New Jersey: Ike & Randy’s Boxing Gym Saves Paterson Kids One Punch At A Time

By Frank Scandale and Photos by Thomas E. Franklin

While Mixed Martial Arts often hog the spotlight in the U.S. at the expense of traditional boxing, there looms a thriving pulse of the sport in the New York metro area. 

Facilities like Mendez Boxing on 125th Street and Harlem House of Champions on 135th Street keep the tradition alive that was born in places like  Gleason’s Gym, now in Brooklyn, and the epic second Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight in Madison Square Garden in 1974. 

But today in the shadow of New York City, a different battle for survival rages.

Drive across the George Washington Bridge and onto U.S. Interstate 80, you’ll exit into one of boxing history’s most prolific cities – Paterson. Home of the controversial boxing figure, Ruben Hurricane Carter, here is where a determined cadre of youth and adults carry on the tradition, fighting their battles inside the ropes and outside. It’s a fight for survival, honor and discipline.  

Once in the city limits and arriving at 98 Park Ave., a rescue mission can be found deep down a narrow alley blocked by a chain link fence and accented by a simple sign and black mailbox.

While difficult to find, Ike & Randy’s Boxing Gym provides a glimpse of a different path for youths in a city that’s reputation includes violent crime, gang shootings, and corruption.

Hundreds of guns are confiscated annually. Gun violence involving young people has been routine for years. The city is so plagued by crime and misconduct that the New Jersey Attorney General took over the police department.

Ike & Randy’s sits in the center of the chaos, a safe haven amidst the violence, that provides purpose, friendship, and an ally for young people struggling to survive the city.

“It’s a great antidote. Instead of shooting a gun, you can shoot your hands,” Paterson’s Director of Recreation Benjie Wimberly, said. “We wish we could have more boxing gyms like Ike & Randy’s because it would deter some of the violent crimes we are having. It would get the kids from getting into the trouble they get into now.”

Nobody knows more about boxing’s history or value in Paterson than James Marotta. The son of legendary cut man Ace Marotta – who worked with Lou Duva and with greats like Rocky Marciano – Marotta is a longtime boxing aficionado.

“If there were 10 gyms in Paterson, it would cut crime in half in two years,” he said. “It teaches discipline and camaraderie, which is very, very important.”

But for all the good the gym performs, the financial clock is ticking.

It’s been saved, for now, by a benefactor who recognizes the gym’s importance to the community. But a new infusion of passion – and cash – is needed.

For fighter Erik Mendez, the gym’s most promising pugilist, that could mean a shot at boxing glory.  For the trainers, volunteers, and, most importantly, dozens of youths and adults who count on its healing powers, the gym must keep operating.

Nearly everyone agrees that the gym performs such a vital service to the community, that for it to vanish like so many Paterson gyms before, would be catastrophic.         

The Gym

It’s a typical afternoon and sweat is everywhere inside Ike & Andy’s, a setting right out of “Rocky.” In fact, this place makes Mickey’s Gym look like a Pocono spa. A standing fan groans near an open door and a steel gate. Another door remains open for Bootsie – the resident cat – to gain access and maybe provide a wisp of air from the alley.

For a gym so unassuming that kids in the neighborhood needed to feed its name into a web browser to find it, it has a history with pro boxers and media. From ESPN, and Fox Sports to 60 Minutes, its confines have made the big time. 

It’s seen the likes of Ron Lyle train there while attempting a comeback, as well as professionals such as Adrian Stone, Kendall Holt, Aaron Davis, and Buddy McGirt. Not to mention trainers to the stars, such as Mike Tyson.  

But these days, it tells a different story. The clientele is dominated by young Black and Latino boys and girls, half of whom do not speak English. There are about 40 or so who stream in weekly from the local streets, coached by older, wiser trainers who have taken punches inside and out of the ring and are now training the next generation.

Staring down at them from the yellowed walls are posters from yesteryear and those beckoning the future, such as a tournament in early November.

