The Boxer

A Comeback

The move “was like starting over” from a business perspective, Bauch says. Her 2006 revenues were approximately $160,000. She expects to see about $200,000 this year. Until two years ago, she says, she was running at a loss.

Some of the money comes from “open gym” memberships priced at $65 a month, with daily and yearly options available, and special rates for registered amateur boxers. But most comes from class packages that start at $78 for six sessions. The gym has 300 to 400 members, a number that varies with the seasons (summers are a slow time at health clubs and gyms, Bauch says). Members can add classes to their open membership for rates ranging from $20 for a single session to $1,080 for a full year’s unlimited access to group instruction. One-on-one coaching is negotiated with the 8 to 10 individual trainers who work out of the gym—about half of them men, half women—usually for $60 an hour.

In the class Bauch is teaching this afternoon, all six students are men. They look to range in age from mid-20s to mid-40s, and they’re paired on the gym floor, wearing boxing gloves and leather headgear. They circle each other, bobbing and ducking to avoid slow-motion blows that aren’t really intended to land. Bauch watches, stepping between the pairs from time to time to demonstrate a move with her head, arms, or feet.

Bonsante, on the other hand, is landing punches, sparring in one of the gym’s rings with another obviously experienced fighter. Watching them dispels any doubt that Uppercut is frequented by some serious boxers.

With a professional record of 30 wins (17 by knockout), 9 losses, and 3 draws, Bonsante is Bauch’s best-known client. He was the 2003 International Boxing Association World Middleweight Champion—impressive despite the fact that several boxing associations name “world champions.” In 2005, he was a contestant on Sylvester Stallone’s reality-TV series, The Contender. He credits Bauch with arranging the Los Angeles audition and helping him win the role.

Bauch is Bonsante’s “second,” a co-trainer who works with his “first,” veteran Bill Kaehn. She worked Bonsante’s corner in New York’s Madison Square Garden last March in a featured bout with Irish middleweight John Duddy. If not for an accidental head butt from Duddy that ended the fight after nine rounds, Bonsante could have won, Bauch says. “That would have been life changing for him.”

She trains a number of amateur Golden Gloves fighters, as well. But here’s another thing, besides the gender mix, that makes her gym unusual, Bauch says: Uppercut welcomes members who have no interest in competing on an amateur or professional level, but who simply want to learn the sport.

With few exceptions, “boxing gyms don’t want anything to do with you unless you’re going to get in the ring,” she says. They want fighters who will win recognition for the gym by doing well in competition. “If you’re not going to get them that recognition, they’re like, ‘What are you doing here? You’re wasting my space.’”

But boxing’s popularity has dwindled since Muhammad Ali’s heyday, and even since Mike Tyson’s. The Twin Cities are not teeming with would-be Golden Gloves champions. So for both business and personal reasons, Bauch wants her gym to attract “people who aren’t ever going to get in the ring and fight, but who will come in and take the classes.”

This goes back to her decision to run a for-profit, not a nonprofit gym. “Nonprofit almost seemed more complicated to me,” she says. “For me to try to write grants or try to go out and get that money seemed harder than just creating a business and relying on marketing or whatever I had to do to get people in the door, because I really thought there was enough demand.”

It’s a balancing act. Go too far in catering to nonfighters and Uppercut becomes just another health club with lots of competition. But “why would you want to alienate people who might come in and pay you money?

“The fighters are the ones who keep us in the ranks and get us recognized,” she acknowledges. “But fighters never have any money. It’s the other members that keep the gym open.”