Kyle Goon: Downtown Baltimore fight card showcases city’s working-class boxers

Vernon Mason’s neck doesn’t turn like it used to, but his gaze is still razor sharp.

As he watches a teenager shadowboxing in the ring at the Mack Lewis Boxing Gym in East Baltimore, the 81-year-old gives the impression of a cobra coiled to strike. But instead of punches, now he gives out coaching. He corrects the student’s jab — telling him it should lash out quickly, “like a whip.”

As a way of introduction, Mason points to one of the fading signs on the wall — “that’s me over there” — where he is on the undercard of a 1971 fight at the old Steelworkers Hall against Art Kettles (Mason won).

Looking at the wall, packed with cards of Baltimore boxing matches, is to quickly grasp the scope of the city’s rich history with the sweet science. But a brief scan of the faded, monochromatic signage is all it takes to realize how much of that history feels so long ago.

This weekend, the Baltimore Development Corp. is teaming up with a Maryland-based boxing promoter to host a fight night at the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor. It’s a test of downtown’s viability for hosting fights and a way to generate economic interest in a historic sport at a costly, underused city-owned hotel.

If they can sell out the 2,000-seat ballroom, there could be more boxing matches — typically hosted locally at venues such as Live! Casino & Hotel Maryland in Hanover — in downtown venues.

“We’re in this to last,” said Kevin Seawright, BDC’s executive vice president. “We do want this to be a revitalization of the city.”

But as much as the city may hope for combat sports to help drive downtown events, it’s also a rare spotlight on the working-class boxers of Baltimore. Well below the ranks of former champion and Baltimore native Gervonta “Tank” Davis, being a boxer is a grind. “It’s a poor man’s sport,” undefeated cruiserweight Tyler Langer said. “Most of us have had hard lives.”

There are still Baltimore boxing gyms and still Baltimore fighters. But there just aren’t that many boxing cards in the city.

To fight, they usually drive — a lot. New Jersey. D.C. Philadelphia. New York. It feels like every mid-Atlantic city has a boxing scene, except Baltimore.

“It’s good after years of being on the road, going away, I finally get to come back right here in the city,” said Antonio Dunton-El, a super featherweight who lives in Baltimore. “I don’t got to wonder what my kids are doing at night for the fight or whatever. Not being homesick. You know, the hotel life.”

Dunton-El, 29, has four children between the ages of 10 months and 10 years. His day job is in security. He commits his mornings to conditioning. Early evenings are for shadowboxing, sparring and bag work.

Social media makes the windfalls of boxing — a strong and toned body, the acclaim of victory, the spoils of success — seem extremely accessible. When kids inspired by social media enter a gym like Mack Lewis, they quickly find out they’re a long way from triumphant posts.

“A lot of people looking for pretty much instant gratification — they look in for, like, magic trick,” coach Warren Boardley said. “Boxing is a little bit like magic in a way, almost, but it takes a while.”

Boardley understands better than most how long it can take to carve something useful out of this sport — and life itself. He spent 27 years in prison for his role in a drug organization (the same one for which Davis’ trainer Calvin Ford served time). He was 43-8 as a heralded amateur fighter — by 2015, he was an ex-con whose fighting days were long over.

While incarcerated, Boardley kept up with Marvin McDowell, a local fighter he’d grown up with under the tutelage of Mack Lewis himself. When Boardley was in prison, McDowell, the boxing director at Umar Boxing just south of Druid Hill Park, wrote letters to him and called him. Boardley mentored other men while inside, building an aspiration to help kids become “law-abiding citizens” when he got out and avoid his path.

McDowell was nothing less than a tether to the outside world. That’s the kind of bond fighters in Baltimore can have.

“We’ve been friends for 50 years now, and we kept it up while I was away,” Boardley said. “I never felt out of touch with society. I never felt that, although I weren’t in it.”

Being a boxing coach has its own kind of loneliness, Boardley said. He is gone many weekends, coaching fighters or watching matches out of town.

Most of Boardley’s pros are latecomers to the sport. Dunton-El started his amateur career at 18. Langer started at 19, and even took a four-year intermission as he started a family.

Langer came back to boxing when his oldest son, Luca, was diagnosed with autism. It gave him inspiration, both in watching his son adapt to life as a neurodivergent child and in finding a cause to fight for.

“You gotta work every day just to learn how to communicate with neurotypical children,” Langer said. “You know, so seeing him just having to go through that, and everything he has to go through, just to fight to learn.”

Langer has gone by “John Wayne” as a boxing moniker, in part because Boardley wanted to inspire him to keep a cool head in the ring, and in part because he’s one of the few white fighters at the gym. But aside from the typical combat branding of a boxer, Langer will represent his 5-year-old son by wearing puzzle-piece logos when he takes the ring Saturday.

It’s a fight his children will be able to see, even if they don’t fully understand what it means. And a new poster, actually in color, is up on the Mack Lewis gym wall for future students to see.

The boxing scene in Baltimore isn’t as robust as it once was, and even a successful card on Saturday is a mere first step in a longer road to rebuilding the grassroots of the sport. But fighting where you live is a blessing that the old fighters know well, and the current blue-collar generation hopes to take advantage of it.

“I feel like we a little slept on here in Baltimore,” Dunton-El said. “I guess that’s why I’m here.”

Doors open at the Hilton at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, and fights begin at 7 p.m. Tickets are available through Jeter Promotions.