The date looms large in the financial health plan of the gym. It pits Ike & Randy’s boxers against another gym in the city, True Warrior Boxing Club, and tickets are being sold to boost the bottom line and keep the gym solvent.

Inside the Gym

Half the heavy bags are held together by duct tape and no less than two or three kids are punching them simultaneously. Some cardio equipment works, and some don’t. The metal weightlifting area is rusty and worn and outdated by decades. Two doors are the only source of air, one has a standing fan working to cut through the stale air.

The smell of sweat punctures the room. Rap music swirls but doesn’t blare. Every kid, male and female, who comes in or out of the gym acknowledges the trainers with verbal greetings and fist bumps. Bootsie the cat lounges outside on a makeshift wooden bench. He looks like the mayor of the place.  

The gym harkens back to the days when the building was home to auto mechanics. The patchwork floor of stone pavers is covered by a ceiling crisscrossed with exposed pipe. A stone wall replaced the overhead garage door long ago. Inside, a worn boxing ring serves as centerstage for sparring and represents boxing glory for the kids.

The Next Great Hope

Working the heavy bag is Mendez, a 19-year-old with promise and a 12-2 amateur record. His 125 pounds of chiseled sinew assaults the heavy bag like his life depended on it. 

“I have to get in here and stay away from the streets,” he said. “Time passes. Things change. I’m still making choices. Every day you have to make choices. Every day.”

While he says he does not feel the pull of the street as much – he became a father recently and took a full-time job at Newark Liberty International Airport – he was part of those streets as a young teen. 

“This is a big moment in my life,” Mendez said, glancing at a reporter while peppering the heavy bag with jabs to prepare for his next fight, a critical step in his quest. “This ain’t a joke to me. This is going to mean something to me if I am going to go pro.”

He turns 20 years old in March.

“I don’t want to be 20 or 22 and still trying to turn pro,” he said.

Mendez was 14 when some friends mentioned the gym. “They introduced me to boxing and I said, “Wait, I get to punch people in the face with gloves?”

He was rolling along when the baby came and the challenge grew. He said he kept working out on his own, but not at the gym. “I came back for love of the sport,” he says.

His last fight was in November 2023. Then came the moment he was waiting for. 

An exhibition match in September pitted him against an opponent who gave him a battle, but in the end, Menendez took the match despite some initial confusion by the judges that had his opponent winning. 

“I could have performed better, unfortunately, it was not the best night..but I will go back to the gym and work harder and get an A-plus performance next time.”

“We did a good job. We got the win,” he said, his parents, girlfriend and daughter at ringside. 

He understands the role the gym plays in his life and the lives of others.

 “Kids would rather be here and doing something positive,” he said. “You have to get in here and stay away from the streets. Choices. It’s about choices. And I am still making them. “

“You can’t have one foot in the streets and one out. You gotta be committed to something.” He philosophizes in a bit of Muhammad Ali style while he snaps punches. “Skills pays the bills.”

“Some of my friends are out partying and having fun. That is not my path. I can’t be hanging around rappers and artists if I want to be a professional boxer. That’s a different world. Everybody has to do it their way. “

While Mendez’s boxing career sits high on the priority list, there is so much more driving the men who run the place.

“A lot of mamas come up to me and thank me. Their kids come here and then they go home and sleep like babies,” says Ike & Randy’s 74-year-old owner Phil Shevack. “I cry when I see the kids here. Kids today don’t listen like they did before.”

Shevack knows without the gym, many of these kids would be more vulnerable. He has a difficult time articulating his love for the kids, instead choosing in mid-sentence to walk over to one boy and saying, “Here let me show you something.”

But his supporting cast more than makes up for the lack of self-praise.

“He really cares about these kids,” notes Ken De Berry, the main cog in the wheel for survival here. “It took me years to convince Phil to let me help him out.”

Incidentally, when the movie is made about Ike & Randy’s, John Malkovich will play Shevack and Russell Crowe will take on the role of De Berry.

