New Orleans Boxing Culture.
Spend enough time in New Orleans and you will get to know people who box with gloves on. New Orleans is a city with a long, deep-seated boxing culture. It goes way back.
New Orleans is a boxing town. It has been for a long time. I am going to talk about that. There are boxing gyms, the real kind, not in the faux bourgeois bohemian sense, the way there are chain ballet workout studios all over the city. There is a New Orleans ballet culture, to be sure, but it is dwarfed by the New Orleans boxing culture.
New Orleans is a city that does not welcome fisticuffs, but, as a city overall, New Orleans appreciates a good fight. We do it every day.
Boxing is called the sweet science and, there is nothing better than going to a Friday Night Fight at the gym on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. Those Friday nights are nights to remember. A guaranteed good time if you appreciate the finer points of two pugilists locked in sporting combat. I know I do.
There are more boxing gyms in New Orleans than in any other city in which I have lived. This is not saying much, but it is all I have to say, firsthand.
There is Le Boxeur. He was a professional boxer. I suppose he still is, since he runs a boxing gym and he trains boxers based on his years of experience in the ring. His gym used to be a couple blocks from my house, in the building with the mural of Allen Toussaint on North Claiborne Avenue.
I have met more than one woman who has traveled from far away to take a few lessons from Le Boxeur. New Orleans boxing culture has an international reputation beyond Friday night fights. Le Boxuer is good with his hands, I understand. He trains people to make their whole body an instrument to win.
I cannot imagine a streetscape uglier than North Claiborne Avenue between Tulane Avenue and Elysian Fields Avenue. I cannot.
I love the El in Chicago and I love going to Queens or the Bronx where the subway is elevated. This is what I liked about the Red Line in Boston along the stretches where it was on tracks overhead. Only a churl with a glass eye cannot see the beauty in a train passing overhead, the rumble of metal wheels on metal tracks in the sky adding punctuation to a day’s rhythm. That is city living.
A legacy elevated highway cutting through a perfectly good neighborhood in a misguided effort at blight abatement, is also a part of city living.
Le Boxeur had a private gym across the street from a funeral home. I cannot remember what that cross street is. It might be Kerlerec. It might be Columbus. The building is diagonally across from the Mother-in-Law Lounge. Le Boxeur used to be close to Orleans Seafood, the best boil house in New Orleans, hands down.
It makes no difference where the building is located because there is something else there now. Le Boxeur has moved to classier digs. He is located on South Claiborne Avenue now. He went Uptown.
Follow the money.
I know someone who trains with Le Boxeur. She has never been in the ring but she finds his training helpful should she ever find herself there.
—Wait! I am at home at the moment, chained to the back gardens while I wait for something important to happen. I do work for a living, you know, though no one believes this.
Mardi Gras Indians are out today. I can hear them over by Ursulines Avenue. This is unusual because it is noon on a Friday. It is not Mardi Gras Day. It is not St. Joseph’s Night. It is not Bayou Super Sunday. Yet, the Indians are out and about today. I wonder why. It must be important.
I do not know if any Mardi Gras Indians participate in New Orleans boxing culture. I am a sure more than a few of them are handy with their fists in a pinch. They have to be. They are Indians.
I can hear them. The drums, the tambourines, the chanting, call-and-response, the rhythm of New Orleans felt deep down in one’s bones. I do not have time to go investigate. I am stuck in my back gardens, watching the chickens, on business.
The Indians do not do what they do to be watched. Mardi Gras Indians do what they do because that is what they do. This is true of most New Orleanians. We live in a kaleidoscope of a city.
Back to boxing. You should become a paid subscriber.
What follows is really very interesting. I know because I just finished writing it down before I push the send button.