In the beginning there was the Astoria Boxing Club, a 60-year-old facility in the basement of a hotel on the outskirts of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, or DTES—an area notorious for its glaring poverty, drug abuse, and homelessness. For many years, the club ran a nonprofit youth program that endeavored to keep area kids off the street and provide training to at-risk women. Astoria Boxing Club closed in the spring of 2012 after its funding was slashed, but the organization found a new location under new name: Eastside Boxing Club. A fire in early November 2013, however, rendered the space and equipment unusable. It hadn't even been open for a year.
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With more than 60 youths left without access to an obviously essential support system, several chefs who boxed at the space decided to found the Aprons for Gloves organization in 2012. Under the direction of head coach Dave Schuck, Aprons for Gloves managed to pick up the financial slack by hosting the annual chef-on-chef skirmish known as Restaurant Rumble. On July 24, after months of training and individual fundraising, chefs and bartenders from around Vancouver met to throwdown for the children.
"It's not about the fighting," maintains Schuck, himself a lifelong boxer. "It's about the camaraderie. Its about giving these kids mentors. These guys are all professional people with good jobs."
Schuck notes that a lot of the kids already display an interest in the culinary industry. Maybe they're drawn to the familial structure of the restaurant industry, or the fact that many of these kids come from unstable environments and are hungry for the kind of intimacy demanded by kitchen work.
For chefs, undertaking the intensive training is their way to give back, since many of them were once underprivileged themselves. Lightweight division fighter Lee "Lion Heart" Robert, who runs catering events at Jamaican Pizza Jerk, has been brawling in one way or another for much of his life. "There were fights in the streets everyday," he says of growing up during Quebec's quest for sovereignty in the 1980s. "I'm English, so I fought a lot of French kids. Baseball bats would get involved… knives."
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Before he got into boxing, Robert pursued skateboarding professionally, and was signed to New Era and other American companies. "I know what it's like to need to have an outlet," Robert explains. "I'm a ghetto kid and I'm here fighting for the ghetto kids. If I can help give a kid an outlet so that he doesn't end up troubled or dead, I can't ask for more."
It's a similar story for Middleweight Yacine "The Technician" Sylla, a bartender at Chambar. He began kickboxing in Paris as a kid with an organization similar to Eastside Boxing, which kept him off the streets of the rough Paris suburb where he grew up as a disenfranchised, third- generation French African. "After the second World War, France brought in a lot of Algerians to rebuild, but no one recognizes us," he says. "I could never go to a nightclub in Paris because they would never let me in. I have a degree in marketing but I could never find a job there."
Sylla left the restrictions of Paris to learn English in London while working at Tom Aikens restaurant after a two-week stint with Gordon Ramsey. He sees a lot of parallels between the situation for Vancouver's youth in the Downtown East Side and his own early experience as someone with few opportunities. "I love Vancouver," he says. "I want to help keep something like that from happening here."
The DTES is an area of town that's often called "the poorest postal code in Canada," but it's flush with cash in certain spots. At last count, there werre 260 independently run outreach agencies that generate almost million dollars a day to provide services to the neighborhood of approximately 6,500 residents. It more than a little infuriating that fundraising organizations like Aprons for Gloves must step in when the resources are already supposed to exist.
Despite the drag of a broken system, Shuck and company are focused on building the organization's momentum once it moves into its new space when the city grants approval. "We gotta bring more culinary aspect into this," he says, describing plans to eventually establish black-tie Dinner Shows that will marry exhibition boxing with the supply of kitchen talent at his disposal.
"I'm no gourmand, lady," he tells me, "but I tell ya one thing: These guys are the best at what they do around here and, probably in Western Canada, and I'm gonna leave it at that."