Ike & Randy’s was named after the former owner of the building and Shevack’s brother who struggles with mental challenges. It was born in the early 90s on a street in one of the grittier parts of the city just a block up from Eastside High School.

Between the high school and the gym, your head needs a swivel to keep patrolling for any possible surprise. A cacophony of fire and police sirens is the regular soundtrack of a neighborhood dotted with mobile phone stores, barber shops and salons, churches, and liquor stores. 

While homicides and violent crime are down from the year before, cocaine and heroin arrests have more than doubled through the first six months of this year. About 26% of the city’s 156,000 residents live in poverty and the part of the city where the gym sits ranks high in overall crime.

The Supporting Cast

The gym’s understated goal, for all it has done for the neighborhood, is to save the youth of the city – and along the way a handful of adults who are the backbone of the gym.

Ossie Duran ended his career as the Ghanaian Gladiator at Shevack’s urging after a controversial loss to a hometown pro in Minnesota – and a detached retina.

Shevack gave him the head trainer’s job at the gym and an apartment upstairs. Duran is a U.S. citizen now, and De Berry and company are working with him to bring his teenage daughter to the States so she can attend college. He hasn’t seen her in years.

“We wanted him to be a citizen, so we put him on the payroll,” De Berry said. “Ossie relates to the kids well and he is an excellent trainer. The gym would not be here without this guy. The kids love him.”

Duran plays down his importance. But to a person, all agree there is no Ike & Randy’s without Duran.

Low-key and surprisingly soft-spoken, Duran offered this insight:

“Being the head trainer at Ike & Randy’s has been a dream come true. I love teaching the youth that come into the gym to learn how to box by using my professional background and teach them to be respectful of the sport and everyone in the gym.

“I have many kids who came into the gym at 14 years old only later to become champions in major tournaments,” said Duran, whose professional record was 28-11-3. 

Now 47, Duran started boxing at eight, had his first pro bout in 1996, and his last in 2014. 

Rescue number one.

Next door lives Ike Thomas, who met Shevack in grade school. The two made an unlikely pair.

“I never saw a Black kid before, but he was nice to me and we became friends,” Shevack said.

The two lost touch, but about 40 years later, a chance meeting with his old pal on a Paterson street had Thomas asking if Shevack knew of a place to stay.

“Sure, I got a place above my gym’,” Thomas recalls Shevack saying without hesitation. The two smile at each other in the alley like only old friends do. 

Another rescue.

Shevack, now 74, took up boxing in high school when he didn’t make the football team in his hometown of Passaic.

“I found out quickly how much I didn’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t lay a glove on my opponent.”

He said he fought a few fights as a pro but knew this career would not bear fruit. He worked at the former Rahway State Prison where he met Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, the legendary boxer who was convicted of a mass shooting in a Paterson bar and was the muse behind Bob Dylan’s famous song.

Shevack can still bob and weave.

“Kids today they telegraph their punches,” he demonstrates. He lines up the door frame and shoots some punches to a pretend jaw. Then he turns toward a reporter sitting nearby. Before the reporter can object, Shevack unleashes three lightning jabs that come within a hair of a broken nose. 

Shevack is reluctant to take credit for his rescues. He deflects without effort. 

He cocks his head and nods toward De Berry, a former boxer turned accountant who witnessed the 9/11 attacks from his office adjacent to the Twin Towers.“If it wasn’t for this guy, I would be gone,” Shevack says. “He did it. He’s a great guy. He’s a nice guy and there are not many like him left.”

At 67, De Berry looks like he could go a few rounds with anyone 30 years younger. A Queens, NY, native, he boxed at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn as well as other venues, including overseas.

After his career ended, he earned an accounting degree, learned operations, and was working at The Hartford in the Trade Center complex and saw the buildings go down. He ended up in New Jersey and found himself at Ike & Randy’s one day to work out.  

But he learned the gym was on the ropes financially. Drowning in mortgage payments and facing a hefty property tax hit, De Berry went to work. He set up the nonprofit Ike & Randy’s Foundation in 2015, bought the building three years later and transferred it to the foundation on the same day. Then he paid off $15,000 in back taxes to stave off losing the gym. 

