The Early Members

The first man through the door. McNally was a third-generation Irish-American who had been boxing in the streets since he was nine years old. He worked the steel on the new bridges going up across the East River, and he trained every night after his shift. He never fought professionally — he said the money wasn’t worth the damage — but he sparred with men who did, and they remembered it.

Arrived from Kraków in 1912. Spoke almost no English when he enrolled, but communicated everything that needed to be communicated with his hands. Kowalski was a natural heavyweight with a work ethic that embarrassed men half his age. He took the train from Brooklyn every Tuesday and Thursday without fail for nine years. He missed three sessions total: the day his wife delivered twins, and the two days he spent in the hospital after a loading accident at the docks.

His father ran a barbershop on Mulberry Street. Carmine swept the floor and listened to the men talk about boxing from the time he could hold a broom. By the time he walked into Trinity at nineteen, he already knew the theory. The gym taught him the rest. He had fast hands — the kind of fast that made experienced fighters blink twice — and he used angles the way a chess player uses the board. He fought twelve amateur bouts and won eleven.

O’Malley had been a professional fighter in the 1890s and 1900s — a journeyman middleweight who fought everyone and was afraid of nobody. By 1920 his fighting days were behind him, but his knowledge was not. He was the one who set the rules of the gym, the one who decided who was ready to spar and who needed another month on the bags. He had a broken nose that had been broken four times, and eyes that had seen everything twice.

Rosenberg was studying at night and working the printing press during the day. He came to the gym because, as he told O’Malley on his first visit, “I am tired of being afraid on the subway.” He stayed for seven years. He was never a great fighter, but he became a very good one — technically precise, patient, impossible to rattle. He went on to become a schoolteacher in the Bronx and brought his students to the gym every spring.

His father signed the card. Declan was fourteen, skinny as a rail, and had already been in more street fights than most men twice his age. O’Malley took one look at him and said, “The street is going to kill you before you’re twenty. Come in here instead.” The boy came in. He grew up in the gym — literally. By the time he was eighteen he was one of the best young fighters in the city. He never forgot where he started.

Santos came down from East Harlem on the recommendation of a friend who told him Trinity was the only gym in the city where nobody cared where you were from. He was the fastest man in the gym from his first week. His combination speed was something the other members talked about for years after he left. He fought professionally for three years, went 18–4, and retired to open a hardware store in the Bronx. He trained his son in the back room.