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Broxton, Ohio, was a sprawling, half-alive, half-dead city of about 30,000, 27,760 of which were born there and 23,000 of which would die there; it was in this regard just like a hundred other small cities in the Rust Belt. Situated five miles off the interstate about two hours from Pittsburgh and about two hours from Columbus, the Wal-Marts and McDonald's of the world comprised Broxton's major industry.
There was one particular small business that made Broxton different from the rest of the dusty towns of the northeast, and it was called the Sixth Street Gym. Located in the southwest corner of downtown, right on – get this – 6th Street, the Gym was, to all normal appearances, nothing special. It was sufficiently spacious, clean, modern, and had most of the amenities you expect of a gym, cable TV and all that. Gyms these days tend to serve the same purpose as singles bars, only without the alcohol and its often-unfortunate effects on one's personal standards. The Sixth Street Gym was really not very notable in this regard, though, as there was a large and trendy Summit Athletic Club just outside of town that served that purpose. The Summit, like most modern “athletic clubs,” were heavy on the aerobic classes and yoga classes and were heavily female on the membership rolls; the Sixth Street Gym was heavy on the standard strength-training equipment and had a male majority in its membership. People come and go all the time in the trendy clubs, but gyms like Sixth Street thrive on their regulars, the guys that are there four, five days a week at predictable hours, and so it had taken on a culture all its own. There was something of a tough-guy, no-nonsense feel to it. It was the place the people who consciously avoided the trendy appearance went to work out.
The Gym had been around for fifteen years, since 1987 to be exact, but when the Summit opened to much fanfare in 2002, its membership took a serious hit, and it fell afterwards into a slow decline cycle. Membership stabilized within a few years to the point where it could pay the owner's bills, but couldn't do much else.
Trent Gutshall bought the Gym in 2008. Though the Gym was a favorite of locals, Gutshall was no local, having moved from northern Pennsylvania for the express purpose of purchasing and taking management of the gym. He was but twenty-three years of age when he purchased the Gym for $650,000, but he had a vision for it, and he spared no effort in molding it into his mind's image. He laid out to replace the equipment, he made it a point to make the town luminaries familiar with him, and he advertised aggressively, particularly in the town newspaper, the Record & Courier.
And he introduced Fight Night. For years the Sixth Street Gym hosted boxing training, off and on, as a very small side business. Gutshall made it the centerpiece of his business plan, and traveled frequently to the surrounding cities to advertise Sixth Street boxing and bring in interested young guys. It didn't have much impact at first, but over the next three or four years, guys began drifting to him, showing up from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and training at his gym. Turnover was high, as many of these guys were bums, scoundrels, and losers; not a few simply disappeared, never to be seen again, probably incarcerated or dead. But a few of them stuck around, and then a few more of them stuck around, and before long the Sixth Street Gym had gained for itself a reputation as a boxing Mecca that spread a ways outside of Broxton's city limits.
As his boxing business grew, Gutshall hired a few trainers, mostly old guys who used to be fighters, or amateur trainers, in dusty days long gone and had been bouncing around for longer than Gutshall had been alive. It's a funny thing about boxing, though: Sometimes the very wisest old gurus are the guys who have been bouncing from town to town and state to state for twenty-five years and don't have two dimes in their pockets to buy a roll of Pez with. I don't mean to suggest that Gutshall was rolling in money; most of the fighters that came to him couldn't afford much in the way of club dues, so Gutshall was making enough to pay the mortgage on a little house three blocks from the gym, and that was about it. He didn't have anywhere close to the resources to attract big-time boxing experts, and wasn't sure he wanted them even if he could afford them, based on his occasional encounters with boxing bigwigs. So like the fighters themselves, old trainers came and went, and over time he found himself employing a handful of good ones, or at least sensible ones.
But Gutshall didn't get into this business to get rich quick. Heaven knows that there were a hundred better ways to lay down a six-figure investment and get a fast return on your money than buying a vaguely dilapidated, shrinking gym in downtown Nowhere, Ohio. Gutshall was there because, having spent the better part of a year traveling about the northeast and studying all the possibilities, this seemed to him the best place to plant the seed that he intended to nurture into a small empire. He went to Broxton to build a premier boxing gym. Oh, there would never be really all that money in it. If he did really well, he figured, he might reach the high five figures a year in personal income, fifteen or twenty years down the line. Certainly enough, for him.
