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…
