Minister Champions Christ and Boxing

The Hamilton County Boxing Academy is dark, dingy and smelly -- not unlike typical big-city boxing gyms. What makes it different is that it sits in the middle of rural Nebraska in a barn built in 1912.

You won’t find a gravelly voiced, old-school trainer running the place. A mild-mannered minister, 42-year-old Scott Peace, is in charge.

Peace’s mission isn’t necessarily to mold champions out of the 30 men who train under him, some of whom make a 250-mile round trip from Omaha twice a week. Peace, youth pastor at the nearby Monroe Free Evangelical Church, says he uses boxing to draw men closer to Christ.

With a whistle around his neck and a stopwatch in his left hand, Peace stands ringside and puts boxers of all shapes and sizes through two-hour, nonstop workouts.

“Jab, jab, jab,” Peace barks. “Work, work, work.”

Workouts take place in a boxing ring sitting a few feet from where draft horses were stabled nearly a century ago. Two punching bags hang from the rafters in the hayloft. Weight benches, dumbbells, a speed bag and medicine balls are in the basement, an area that once served as a milking parlor and later a pigpen.

As he keeps an eye on his stopwatch and directs drills, Peace talks about what would seem to be a tenuous relationship between boxing and the Bible.

“The Bible talks about spiritual warfare. In life you have to endure and go through things and fight through things,” Peace said. “This is just a mirror image of life. That’s why I love it so much.”

Peace was the Indiana Golden Gloves coach of the year in 2004, when he operated the South Side Boxing Club in Bloomington, Ind. Looking for a new challenge, he and his wife moved to Nebraska 18 months ago.

Peace brought with him his equipment and boxing ring, which he bought with every cent of his $2,550 in life savings. He put church members and area high school athletes through boxing-themed workouts in his basement, but had no place for his 20-by-20-foot ring until last March.

That’s when Roger Hattan, a member of the congregation, offered his barn free of charge. Hattan got out of the hog business about 10 years ago and was using the barn for storage. Hattan now operates a tree farm on his 10 acres.

“It was nasty in here,” Hattan said of the barn. “There were holes in the walls and dust everywhere and no heat or air conditioning.”

Peace loved it.

Within a week, the barn was converted into a gym. Electrical wiring was updated and other minor repairs were made. The biggest job was cleaning.

“We went to town on it,” Hattan said. “We got a couple power washers and went from top to bottom. The mud just rolled. Now you can actually see the cracks in the floor. It was just covered in dirt. It took a week to get the thing aired out.”

Farm odors have been replaced by the smell of sweat.

Peace takes all comers, from serious boxers to a 50-year-old looking for a way to keep his potbelly in check. Most have bought into his message of Christ, he said, but a few haven’t.

“That’s all right,” Peace said. “Eventually they’ll come around.”

And as in any gym, there are hard-luck stories.

Frank Barton said he was hanging out with a rough crowd and had alcohol and drug problems before an acquaintance hooked him up with Peace.

“I was skipping school in high school and was going down the wrong road,” said Barton, a 22-year-old drywaller who makes the commute from Omaha once or twice a week. “I don’t hang out with my old friends anymore. Scotty has taught me to respect myself and the people around me. This is a close group of guys here.”

Johnathan Oswald moved to nearby Aurora from New Mexico two years ago to live with his grandparents after family trouble. Boxing, he said, has given him an outlet.

“Coming here is something I look forward to,” the 18-year-old said. “You’re going to have hardships and you’re going to have pain, and you have to work through it. I have a little bit of built up anger. This helps a lot.”

Peace said he, too, was an angry young man before undergoing a religious transformation. He said he was young when his father, a commercial fisherman, drowned off the coast of Alaska. Raised by his mother in the Portland, Ore., area, Peace said he got into a lot of fights and was suspended from school several times.

He said his transformation came his first year of college, after he had blown out a shoulder playing football. He went into the ministry 20 years ago while working in the printing business in Rochester, N.Y.

In Indiana, he said, he used boxing to reach out to youngsters who were mimicking scenes from the 1999 Brad Pitt movie “Fight Club.”

“That’s when the cog hit the wheel,” Peace said. “We had these fight clubs happening in Indiana, where hundreds of kids would gather at night in parking lots under streetlights and just beat each other up. It was a real problem.

“I thought we could teach these kids who wanted to fight the right way to box and get them to know Christ at the same time. It was the perfect avenue.”

George DeFabis, executive director of Indiana Golden Gloves, said Peace coached a number of champions and that his fighters had a reputation for good sportsmanship.

Word of the Hamilton County Boxing Academy spread through Nebraska boxing circles last summer after two of Peace’s fighters won decisively in the Cornhusker State Games, the state’s major amateur sports festival.

Harley Cooper of Omaha, a fixture in the state’s boxing community, said Peace’s work is refreshing.

“It’s something that’s not common -- a preacher in the boxing business,” Cooper said. “Boxing is a sport where you get the rough and tough guy. You don’t normally find someone of his character in this game. That’s why we so gladly support him.”

Peace points out that amateur boxing is not about knocking out an opponent, it’s about scoring points.

“These boys aren’t violent. They don’t hate anybody. They love people,” he said. “They are learning a skill: self-defense. They’re learning life principles that help them achieve things in life. They take on challenges that seem insurmountable. There is a wonderful carryover to Christianity.”