Rocky-Style ‘Primal Therapy’ : White-Collar Boxing: It’s One Way to Beat the Boss

Autographed glossies of muscled champs share the wall with fading posters for fights of 20 years ago. Paunchy trainers lean on the ropes and rasp orders to kids sparring in the ring. The sour smell of old sweat hangs in the air.

But on Saturday afternoons, the Gramercy Gym, steeped in boxing lore, becomes a secret hide-out for pinstriped executives undergoing what one of them calls “primal therapy”--a $75 course in white-collar boxing.

“It’s an outlet,” said gym co-owner Bob Jackson, who teaches the four-week class. “They start banging the bag hard and they see the boss.”

Macho Mentality

Jackson, an ex-fighter who moonlights from his job as a corrections officer at Sing Sing prison to coach and promote boxing, traces the course’s popularity to a macho mentality that worships such fictional heroes as Rocky and Rambo.

“I’ve had people as old as 70 and as young as 18 in this class,” Jackson said. “Lawyers, students, businessmen, teachers. . . . “

They climb into the ring, he said, not only to relieve their frustrations but “to live out their fantasies.”

“I like boxing as a spectator. I’m doing this instead of living vicariously,” explained Walter Zilinski, who joined about 18 men and one woman attending two sessions of the class on a recent Saturday.

Zilinski, a 37-year-old high school English teacher, said the training is “absolutely therapeutic.”

“I see 20 or 30 different faces on the bag,” he joked. “I can’t do it at school, so I get it out here.”

Class starts with shadowboxing in one of the Gramercy’s two rings while Jackson coaches from the ropes. The beginners tend to get smacked in the face by punching bags and to trip over their own feet, but “a few get really good,” Jackson said.

‘Requiem for a Heavyweight’

Still, joked one executive in gray sweat pants, the scene at the Gramercy on Saturday afternoons “is more like ‘Requiem for a Heavyweight’ than ‘Rocky.’ ”

Sparring is strictly voluntary, but most students put on the face guards and venture into the ring sooner or later.

Denise Fama, a 30-year-old computer program analyst, has sparred three times since she began taking the class in August.

“I didn’t even like boxing that much before,” she said, “but I wanted to get some form of exercise, and this was too different to pass up. Aerobics is too boring.”

Fama, the only woman in the class, sometimes trudges up the 43 decaying wooden stairs to the Gramercy to practice after work. Once, when no classmates were available to spar, former Golden Gloves champ Joseph Jacobs volunteered.

“He was gentle with me, thank God,” she recalled.

Jackson said a fractured pinky is the most serious injury suffered since he began teaching the white-collar class seven months ago, but sore knuckles are a common complaint. Boxers smear Vaseline on their faces so most punches will roll off.

‘Good Shot in the Nose’

“I took a good shot in the nose sparring,” said Ray Ginther, 34, a circulation sales manager for magazine publishing giant Conde Nast. He later evened the score with a bruising blow to his classmate’s ribs.

No one in the class reported using his or her boxing skills on the streets yet. But no one has ruled it out.

“Sometimes you can walk away from things, and sometimes you can’t,” said John Sterling, a 35-year-old trade magazine editor who took up boxing for fitness and self-defense.

Ginther steered a visitor to the wall that serves as a sort of shrine to the late Cus D’Amato, the boxer who founded the Gramercy 57 years ago. A list of D’Amato quotes includes one comparing fear to fire.

“If you control it,” D’Amato philosophized, “it is a friend. When you don’t, it consumes you and everything around you.”