Trent Gutshall would later recall that he couldn't exactly identify when, or even how, he became interested in boxing, or when his mild interest developed into serious interest. He was not much of a fighter himself. He'd fought a few basically casual matches in the local gym in his own hometown, three rounds mostly, twice five, and won a couple, lost a couple, and after getting severely knocked out in the second round against the only good fighter he faced, and waking up in the hospital, he decided to hang up his gloves and keep whatever remained of his mind.
But he stayed seriously interested in boxing. He never went to college; after two years of working odd jobs in high school, he had showed up at enough local fights to get to know the people who ran them, and secured a prestigious post as a trainer at Bad Billy's Boxing outside of Pittsburgh. In this case, “trainer” meant “guy that squirted water into the fighter's mouth and rubbed him down” primarily, and he only worked one fight a month, two if the schedule was really packed, and he was paid $30 per fight, but Gutshall didn't mind any of that. He loved just being around the ring. He was quiet and ponderous by nature, rarely opening his mouth until he was certain of what exactly he wanted to say and how and when exactly he wanted to say it. He did the “trainer” thing for a year, and the guys he worked with at Bad Billy's, the real trainers, started to notice that on the irregular occasions when Gutshall did say something, he had unusually smart things to say, subtle observations that would often lead to real improvements in the fighters he was working with. So Bad Billy called Gutshall, who was then 21 years old, and asked him if he wanted to come down and work with the fighters in the club a couple days a week. The pay was lousy, but Gutshall had a knack for picking up odd jobs, so he began making the two-hour drive three days a week, leaving home at seven in the morning and often not returning until eleven at night.
If you simply walked in the door and started watching Gutshall, you would have a hard time finding evidence that he was doing anything. He would just stand, or just as often sit, nearby and watch a particular fighter work for awhile. He especially liked to hang around while a fighter was sparring. Of course here and there he carried water or towels or spit buckets around, but he kept that work to a minimum so he could spend his time with the fighters. Bad Billy paid him by the day—$50 a day for eight hours' work—but Gutshall most often gave Bad Billy ten or twelve hours, usually as long as it took for the last fighter to call it a night.
Perhaps if I was a better writer, I could give you a clear picture of what Bad Billy—yes, he was a real person—was like, but I'm not coming up with anything more descriptive than this: Bad Billy Jensen was a jackass. He wasn't personally much of a boxing guy; he was a businessman who also had partial ownership stakes in a car dealership and a contracting company. Oh, he fancied himself a boxing natural, like Gutshall, but the difference between them was that Billy didn't have a clue.
Bad Billy's Boxing made only very modest profits, but Billy liked owning it because it made him just that little bit more of a prominent citizen in the community, and because he liked boxing. He didn't like it anything like how Gutshall liked it—Gutshall was drawn to the science, even the artistry, of it all, the science of survival, as he called it in his own mind. Bad Billy, on the other hand, liked it for the same reason many casual fans pay to watch fights. He liked watching grown men attack and try to injure each other. Oh, he'd call it the sweet science and talk big about how scientific the sport was and what incredible athletes boxers were—it made him sound smart for being in the business—but the guys who really understand boxing, almost to a man, share their wisdom in relatively rare and relatively short observations here and there. Like Trent Gutshall.
Bad Billy was still in the boxing business because of Hurricane Bert Halama. Hurricane Bert had been a pro welterweight back during the late sixties and early seventies, and his calling card was that it was so rare for a Hurricane Halama fight to reach a decision that it was often said that judges weren't needed when he fought. Cane, as everyone called him around the gym, was now nearing seventy and still every bit the pepperpot. He took the guys Bad Billy brought in, a surprising number of whom were preppy types who were there because their parents paid dues in advance and they thought they were bad stuff, and either made them into something resembling boxers or drove them back home to their plasma TVs with his relentless pressure.
