Fight club Fight club Fight club

Armed with an associate’s degree from North Seattle College, Zeke Harmon didn’t know anyone at the University of Washington when he transferred here. Having taken all of his community college classes online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he hadn’t had much of a traditional collegiate experience, either.

Walking through Red Square alone in the early days of his Husky tenure, Harmon came across a table advertising tryouts for the UW’s boxing club. Harmon had never boxed and had no idea the UW even had a boxing team but was nevertheless intrigued.

“I didn’t really have any friends at U-Dub,” he says, taking a break from an intense Thursday night workout with 60 of his Husky peers at Emerald City Boxing Gym on Roosevelt Way Northeast. “I wanted to see where I belong.”

So, Harmon showed up for the start of a four-week boxing boot camp that would separate the wheat from the chaff. The camp was grueling, militaristic—and involved absolutely no boxing. Rather, the camp was all about conditioning and building mental toughness.

Ricardo Acuna, who took over head coaching from UW Boxing founder Christopher Mendez, is now the club’s assistant coach.

“They’re trying to break you,” says former UW boxer Mario Hernandez, a 28-year-old who’s in his first year as the program’s head coach.

Everything about Harmon’s past indicated that he would pack up his gym bag and go home after a couple of days, if not hours. By his own admission, he was a habitual quitter. But despite boot camp being the toughest thing he’d ever done, he persevered to the point where, last winter, he found himself dressed to the nines at the Washington Athletic Club, cheering on his teammates in the ring during UW Boxing’s signature annual event.

“We got to walk in like kings and queens,” Harmon says of attending the tournament, which this year will put male and female boxers from 18 schools—Michigan, The Ohio State and the service academies among them—in a ring before some 300 decked-out WAC members and athletes on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1.

The relationship between UW Boxing and the downtown athletic club was forged by a WAC member, Christopher Mendez, ’08, who boxed as an undergrad at West Point and served as UW Boxing’s head coach until two seasons ago. The passing of the coaching baton—first to Ricardo Acuna, ’19, then to Hernandez—was well-choreographed; Acuna is now an assistant coach and Mendez remains very much involved with a program he helped make a national name for during his decade-plus at the helm.

The WAC has a long history of hosting collegiate bouts, and before he helped get the UW’s program off the ground in the early aughts, Mendez would attend as a spectator. Boxing is a club sport at the UW, receiving a modest $1,000 annual allocation from the university. Hence, the boxing club must raise its own funds, and the WAC, with its well-heeled membership, plays a profound role in that endeavor.

Just as important to Mendez, however, is pairing pugilists with WAC mentors who might help them along a career path outside of the ring. This, too, has paid dividends: Mendez carries with him a sheet showcasing the ample career accomplishments of UW Boxing alums, and the club requires its participants to maintain at least a 3.0 grade point average.

“We’re not just a bunch of dumb boxers,” says Mendez, who greets people he knows with hugs.

This emphasis on education extends to the coaching ranks as well. Acuna grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, before immigrating to the United States, and he fought professionally as a younger man. After a few years of extolling the virtues of education to his UW pupils, Acuna says he “felt like kind of a hypocrite” because he hadn’t gone to college.

In 2019, Acuna graduated from the UW with a communication degree, nobody’s idea of a dumb boxer.