My cousin is the director at a new hockey school in Philadelphia. What if some corporations opened up a state of the art boxing school? Somewhere where you had to pay tuition? With state of the arts machines and equipment? With tutoring? With film study? With menial chores to learn discipline? With strength and conditioning? On site meals and dieting . With past history research. With different styles of coaching, peak a boo, crab, slick, boxer puncher, counter puncher? With work on foot work? With mentoring? Learning the business side of things and or beaurocracy? Imagine if you could enroll as a young man or a woman? It would be so effective in the way of producing major champions in the ams and the pros! They would need some integretous coaches/ facilitators. No drug drinking or smoking policy. Only legal supplements, caffeine up until 6 pm, and multi vitamins, sport drinks etc. Would this seem fathomeable? Imagine, we have gyms these days obvi all across different countries yet we have no boxing "schools". This would build champions. I would imagine it would be in the USA. What would one think about enrolling regarding you young bucks or men with adolescent teen kids? Lemme know what you think, or if you have seen anything that could almost duplicate this?? Of course program fees and great coaches. Edit: It's basically a training camp for a dedicated individual. Not to mention sparring, and also a curfew as in being able to leave and have a normal life aside from the school. This would cause a lot more tourism, education opportunities and a vibrant new community in a hopefully beautiful city or town. Just a thought lol. There would be room for cutmen, mentoring coaches, all the intricacies. It could be open ended ones stay there. When they are done taking in their skills they could feel free to apply them at their hometown gym or network with other boxers to produce further training opportunities further down the road.
They've already done this. A scholarship up to Northern Michigan University with training at the Olympic facilities.
Interesting and worthwhile concept. Whish they would do something like that here in SA but alas.... Boxing gyms, here we come!
Countries invest in their Olympic boxing programs but it’s not ground-up (like go find kids and train them from scratch) — maybe China is/was doing something like that in all sports, but generally these are geared to boxers who have shown aptitude in junior and or younger open-level fighters to develop them to the next step. In the U.S. you train with your normal trainer at your gym and if you make it to a national or international program, you go on excursions with teams (guys from different weight classes) and train under an Olympic/national coach for those, then go back home. In general, beyond Olympic training no corporation is likely to put money into a sport associated with brain damage. Especially one with narrow appeal, as boxing has become a niche sport. Probably the closest to that was the pro program to develop heavyweights that some manager put together, hiring trainers and recruiting athletes from different sports (usually college football players) in hopes of finding some heavyweights who could be converted to boxers because they were better athletes. I think Dominic Breazeale and maybe Gerald Washington and some others came through that program. Good plan. Didn’t work.
A few have. I think Roy Jones Jr had a lot of guys who either moved to Pensacola or traveled to train there with him. But mainly, it’s not a wise investment. A pro boxer has a fairly few years to make all his money and then they enter a real world of work in their 30s (or later) and don’t have the skills to really translate to the business/work world. They mostly don’t have the schooling and even if they did, they’re entering the workforce where other people their age have been doing it for a decade or more (usually more) and moved up the ladder and they’re starting where kids out of school are. Most people tend to live at or a little above their income. Well, a very successful boxer makes a good bit of money (probably not as much as you think after managers and trainers and the tax man take their cut) in his career and goes down to almost zero after. It spends quick and they usually don’t scale back from the jet-set celebrity style life. They want to travel and figure all the work they’ve put in, now they’re kinda due to have some fun and … suddenly all that money they had, half of it is gone. And they need to sell that big house (if they paid for it, or move out of that high payment home) into something modest … an even then they aren’t necessarily making the money it takes to live a regular, decent life. A few, like Larry Holmes or George Foreman, invest wisely. Most don’t. A few get gigs as announcers, but honestly how many of those have you seed who got more than a few years doing that? A precious few can make a living being Sugar Ray Leonard (who also invested wisely) or Mike Tyson (who has been bankrupt and broke, but so far seems to find another pot of gold to get him by for a bit longer), but not many. And then most boxers end up broke or barely making it because they spend it all (or even when active give it away to entourage people who they pay to do jobs that don’t need to be done, and at a higher rate than those hangers-on could ever make in the real world) and they don’t have the life skills to make money another way. As for investing in boxing, it’s almost always a losing proposition. Do you know how much it costs to take a prospect to world champion level (if he’s good enough)? And how much your percentage of those purses are as a manager, where you’re still trying to make back what you invested in the first place? If you go through five guys who don’t quite make it, you’ve dug a financial hole probably bigger than you can refill if the sixth does make it. And investing in a gym? Not a way to get rich. You pay all the bills (rent, utilities, equipment, insurance) and most guys with any promise who come in can’t afford dues. And you spend your time training yuppies who will never have a fight but can at least pay gym dues. It’s not like Planet Fitness or Gold’s Gym where there are a ton of normal working people — who wants to come get their nose busted or go to work with a black eye? How many actually get in a true boxing-type workout. And how many decide this is too tough and walk away? It’s a hard life. It’s a hard business. It’s a hard world.