Despite the nickname that belied his own style, Cane didn't force everyone to fight the way he did. “These boys' teeth would be flying in all different directions if they tried that against a real fighter,” Cane laughed when asked about it. He taught them aggressive fighting—Cane couldn't stand a fighter just darting around with his hands in front of his face for eight rounds; “What're you in the ring for if you don't wanna fight?”—but he ragged on them incessantly to keep their hands up, to keep their feet under them, to always protect themselves. Every couple weeks Cane would let a few of the fighters actually fight each other for three or five rounds, but for the few good ones—and Cane trained some good ones—it was hard to find good competition for them.
Bad Billy would wander across the floor now and then and yell at some random fighters to get mad, to fight like they mean it, to stop being a girl, etc. Probably it gave him a rush to insult guys much younger and stronger than himself. He would frequently come across Trent Gutshall sitting in a chair, watching a fighter work a bag with his feet tied together by an eighteen-inch length of shoelace—one of Cane's favorite old balance-teaching tricks—and start yelling at Gutshall to get busy and earn his paycheck. Bad Billy was never around past five, and so he didn't know Gutshall was usually around until eight or nine in the evening, because Cane never told him; and Gutshall didn't know that Cane talked Bad Billy out of firing him twice a week on average, because Cane never told him that, either. But Cane knew Gutshall had something to offer, so he talked Bill Jensen into hiring him and then made sure he stayed there.
Trent Gutshall was a quiet man by nature, but every man has his breaking point, and in 2007 he reached it with Bad Billy Jensen. Jensen stormed into the gym at about 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon, already worked into a froth (allegedly over having discovered his wife had been running around with one of his car dealership's managers) and happened upon Gutshall sitting quietly in a chair, eyes off in space, not apparently paying attention to anything in particular. He immediately planted himself about eight inches from Gutshall's chair and screamed at him to get off his keister and do some work for once in his life. Gutshall just blinked and looked up at him the way you'd look at a man who just threatened to kill his poodle if you didn't do exactly what he said.
“Did you (expletive) hear me!?” Jensen demanded after Gutshall had remained silent and continued staring at him for five long seconds. Their faces were two feet apart at most.
“A deaf man in North Pittsburgh could have heard you,” Gutshall deadpanned.
The gym very suddenly fell silent.
Jensen stood very still for a second—one second—and then, before anyone could even recognize what was happening, violently shoved Gutshall, one hand on his chest and one in his face, backwards. The chair, and Gutshall's weight, fell to the floor with a reverberating thud.
“Get the (expletive) out of my gym right now, you (profanity), and don't you EVER show your face here again!”
Gutshall made no response, lying quietly on the floor, still, in fact, holding the half-sitting position in which he'd fallen, his bent knees up in the air. That would have been the end of it, except that Jensen's rage was out of control; and before leaving, he kicked at Gutshall's side, hard.
Gutshall would forever be a legend in his own right around that gym for what happened next. He grabbed Jensen's foot as it made contact with his side and violently twisted it forward. Jensen voiced a cut-off scream—pain or rage, who could tell?—as he fell with tremendous force, landing hard on his left shoulder on the stone floor. His collarbone broke with a sharp crack! that every man in the gym heard. Jensen screamed again. Bill Jensen did not know that Trent Gutshall had been taking martial arts lessons for a few years by then, and had shown himself quite competent at the study.
That was the last time Trent Gutshall ever saw Bad Billy Jensen's face. Without another word, he got up and calmly walked out of the gym.
And that was Trent Gutshall: Quiet, reserved, and willing to take a lot of crap before he began to grow annoyed, but not a man you wanted to push across the line. In his business dealings he reflected this personality just as well as in his personal conduct. He was conservative but not too conservative, unafraid to purchase new equipment or hire better employees when he felt reasonably certain he would be improving the Sixth Street Gym in the long run. Though he was anything but a gregarious media personality, Gutshall made it a point to install himself as a fixture in the community, not because he cared for the attention, but because it was good for business. He appeared at every community function, sponsored the prize-winning float in the Broxton Thanksgiving Parade, and even wrote editorials with some regularity for the Broxton Record and Courier, the local newspaper, sometimes concerning his business, but just as often writing about some event that was only notable within Broxton's boundaries.
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