 of Jerry Martin Trials.jpg)
 |
| Gloria Peek watches as her boxers work on the punching bags at the Barraud Park gym in Norfolk. Peek says she runs the gym like a family; her fighters respect her as a surrogate mother.
(Bill Tiernan photos/TheVirginian-Pilot) |
By Ed Miller
The Virginian-Pilot
NORFOLK - Gloria Peek, all of 5-foot-4, steps between a pair of sparring boxers a head taller and young enough to be her grandsons. It's a potentially hazardous move - for the fighters, who have failed to heed her command to stop punching.
"When I say stop, what does that mean?" Peek asks one of them, her voice rising.
"Stop," he mutters.
"What does that mean?" she wheels and asks the other.
"Stop," he says.
Peek wears a T-shirt that reads: "Boxing is life. Roll with the Punches." But she can't abide what she's been watching. The sparring session has been sloppier than a spit bucket in the 12th round. One fighter has been flailing wildly, the other clinging like a marathon dancer at 3 a.m.
"You cannot fight out of anger," she tells the overly aggressive one, her eyes boring in on his, which are framed by leather headgear. "If you do, you'll get hit all the time."
He would, too, if only his opponent were not too winded to hold up his gloves.
"Remember all that running we do?" she says. "That's why we do it. You need to do all that running and then some."
It's a Wednesday night at Norfolk's Barraud Park gym, but this could be any inner-city boxing gym in the country. You know the story: A tough-love coach provides a haven from the streets, drills the risk out of at-risk kids, and replaces it with discipline, purpose, a sense of belonging.
The difference is that this tough-love coach happens to be a 55-year-old woman who started in boxing - training male fighters and running her own gyms - when women just didn't do those things.
She is already a pioneer and may break new ground yet. Peek is on the short list of candidates for two assistant coaching positions on the 2008 men's Olympic team.
"The elite boxers know her," Olympic coach Dan Campbell said. "She doesn't really have to prove herself."
That's a change. Girls didn't box in Rochester, N.Y., or anywhere else, when Peek was growing up there, dying to sink a left hook into somebody. She fell in love with the sport watching "Friday Night Fights" with her dad.
She found other ways to exercise her wild streak. One night, in a boozy haze, she broke into a doctor's office. Not that she remembered the next day, but she was told that when the police came, she invited them to join the party. She was 17.
Seeing few other ways out of her Rochester housing project, she joined the Navy. There, amused sailors would allow the slight hospital corpsman to hit their heavy bag. They stopped chuckling when one of her shots knocked the bag off its chain.
"Leverage," she explains 35 years later, when the accuracy of her story is gently questioned. "I've seen 132-pounders knock out heavyweights."
Born too soon to be a contender, Peek finished her four-year hitch, returned to Rochester and found work in maximum-security juvenile corrections, a good gig for someone with a strong sense of self and a voice that rattles windows..
"You get folks who killed people," she said. "You'd better be able to stand your ground."
After a couple of years locking kids up, Peek reasoned that starting a boxing program might prevent more of them from ending up in the kinds of places she worked.
First, she needed some ring-won credibility. She headed to a local gym and got the kind of reception Hilary Swank did when she walked into Clint Eastwood's gym in "Million Dollar Baby." Only this was 1977, not 2004, and nobody as easily won over as Eastwood worked there.
She kept coming back. Finally, they let her in, figuring the men would run her out.
The plan backfired. Training led to sparring. In her early sessions, her male opponents were told to go easy on her. After a while, that advice would get a guy hurt.
Peek hung fliers in a recreation center announcing the formation of a boxing program. She sat in the bleachers and waited to see who would show. About 20 boys drifted in while she sat silently.
"Hey, lady, when is the boxing coach getting here?" one of them said. "We're not going to wait all day."
Peek stood up, blew her whistle and the seeds of what would become Rochester's Montgomery Boxing Club - named for the Alabama city that was on the front lines of the civil rights movement - were planted.
Peek didn't just have to be as good as male coaches; she had to be better. Before one of her first national bouts, a coach looked over look over in the opposite corner and scoffed.
"He told his fighter, 'Man, we got this,' " Peek recalled. " 'I know doggone well she couldn't teach him anything.' "
The coach, Basheer Abdullah, apologized after Peek's boxer rocked his. Abdullah went on to coach the U.S. Olympic team in 2004.
Peek rose in the amateur coaching ranks, too, and became a go-to person in Rochester on youth issues, a surrogate mom for the kids amateur boxing attracted - "the misfits, the ones nobody wants, the ones out there floundering," she says.
In 2000, she took her New York State pension and escaped the snow belt for Virginia, where a brother lived. Last year, she left Richmond to take over a Norfolk boxing program started by Campbell but on wobbly legs after nearly a year without a director.
Enter Peek, human smelling salts. On most nights, she presides over 15 or 20 boxers - neighborhood kids and sailors, male and female, black and white - her bullhorn voice cutting through the din.
"Get your hands up!"
"If you're tough enough to stay, stay. If your heart pumps strawberry Kool-Aid, leave!"
"Slip and catch those punches; don't run!"
"You call those push-ups?"
