The Boxer

How Did a Nice Girl Like You . . . ?

At 43, Bauch (pronounced “Bock”) looks like a health-club fitness instructor. She was one in her 20s—a trainer for Nautilus Swim and Fitness, and later the manager of a health club attached to a Holiday Inn in Bloomington, where she grew up.

She first walked into a boxing gym in 1993. At the time, she was managing the former Rogue nightclub in downtown Minneapolis, having left health clubs for the bar-and-restaurant business. “In that industry, you deal with a lot of stupid situations,” Bauch says, acknowledging that this translates mainly as “belligerent drunks.” “I was looking for a way to defend myself, but I wasn’t high on the whole martial-arts thing. I wanted something real basic.”

Intrigued by a local TV news report about a Minneapolis boxing gym, she tracked down its location with some difficulty (“There were no gyms listed in the yellow pages”). On her first few visits, she just put on gloves and mimicked what she saw other people doing.

“The third or fourth time, a trainer said, ‘OK, let’s get in the ring.’” They didn’t spar, she explains, which would have meant full contact. “What he did was work my defense. So he was throwing at me, and I had to work my slips and try to get out of the way so I wouldn’t get tagged. I wound up going around in a big circle, trying to figure it out. I realized that, wow, this is a lot harder than I thought.”

From that moment, “the sport just pulled me in,” she says. “I wanted it broken down more so I could understand it. I wanted to study it.”

The gym closed a few months later. She learned of a few others, but “I was turned away because I was female.”

The message came across in two ways, she says: “One, girls just shouldn’t be in boxing. Men don’t want to see girls get hit. And the other one was, ‘You’re too distracting to my fighters.’ Any woman, not just me, is ‘too distracting to my fighters.’”

Determined to pursue her interest, Bauch wound up at the Minnesota Kali Group, a martial arts studio in South Minneapolis. “One of the trainers there knew American boxing, so I trained with him,” she recalls. Then, after about a year, she got permission from Kali Group owner Rick Faye to use one of the studio’s rooms to start her own boxing class. “That’s when I trademarked the name Uppercut.”

At its height, her class in the borrowed room had about 15 students. It started with just a few friends. “I got a second ring on my home phone. I got listed in the yellow pages—just the free listing they give you. Then I put a few little ads in City Pages—things like that,” she says.

She worked out her instructional methods as she went. “It was hit or miss what kept their attention,” Bauch remembers, but in order to make a go of the business and not find herself competing with every workout facility around, she knew that she had to stay focused on her distinctive niche. “I just knew I didn’t want it to be an aerobics class. I wanted to teach the hows and whys of how amateur boxing works: Here’s why you slip this way; here’s why you do this or that.”

Workout Crowd versus Boxing Crowd

By 1996, Bauch’s business had enough momentum that she opened her own gym—financed with personal credit cards—in a storefront at Lake and Lyndale in South Minneapolis. She started with a back room and eventually expanded into a 2,000-square-foot space.

She says she never intended the Kali Group class or the Lyndale operation to be targeted specifically to women, though in the beginning, most of her students were women.

“Because I owned it,” she says, “everyone figured, well, it’s all females. But I didn’t want to make that separation. That’s how it was separated for me. That’s why I was turned away from other gyms. So why would I have it exclusively for women? I’m not going to alienate the guys; that would make no sense.” She set out to prove that “guys and girls can train together in the same atmosphere. It’s just a matter of controlling the environment and representing it well.”

She enforces a dress code: stomachs covered and shorts as long as where fighters’ fingertips reach when their arms are at their sides. Guys like to walk around shirtless, but that’s not allowed, Bauch says. Her message to anyone who’s trying to draw attention with scant workout wear: “If you want people to look at you and stare at you, you’ll get people looking at you if you’re training really well, or if you’re sparring and you look really good in the ring.”

In 1999, at the end of its three-year run at Lake and Lyndale, Uppercut’s small clientele was about 50 percent male, 50 percent female. (The split remains roughly the same today.) But while Bauch could count that as a success, her lease was about to expire and Uppercut was barely holding its own financially. She learned that the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis was looking for someone to manage its downtown health club, and by early 2000, she was doing business there, in leased space, as “The Uppercut Gym—Located at the Hyatt Regency Athletic Club.”

During a three-year stay at the Hyatt, she was able to pay off some debt, but she found it hard to keep the business focused on boxing. With hotel staff answering the phones, she had little control over how her business was represented to callers. The location had low visibility and bad parking. And the downtown office workers who could have walked there during the day were more of a quick solo workout crowd than a boxing crowd, Bauch says: “They want to get in, they want to put their headphones on and watch TV or CNN or whatever, and boom, they’re out.”

Then she walked into the Quincy Street building in 2003 and fell in love with it. Her sister helped with the down payment on a contract for deed. Nine months of renovation later, Uppercut opened at its present location.