As Chase walks through the crowd, shaking hands and putting the finishing touches on the night’s program, he tells me that he lost his teeth at age 13, when a group of teenagers jumped him in a park in the Bronx. He removes the previously invisible retainer to reveal his front dentures and the gap they fill. After that incident, Chase began fighting more often, and he says that rather than growing a grudge, the matches often resulted in a kind of mutual catharsis. “There are actually real N-Gas out here that will fight you. And if they lose, they’ll still shake your hand,” he says, moments before the starting bell rings.
The night begins with a series of exhibition battles, involving children as young as 13 years old. Wearing gloves and head gear, they fight with the toughness and poise of men decades older. Minutes before the first fight of his life, a 13-year-old fighter told me that boxing had given him discipline. “I want to be a better version of myself,” he says. “I used to be angry…and now I take that anger out in the boxing ring.” The DJ makes an air-horn sound in place of a round bell, and small children and angry mothers announce the ringing of the bell instead. Around the corner is a local motorcycle club selling tacos, a vendor selling sneakers, and a stand selling branded weed.
Raji, a 20-year-old fighter whose ring name is iPunchHardAsShit, has traveled from Philadelphia to take part in a rematch against 35-year-old South Bronx native DaFreshPrince. While warming up the corner of the room located between the taco stand and the bathroom, Raji tells me that he learned boxing when he was 19, after a run-in with the law almost landed him in jail. The discipline of sports changed his life. “When you start boxing, you’ll be training your stance over and over again. You’re going to be throwing your strikes over and over again. These are things that you have to do not just until you get it right, but until you get them right, until you can’t do them wrong,” he says.