So De Berry saves the gym for Shevack.

For now, De Berry shells out about $20,000 a year to keep the gym solvent. That includes paying off a quarter of the annual property taxes to keep current while the courts process the gym’s nonprofit status.

It’s a financial burden De Berry admits he can’t continue “in perpetuity.” At nearly 68, the gym needs new blood to take it to the next level, and new revenue streams to finance its mission. While there is no foreclosure notice in the mail, it’s at least on the desk. 

“I’m just here helping out the kids. It keeps them off the streets,” he says, not mentioning, for instance, how he is helping one boy get his driver’s license, or how he prepares his crew by taking them to Newark to spar against more experienced fighters.

“I told them, ‘You are here to learn. Don’t try to knock out these guys because it aint going to happen. These guys are smarter. They know what they are doing’.”

He stops, looks around the gym, and lets loose a rare f-bomb.

“This is a true inner city fucking ghetto gym,” he says with some satisfaction.

His son died and he was down

Tucked into a corner a weight bench or two is squeezed between the ring and wall and a lone figure is banging out sit-ups. 

Cary Schwartz sticks out in this sea of brown and Black bodies like a snowball on asphalt.

At 63, Schwartz came by Ike & Randy’s after he lost his son Drew in an ATV accident about five years ago. Distraught and flailing, he was in bad shape when his other son told him about Ike & Randy’s. 

“He knew I always liked boxing,” Schwartz said. In the gym, he found a way to channel his anger and sadness into a heavy bag, a rope skipping session, a speed bag and the trainers who urge him to push.

“This place literally saved me,” he said. “The gym really saved my life. Mentally. Physically. As a stress reducer. Ossie became my friend. All these guys are my friends.

“Everyone here is fractured in some way,” he said. “So it’s a community. It’s a discipline. It’s not a place where someone goes just to get on the treadmill.” 

When Drew died, Schwartz had already survived a diagnosis of testicular cancer and the loss of his first wife to blood cancer. He was badly shaken.

“I was a little wary because Paterson was not my demographic,” he said. 

He drove to the location but couldn’t find the gym. His doubts grew. Finally, he saw the modest sign and made it into the alley, but realized “this was not right.” He was ready to leave.

“I turned around to leave when the door opened and a pit bull dog came out with a guy who said, ‘Can I help you?’

“I went there because of Drew’s death and I survived because of the gym and the relationships at the gym,” he said. “We were in a bad place. We pushed on for the other kids and grandchildren, but we were in a very bad place.”

Schwartz has a vision for the gym involving donations from sporting equipment companies and a food program to make sure kids have something hot to eat when they train.

Another successful rescue.

“This place is not about me, “Schwartz continues after a pause. “It’s about the kids.” Then he points to a man nearby, Ronald Bacote, whom everyone calls Rasul.

“Phil helped him off the street. He was living in the street. Now, he’s great for the kids,” Schwartz said.

Now 59, Rasul moves furniture for a living and then plants himself at Ike & Randy’s for the other mission. He came to the gym in 1997 after some troubled years that landed him behind bars.

While incarcerated, the guy who ran the jail boxing team coaxed Rasul into joining.

“I was locked up and this was a recreation, a chance to show my skills,” Rasul said.

He said he became a state champ in the prison system in 1992 as part of a boxing team at the former Rahway State Prison and was determined to live when he got out. He lived right around the corner from the gym, but a lack of job opportunities and the lure of the streets and drugs detoured his plans.

Until Shevack came along.

“I met Phil on the street when I came home,” Rasul said. “I chose to live.”

Rasul showed Shevack what he could do in the ring. Then, “He opened his arms to me,” Rasul said. “It’s been a marriage ever since.”

Shevack praises Rasul’s willpower.

“This man salvaged his own life.,” Shevack said. “His direction was going off the cliff. But now he is a productive member of society.”

