Fighting at the Front Street Gym

Here is an article that is supposedly printed in the Fishtown Star.



Youngsters are finding refuge from the rough streets and stifling summer heat at the Front Street Gym.

During summer afternoons in Kensington the sun is reflects so brightly off the concrete that one could squint his or her eyes at the beige and pink colored cement and see the blurry illusion of a sand on a beach, one that has been smashed by wave upon wave of crime and poverty that have hit the area hard over the years.

“Before, it was a poor neighborhood with good people. Now it’s becoming worse than a ghetto,” said Frank Kubach, 68, director of the Front Street. One of the largest and oldest gyms, with the most speed bags in the city, Kubach has ran the gym for over twenty years at its current location on east Clearfield street off of Frankford avenue. Before that, the gym ran under a five or six different owners dating back over fifty years ago.

“We try to look out for the good people in the neighborhood,” Kubach said. “We keep people who do drugs off the street. It keeps the good kids off the street.”

The walls of Kubach’s office are covered with posters and artwork of famous boxers like Jake Lamotta and Mike Tyson, as well as fight flyers spanning the careers of the many pro boxers who have fought and won world titles out of Kubach’s gym, like Monty Sherrick and Anthony Boyle. The influence of the Front Street Gym bridges sports as well. Eddie Alvarez, a Kensington native and top-ranked lightweight mixed martial arts who fights out of the Philadelphia Fight Factory, got his start at Front Street Gym. He still visits the gym every week to hone his boxing technique.

The reputation Kubach’s gym has gained in its twenty-year tenure at Kensington has proven a better recruitment tool than any advertising or website. The Front Street Gym has 15 professional fighters, around 75 kids and eight trainers. A summer day in the front street gym almost looks like an after-school program. Nine year-old students laugh as they practice their foot work.

But Kubach, a former pro-boxer, doesn’t run the business for personal recognition. He simply wishes more people applauded the young students who train every day, and in that, forgo a life of crime on the streets.

Those who make a commitment to train quickly learn a disciple never taught in the streets never taught. From the disciple comes respect. Young students duck into the Frank’s office to shake hands with their trainers and bid farewell for the day, only to return the next.
“At first boxing is boring,” Kubach said. Street brawlers who step into the Front Street Gym hoping for a quick scrap are disappointed when they are first drilled on jumping rope and forming their hooks, sometimes up to a year before they ever step in the ring to spar. But patience is a key to the science of boxing, for fighters and trainers.


“I’ve got more patience than Job, and you know how much patience he needed to deal with what the good lord put him through,” said Sonny McCord, 78, the eldest member of the gym who trains the trainers. McCord took up boxing in the 1940’s. He used to work in Kensington with the department of sanitation, when Kensington’s population consisted of mostly Polish immigrants and horses and buggies were used to collect trash instead of garbage trucks

Not everyone stays, of course. Boxing is a transient sport by nature, said Joe Black, 59, a former retired professional boxer who has been a trainer at Front Street Gym for eight years.

“It happens to a lot of fighters,” said Joe Black, 59, a trainer. “Very few can come in and stay and stick with it like a job. They have work, families, and it puts a strain on training and fights.”

Black grew up in north Philly. He learned to fight a necessity to ward off the petty crime gangs in the neighborhood that conscripted other kids.

“You didn’t want to be a chump,” he said. “Those gangs would enlist you if you wanted to join or not, but I could stand up to a gang and ask for their toughest guy and beat them.” Back then, the extent of gang activities was stealing and petty crime. Not even the trouble makers wanted to be locked away in jail or turn to drugs. But things have changed now.

Eric Gonzalez, 18 lives down the street from the Front Street Gym in Kensington, where has trained since he was nine. As a child, he punched his father’s hands for practice until his knuckles bled. Now he is looking to turn professional in the 119-pound weight class in a year. Most of his friends in the neighborhood are in prison or into drugs.

“I used to hang with the wrong people,” Gonzalez said. “When I saw them going to prison I knew something was going to happen to me sooner or later.”

Adam Bassal, 17, of Northeast Philadelphia, was planning on embarking on a career in music, having studied violin at the Creative High School for Performing Arts in city, but resolved to learn boxing after watching Rocky.

“My neighborhood is pretty much the opposite of dangerous,” Bassal said. Born of Irish and Egyptian descent, Bassal looks like an olive-skinned James Franco with his a smile that his hardly containable and a deceptively lean-looking 195-pound frame.
More kids flock to the gym during summer, when school is out. The gym hosts boxing events beginning in the fall. Kubach hosts the Turkey Bowl every year. The event pits former professional boxers who have fought at Kubach’s gym against each other in exhibitions to raise money for public school students in need. The gym also puts on amateur boxing shows in the winter sanctioned by USA Boxing in the winter. Come spring, Kubach said he hopes to be approved as a host for the diamond belt and golden gloves competitions.
“I wasn’t a great boxer,” Kubach said. “I took up training to help out the kids.”