Fists of Faith

Don Saxby’s feet never stop moving, but his eyes remain locked on the young boxer’s face.

“Jab, jab, good,” the trainer calls out, meeting each punch with his hands.

At Brooklyn’s famous Gleason’s Gym, training ground for Hollywood stars and world champions, Saxby tapes fists as naturally as most people tie their shoes. It’s difficult to picture him doing anything else.

But Saxby, 41, is also a Pentecostal minister at Brooklyn’s True Worship Church, where it’s common for congregants to become so overwhelmed during a sermon that they break down in tears or even faint.

In the same day, Saxby could be demonstrating the proper way to throw an uppercut and counseling a wayward teen to get off the streets and embrace God.

To Saxby, his two roles are one.

“I don’t need to make the transition from reverend to boxing trainer,” he said, standing a few feet away from two men sparring. “I let the two blend.

“I get my joy out of watching my guys win,” he continued. “All I care about is winning. In church, too, it’s winning against the trials and tribulations of life.”

He’s been doing a lot of winning lately.

One of his fighters, Taurus Sykes, recently won the North American Boxing Association’s heavyweight belt.

They trained at Gleason’s, where Mike Tyson used to clobber punching bags, and where Hillary Swank trained for her Academy Award-winning role in “Million Dollar Baby.”

Whether he’s in church or the gym, Saxby commands respect and tries to impart discipline -- the key to success in both his pursuits, he said, and the bridge between them.

“It’s my job not only to be a trainer, but to be a spiritual leader,” he said. “In the gym you want to pull out their best from them. In church you want to help them overcome.

“I believe there is a satanic force, and that’s where discipline comes in,” he said. “It’s a spiritual fight. Temptation comes in and I have to defeat it.”

In the gym, “Discipline gives my guys focus,” he said. “It makes them work harder.”

Saxby, whose wide chest and powerful arms look like they belong in the ring, grew up in gritty gyms, boxing with his brothers and watching his father train.

“It was something that ran in my blood,” he said.

He had a long and fairly successful amateur career, but was more interested in coaching than getting in the ring himself. He’s been training fighters full-time for almost two years after leaving the Police Department’s school safety unit.

If he came early to boxing, Saxby’s route to church was more circuitous.

He was “a bad kid,” he said, hanging out with the wrong crowd, selling drugs, getting into trouble. He got hooked on drugs himself, and didn’t get clean until he found himself alone in North Carolina with nothing to his name but his identification card.

“I got a job at McDonalds, got my own place, got off drugs, and never touched them again,” he said. “I’ve been from bad to good. I guess it’s the road God put me on.”

He didn’t start going to church until he met his wife, who brought him along with her.

“I was just going because I wanted her,” he said. “It’s funny how you go for one thing and you wind up coming out with something else.”

He was ordained in 1994 and found a home at True Worship Church, a Pentecostal church that features a full band backing the choir and a congregation that dances in the pews and worships with full-throated abandon. The church is in East New York, Brooklyn, one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, and caters especially to young people ready to leave the streets behind.

The Rev. Clarence Keaton, pastor of True Worship Church, said Saxby “was making the transition from the street world into church” when they first met.

“As with all of us, he was searching for something and he really developed a passion for Christ and he actually showed a minister’s quality,” Keaton said.

Keaton encouraged Saxby to study to be a minister -- he’s one of roughly 20 associates at the church -- and he’s flourished ever since.

As a minister, Saxby is a counselor, a father figure, a brother and a teacher.

He recalled a crack addict who heard him preach. She fled to the bathroom in tears, he said, and afterward approached Saxby.

“She said she had crack vials in her pocket and she threw them in the toilet,” he said. “At that moment, she knew God was with her and she finally got off crack. She’s still in the church, she’s clean, she’s got a good job.”

Saxby said his own life is still a struggle -- he’s trying to get his boxing company, Boxing Made Easy, LLC, off the ground, and juggling gym, church and family doesn’t leave time for much else.

But at least now he has direction, he said.

“I know this is what I want to do,” he said, as he discussed the fighters he’s training. “I can’t forget who I am, because when it’s all over, it’s me and God.”