After leaving the Near West Side community center where they work, Joe Kaehn and Rory O’Shea approached two youngsters punching each other in the street.
Instead of stopping the fight, the adults took it inside.
O’Shea and Kaehn walked the two combatants into the basement of Northwestern Settlement House at 1400 W. Augusta Blvd. They led them to a red-matted boxing ring, put boxing gloves on them and let them slug it out until they were exhausted. It didn’t take long.
That recent scenario is typical of how dozens of tough street kids have found their way to the Matador Boxing Club. Not all of them stay for a second fight, or a second chance to learn how to box.
But many do. And for Nate Jones and Anthony Stewart, two 23-year-olds who came to the Matadors as tough and troubled teens from the Cabrini-Green housing project, the stay has brought them to a golden door to the outside world.
This week, they are fighting in the final U.S. Olympic team trials in Oakland. They are top prospects to make the U.S. team that will fight for Olympic gold this summer in Atlanta.
To make the trials that lead to a final box-off later this month, a fighter must win or be a top finisher in at least one of a select group of national tournaments. Heavyweight Jones and light-heavyweight Stewart won tournaments to clinch one of eight spots in each class for the Oakland finals.
Another Matador, 29-year-old Darnell Wilson, beat Jorge Hawley of Los Angeles Tuesday in an elimination bout to qualify for a light-middleweight berth. There is one other finalist from Chicago, middleweight David Diaz of the North Shore Boxing Club.
With three fighters in the Olympic finals, the small Chicago boxing club has national bragging rights. Only the U.S. Army has more finalists, sending a dozen fighters from three different bases.
“It’s very unusual to have that many from the same small gym,” said Steve Ross of USA Boxing, the national governing body over Olympic-style boxing. “It’s a tribute to the coach and the system.”
“This is a great first for us, a really proud moment,” said Tom O’Shea, founder of the Matadors and long-time coach of Jones and Stewart.
O’Shea’s two top prospects agreed and singled him out as far more than a coach.
“However far I get in boxing, he’ll be the main one who helped me get there,” Jones said. “When I called him while I was in prison, he was always there for me.”
Jones, who served 20 months for auto theft and robbery, said O’Shea “was there for me before I went in and was there when I came out. He’s somebody I can trust, I can believe.”
It wasn’t that way 11 years ago, when 12-year-old Jones and a friend met O’Shea much the way the two fighting youths recently met his brother, Rory, and co-worker Kaehn:
“We just wanted to fight,” Jones recalled. “But when he asked, `Do you want to box?’ I thought, `Right, here’s a white guy goin’ to tell me how to box.’
“But now, Tom is really one of my best friends. I hung out with gang-bangers, being tough, sticking people up. . . . I got my (high school equivalency degree) in prison. . . . I probably would have been dead if I’d stayed in the streets.”
Stewart’s first glimpse of O’Shea was similar to Jones’. When he stepped into the Matadors’ gym with his brother, the 16-year-old thought he was tough enough to fight anyone in the house.
“I got in the ring and got kicked,” Stewart said. He candidly assessed his first opponent “hit me everywhere but the bottom of my feet.
“I thought my brother had crossed me, set me up. I was so mad, I didn’t talk to him for two weeks. But then I came back to the gym and started to train with Tom O’Shea.”
Boxing has expanded Stewart’s surroundings far beyond his street and his city. Although he hasn’t completed high school, he has traveled throughout the U.S. and to competition sites such as Kiev, Ukraine and Dublin, Ireland.
His distinctive pre-fight ritual seems to transcend language barriers. Before every fight, he lets out a primal scream. Crowds respond.
But he insists he doesn’t do it to encourage or enrage spectators. Rather, he explained, “I get butterflies in my stomach before a fight. When I stand in my corner and scream, the butterflies go away.”
O’Shea, who accompanied his Matadors to Oakland as their prime cornerman, credited many others for making the trip possible. He particularly cited Chicago attorney Jim Sloan, “whose support and fund-raising has kept the club going through tough times.”
Besides coaching boxing for 30 years, O’Shea taught English for 27 years before retiring from Wells High School.
O’Shea immigrated from Ireland in a family with four brothers, including fellow boxers Rory and Brian.
“We couldn’t play basketball or football very well, and couldn’t hit a baseball, so we gravitated to boxing,” Tom recalled.
Each of the brothers won national amateur titles, including the Golden Gloves, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Similar in size and weight, they took turns gaining or losing weight so they could move up or down in divisions and not have to fight each other.
Jones and Stewart hope for rematches against amateur boxing nemeses who have beaten them in the past–Cuban heavyweight Felix Savon and American light-heavyweight Antonio Tarver, respectively.
As his fighters dream of Olympic glory and pro boxing careers, Tom O’Shea says he’ll support them all the way. But he won’t literally be in their corner.
“I’m strictly in amateur boxing,” he said. “Once they go pro, I say good-bye to them as a coach.”