For Rasul, he wants nothing more than to help the kids.

“I keep them off the streets, off the guns,” he says. “We talk. I’ve been there. I say, ‘If you don’t do this, you’re going to jail.’”

“This is a safe haven for a lot of kids,” Rasul continues. “You gotta remember. I was them. There were not a lot of outlets when I got here. Guys here showed me the love.”

Rasul insists the gym teaches the kids discipline and attitude.

“This is saving lives from the guns, from the drugs and the streets,” he declares. “If you come here, we’re saving lives. I’m only giving back to the kids.

“Here you are going to learn to be a man,” he continues. “These kids are like our own kids. We are giving back what was given to us. I don’t want these kids falling through the cracks because I fell through the cracks. The kids reach out and I say, ‘You reach one, you teach one.”

The City

Recreation chief Wimberly has been at the helm for nearly three decades and is aware of the service Shevack and company are providing.

“The one thing is boxing is an outlet indirectly when it comes to gun violence,” he said. “Mainly by kids who got in trouble but when they get in the boxing gym they become a different person.”

The city doesn’t subsidize the gym beyond a small bi-monthly stipend for a couple of its trainers.

“They are great,” Wimberly said of the trainers. “We can’t compensate them enough for the amount of lives they save.” 

Mayor Andre Sayegh is a boxing fan and even takes boxing lessons himself. He talks about the gym as a rescue mission.

“We want to provide our young Patersonians with opportunities,” he said. “It’s all about beating the streets and boxing is all about beating the streets. You can displace a lot of aggression in the ring.”

Sayegh calls Shevack “Fighting Phil,” and considers his gym one of the positive options kids have in the city.

“It enhances our efforts and aligns with our vision. This is about character development and instilling discipline. These kids are very respectful.”

But Marotta shakes his head at the lack of funding from the city for boxing gyms. He says the city should do more because of the lives it saves.

“Andre should be giving Phil $100,000,” he says. “These kids are on the streets with nothing to do. They are looking to bond.”

Alexander Cotto, now 34, came by to “pay his respects” to the gym and its people. An addict for years, he’s from Camden in South Jersey but was up north to speak at Turning Point, a drug and alcohol treatment center.

“This has always been my cornerstone,” he begins. “I had too much energy when I was young. This place taught me nutrition, and humility. It taught me there was a better route.

“Boxing was defense first and things are coming from all different angles.”

He said it had been a couple of years since he last stopped in. He just likes to come by to thank those who saved him.

“It’s the discipline. The dedication and the determination, the three Ds,” he said.

De Berry watches him shuffle down the alley. He doesn’t remember Cotto.

And yet, there’s another save.

Click on the video link here for more information regarding the story.

Frank Scandale

Frank Scandale is a veteran writer and newspaper editor. He has edited many newspapers, including The Record of Bergen County, and has covered some of the nations, highest profile stories, including the Columbine High School massacre and the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Thomas E. Franklin

Thomas E. Franklin is a freelance multimedia journalist and an associate professor at Montclair State University with 30-plus years covering news, sports, immigration, and documentary projects. He’s perhaps best known for his iconic flag-raising photograph taken at Ground Zero, which was featured on a U.S. postage stamp that helped raise over $10 million for victims of 9/11. In 2002, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work on 9/11. He can be reached at tom@thomasfranklin.com or on Instagram.

Photo credit: 1)19-year-old boxer Erik Mendez, a Golden Gloves champion, with Phil Shevack, co-founder. 2) Erik Mendez. 3) Trainer Ken De Berry coaches Erik Mendez sparring with trainer Ozzie Durans. 4) Phil Shevack. 5) Erik Mendez, and trainer Ozzie Duran. 6) Phil Shevack stands in alleyway. 7) Trainer Ken DeBerry coaches Josh Santos. 8) Cary Schwartz. 9) Trainer Ron Rasul Bacote, 14-year-old Ashanti Bailey and Phil Shevack. By Thomas E. Franklin/Special to NorthJersey.com

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