Inside the PD Fight Club

The gym is tucked back off the highway in a small, beige building and no one has turned on the lights yet. The fighters begin arriving by 10 a.m., bags slung over sloped shoulders and sensible shoes on feet that don’t always work. This is Juarez Boxing in Irondale, Alabama, home to a former professional boxer who now helps people fight for the lives, or at least their independence.

Inside, Frank Sinatra seeps from speakers mounted on the ceiling above punching bags. Bob Hawkins — he spells out his last name because “that’s what Parkinson’s does to you. It makes you hard to understand”—slowly wraps his wrists with tape. It takes more than five minutes to wrap them both. That’s also Parkinson’s. Hawkins had a 40-year career with Alabama Power, then ran his own business for another eight years until he retired so he could spend more time fly fishing.

“And then Parkinson’s showed up,” he laughs. “Don’t ever get comfortable. God has a way of saying, ‘Nuh-uh. Hit this one’.”

Hawkins has been coming to Juarez Boxing for a little more than a year to take classes with other people with Parkinson’s and says this gym and the man who runs it have been a godsend.

The gym’s owner, Martin Juarez, can’t remember a time when boxing wasn’t part of his life. His father, Epifanio, logged a couple dozen professional fights in his hometown of Tijuana, Mexico, before coming across the border with his wife and settling in San Diego. They had kids— Martin and his twin sister are the youngest of eight— and worked hard to build a life in the United States.

Daddy—at 51 year old, Martin Juarez still call his father that—and Juarez’s older brother would fight in the backyard and at gyms around San Diego. Juarez would tag along, but when he turned nine he begged his mother to let him fight. She agreed on the condition that he spend a year training with his brother and Daddy. A year later Daddy declared it was time to spar. The family gathered in the yard to watch.

“And I’m thinking, ‘man, I’m going to beat the snot out of my Daddy’,” says Juarez. “First round, my father took my head off.”

Juarez moves his head around in a clumsy bobbing motion while throwing weak air punches.

“Pah! Pah! Pah!,” he says. “He knocked the snot out of me.”

The next round, with urging from his older brother, Juarez came out of the corner swinging hard.

“Daddy got tired, so I started teeing off,” Juarez says. “I was hitting him pretty hard and I was rocking him pretty good. I have to tell you, I enjoyed that!”

When Juarez got back to the corner he expected his brother to congratulate him on a strong round.

“He goes, ‘You hit Daddy like that one more time and I’m going to beat the shit out of you!’” Juarez says with a laugh. “And my sisters, in the first round are going, like, ‘Daddy’s kicking your ass.’ And then the next round they’re like, ‘Don’t hurt Daddy like that!’ I couldn’t win!”

But he passed the test and his parents cleared him to compete. And that meant daily training. Juarez’s father would wake him up at 4:30 every morning to run, even on school days. When Juarez protested his father would ask him what the guy he was getting ready to fight was doing right that moment. Sleeping? After school, when all Juarez wanted to do was hang out with his friends, his father would give him permission to skip training sessions, noting, “You’re getting hit. Not me.” Juarez rarely skipped training.

Those 16-hour days became the norm for Juarez. He fought as an amateur throughout middle and high school, then joined the Air Force and continued boxing. He fell in love with a woman, left the Air Force and followed her to Alabama.

It took some doing to find a boxing gym. In the early 90s, they weren’t as prevalent in Birmingham as they were in San Diego. But Juarez eventually found a place to train. He fought on the amateur circuit, racking up two Alabama Golden Gloves, then turned pro. All the while, he worked full-time jobs delivering for Frito Lay and RC Cola and driving a beer truck for Budweiser. Like his father, he had a growing family to support. Juarez’s oldest daughter was born in 1992 and four more followed in the years to come.

He left the professional boxing world, but not boxing. He’d regularly practice in a corner of the indoor track at the Levite Jewish Community Center. When an LJCC member named Laura suggested he offer classes he initially dismissed the idea, but with some nudging she eventually convinced him to take on a few clients. Within six months, Juarez had enough private clients to quit his day job. He took over another corner of the track and stayed there for a decade, until his client base grew too large and he needed to upgrade to his own space. Laura, by this time his wife, found a 1,500 square foot space in Crestline and they signed a five-year lease.

“It was so stressful. I was getting alopecia on the back of my head. I was breaking out on my tongue. I was scared to death!” Juarez says. “But if you don’t ever take a step off of that diving board you have no idea what you can accomplish. You know, it’s either you swim or you sink.”

In Juarez-family style, everyone chipped in. Daughter Anna helped take down one wall and paint the others, while the youngest kids—Stella, Cruz and Marisa—did general cleanup. They opened for business and things took off, especially once he learned about a gym in Indianapolis, Indiana that was pioneering the use of a non-contact, boxing-inspired training regiment for people with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). The disease affects the nerve cells in the brain that producer dopamine, which causes symptoms including muscle rigidity, tremors and changes in speech and gait. There is no cure, but treatment can help relieve the symptoms. A 2011 study in the journal Physical Therapy showed improvement in basic daily activities in a small group of patients who boxed regularly.

Juarez and his assistant trainer Dany Egli, a former musical theatre actor turned boxer, both got certified and opened Alabama’s first PD Fight Club program in 2016. Participants do exercises that test balance and hand-eye coordination. They build muscle strength by punching heavy bags, doing squats at a ballet-style barre, and stepping up onto boxes. They also work on speech and vocal projection by doing call-and-response with the trainers.

“People with Parkinson’s need something that’s going to help them directly with their Parkinson’s,” Juarez says. “It’s like taking your Honda to a Mercedes plant. They’re not going to work on that. Taking your Ford to a BMW. They’re not going to work on that. What we’re doing is we’re working on people specifically with Parkinson’s and Parkinson’s only.”

Juarez started with one person and now the PD Fight Club has grown to more than 80 people.

“When they come in here, I don’t call them Parkies. I don’t call them a person with Parkinson’s or Parkinson’s patients. I call them boxers,” says Juarez, “ because I’m training them like a boxer.”

For someone like Bob Hawkins, whose disease has progressed to the point where he’s unsteady on his feet, Juarez makes modifications to the exercises to keep him moving.

“You should see some of these people’s faces when they’re getting in that ring and they’re doing mitt work and their face lights up,” says Juarez. “No matter how hard the exercises seem to be, nobody ever looks at me and goes, ‘There’s no way I can do this.’ Nobody ever gives me any crap. They keep doing it because they’re fighting.”

Much like Epifanio Juarez—his Daddy— scrapped and fought and pushed his family to never give up.

“My father passed away seven years ago, before he could see my dream of opening our gym together,” Juarez says through tears. “I could not have done any of this without knowing my father’s in my corner.”

(Note: This story was originally written in 2019. Juarez Boxing shut down temporarily in early 2020 because of COVID, but has since re-opened. You can follow the gym on Facebook to see more videos and follow Martin Juarez on Twitter for more photos.)