Boxer Richard Williams searched for the right way to describe Peek's style.
"What's the word you look for, for somebody staying on top of you?" said Williams, 22. "That's her."
Back at the gym on a Friday morning, Peek brushes past a heavy bag on the way to her office, formerly a storage room with a rubber floor where fighters skipped rope. She pulled up the floor, painted and hung pictures on cinder-block walls, and transformed the space into a model of bright, spare efficiency. Her desk at one end, a small meeting table and chairs at the other. A microwave and mini-fridge. A VCR and monitor on a rolling cart. Not a paper out of place.
Men don't mind stepping over things, she explains. Women are different.
Out in the gym, 18 leather gloves, opened at the mouth to air out, line one edge of the ring. The trash cans are empty, the mirrors smudge-free, the floor mopped of the sweat Peek had extracted from a dozen young men and women the night before.
"People think you can only train boxers in dirty, nasty gyms," she says. "That's bull. I've coached ranked fighters and none of my gyms has ever been dirty."
Peek wears a shirt laced like a boxing glove, with a heavy clump of keys looping out of the hip pocket of her shorts. She pops a videotape in her VCR, one of many TV news features from Rochester. It shows her training boxers in ballet, another of her loves. She made the connection between boxing and dance on a trip to New York City to see "The Nutcracker" nearly 50 years ago.
On her office bulletin board is a photo of Peek with Oscar De La Hoya. The Golden Boy trained in her Rochester gym for a week in 1993. Another photo shows Peek with Chris Byrd, a one-time IBF heavyweight champion.
Yet, Peek is not much interested in pro boxing or the image and credibility issues it faces. She prefers the amateur game - "a good, clean sport that provides a lot for the individual if they partake of it," she says.
Photos of partakers line her office walls. There's Peek with smiling Olympians, Peek with national teams on overseas trips, Peek with her Rochester kids.
The photo that probably provides the best summation of her career - and her sparring hard and soft sides - is a black-and-white shot hanging on the inside of her door. It shows an exhausted and much-younger Peek slumped over her desk at a maximum-security detention center for teenage boys. Her forehead rests on her desk, which has a name plate that misspells her name as "Peeks."
The letters were burned into the wood by kids serving time for murder, rape, armed robbery. She didn't have the heart to tell them they'd gotten it wrong and left it there for years.
Peek mentions often that she runs her gym like a family. It's an important point to her. Unlike most gyms, it's a matriarchy, and several fighters say that exerts a different kind of pull on them.
Who wants to disappoint their mom? Curse in front of her? Disrespect her? Have her tell them they aren't welcome at home anymore because they've broken her rules?
"It makes for more discipline," says Denzel Simmons, 26. "Everyone turns to listen when their mom is talking to them."
Keith Robertson, a 19-year-old heavyweight, agrees. Peek was his commanding officer at Beaumont Juvenile Correction Center near Richmond, where he said he did time for robbery and where she worked for a time. He's been trying to do the right thing since his release, and that means coming to the gym and doing what it takes to stay there.
It's safer than the alternative. A month ago on the streets of South Norfolk, he was shot in the arm.
"She gives us that mother love," Robertson said. "When you come over to the corner and you've won, it's like you've done something for your mother. It's the best feeling in the world."
And when you've let mom down? Even heavyweights can be reduced to groveling.
Peek is sitting in her office when the phone rings. It's clear that one of the family has gone astray.
"You called, and said you were late getting out of bed. I told you to come down anyway. But you didn't show up," she says.
She pauses to listen, with the impatient air of someone who's heard this story before.
"When I tell you I'm going to do something, what do I do?" she asks.
There's a brief response.
"Your word is all you have. It's your word that will carry you in this world."
She listens again, and her tone softens.
"OK. Obviously, I haven't given up on you yet."
She tells him they'll talk next week, when she returns from a trip.
"If you're doing good, I'm the first one there to hug you and congratulate you and support you," she says after hanging up. "If you're doing bad, I'm the first one there to jack you up, but I'm not going to throw you away. "
Peek says that at USA boxing camps, male coaches tell her she can get fighters to do things they can't. There's none of that clash of male egos.
Might the power of motherly persuasion be put to use in pursuit of Olympic gold? Campbell says Peek is as qualified as any man to coach the Olympic team. She has worked punch mitts with the fastest and most powerful amateurs in the country, something not all coaches have the hand speed to do.
Peek has coached in the women's world championships, but a spot on the Olympic coaching staff would be the crowning achievement of her career, as well as a first for women in the sport. She jokingly calls boxing "the last great domain of men" and is eager to kick down one last door.
"I want to coach the men," she said. "Because I started with the men."
She knows the men. She knows the particular pain of getting hollowed out by a body shot from one of USA's finest. Back in Rochester, she was working the mitts with one of her elite prospects, a light heavyweight, when he misfired and caught her with a whistling hook to the body.
It felt like she'd been cut in half. She dropped to a knee. Only pride kept her from going all the way down.
She composed herself, put up her hands and got on with it. She had fought for years for the right to be cut in half by a light heavyweight.
"Oh, yes," Campbell says over the phone, laughing. "Gloria can fight."
