VALLEJO – The Vallejo PAL Boxing club’s monthly open sparring events allow people of all ages to step into the ring, starting with kids who are just 7 years old and ending with the most seasoned fighters.
Last Friday’s event helped raise funds for the club’s amateur boxers to compete at the International PAL Boxing Championship in Los Angeles next month. Over a hundred people came to watch and support their friends and family.
“It’s a pillar here in Vallejo,” said its current manager, Tyler Terrazes. “Most of the people come here through word of mouth because we’ve been here so long.”
Located at 917 Marin St., PAL Boxing opened up at its current location in 2004 but has been around as an establishment since the 1970s.
Terrazes, who comes from a family of fighters, started boxing with PAL when he was 7 years old after his father, also a boxer, signed him up. He has been with the club for over 25 years. While Terrazes stopped competing after he broke his jaw when he was 17, he has been coaching the kids since.
PAL Boxing receives most of its funding from the Police Activities League, a nonprofit organization managed by the Vallejo Police Officers Association. As part of the PAL franchise, its goal is to offer athletic activities for the youth of Vallejo at the lowest cost possible.
Mike Kollar, a former Vallejo Police officer who retired in 1996, was also Vallejo PAL’s executive director. He called PAL Boxing “one of our best programs. It gets a lot of kids working out.”
To that aim, they offer classes several times a week for youth ages 7 to 18. Kids jumprope, run, shadow box, hit the punching bag, and if they wish, enter the ring and spar.
Adults may also become members and freely use the gym. Once a month on Fridays PAL Boxing holds open sparring events, which are free, where fighters from across the Bay Area can come and find their match in the ring, or just watch others go at it.
“Our goal is to keep kids off the street. Boxing is a way out,” said Luis Alberto Ramirez, one of the coaches at the gym. “It puts them into something they can put their heart into. It’s rough out here in Vallejo. This teaches them discipline.”
Ramirez, who grew up in Vallejo’s Crest neighborhood and said he had a tough childhood, discovered the gym through his cousin. “It allowed me to take out my anger and I fell in love with boxing,” he said. “It was a way out.”
There were close to 20 sparring matches on Friday, each divided into three rounds lasting three minutes each. Fighters are matched by skill, age and size. Regardless of the skill level or age, the energy that the fighters brought into the ring remained constant. By the end of each match, every single boxer left visibly exhausted, panting and drenched in sweat.
Tyler Terrazes’ mother, Serene Terrazes, sat by the ring for the entire evening timing the rounds by using a tiny hammer to strike a bell positioned next to her.
“What are they doing? When the bell rings, that means stop!” Serene Terrazes shouted several times throughout the evening.
Serene Terrazes has been attending these sparring events and helping out ever since they started. She said that family support is the strongest factor in kids' success inside, and out of, the gym.
“People ask me, how could you let your kid fight? Well, I fight,” she said. “I told Tyler if you don’t want to get hit you’ve got to learn to move, and he learned to move.”
“A lot of the kids are low income but Tyler takes them in and finds ways to make it work,” she added, saying that students can pay their dues by volunteering. “He loves it here, he feels good giving back to the community.”
“I’m trying to make sure that these kids don’t end up on the wrong side of the streets,” said Tyler Terrazes.
Will Graham, 15, has been boxing for over a year. He said he came here to “learn to defend myself from the kids bullying me.”
Graham plans on competing for the first time in September. “They coach me great and made me better as a fighter and as a person,” he said.
While PAL Boxing is connected to law enforcement agencies, Serene Terrazes said that “the cops don’t come out. It’s a lot of missed opportunity really.” She said they ought to come down more often in order to “build relationships with the kids and community instead of chasing them down the street.”
Emani Bolton, 30, was the last boxer to fight on Friday. “It’s exhilarating, it gets my adrenaline pumping,” Bolton said. “I’m looking for the right word, I guess I’d say it gets me amped, and tired.”
Bolton has been boxing for three years and hits the gym close to five days a week. While he treats it as a hobby, it remains a serious one that he uses to “test my limits,” he said. Concerning his fight, by far the most violent and exciting of the night, “it was a good match up. He’s a good fighter but he’s more close range and I’m more long range,” Bolton said. “He looked more refreshed and I think he got the better of me.”
For Bolton, PAL Boxing taught him consistency, teamwork, role modeling and to put his pride to the side. “I come into the gym some days and I don’t workout because I end up helping out the kids,” he said. “You’ve got to love giving back to the community.”
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