For a boxer, to spar is to learn.
On this night, Roberto Berreles, a 2nd-grade teacher, is in the ring against Dave Kraal, a Golden Gloves tournament champion and pro boxer. Kraal waits while Berreles tightens his black helmet.
“I left my head gear at home,” Kraal says.
“Get one from over there.”
Berreles waves a gloved hand to a corner of Pug’s Gym in Palatine.
“Nah, I won’t need it.” Kraal grins mischievously at Berreles, who nods. He knows he’s not sparring to win, but to practice.
The buzzer sounds. Berreles ducks beneath Kraal’s jabs, his body bobbing, his breaths punctuated by a “sh-sh-sh” sound, like the scolding of a child. Kraal is leaner, taller, his punches more certain. Their bodies lock in a wrestle, then release. Berreles lands a few in Kraal’s side. He takes a few, and the buzzer sounds. Round over.
Breathing hard, they retreat to their corners, faces red, shirts damp.
Gary Dobry, owner of Pug’s, is philosophical about the punishment Berreles takes in the practice ring: “You do it in the gym so when you do it in a fight, it’s nothing new.”
Berreles’ only experience with boxing was in Pug’s ring before he made it to the semi-finals, senior novice division, of this year’s Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament in Chicago. He won his first fight and his second. He left his third with two black eyes, a swollen nose and a loss.
“It’s a scary experience when your goal is to knock him out, and his goal is to knock you out,” says Berreles, 25. “You don’t want to hurt each other, but you’re there to win.”
The soft-spoken grade school teacher does not offer much by way of explanation about why he is pursuing boxing. He began it to stay fit and continues because he likes it, he says simply.
After only a year of training in the gym, he feels stronger and more confident–qualities he carries into his classroom of 7- and 8-year-olds at Perry Elementary School in Carpentersville.
The entire school knows of Berreles’ unusual hobby, he says, especially his 23 bilingual students. He makes it a point not to show up in class with a black eye or bruised face, though he admits he has taught once or twice when his nose was swollen from sparring.
“The kids say: `Why don’t you switch to basketball so you don’t get hurt?’ ” Berreles says.
Though Berreles spends five days a week at weight training, sparring and running, teaching has given him a sense of purpose.
As an underclassman at Northern Illinois University, he volunteered to tutor Latino children. He’d hang out with them and play ball and mentor them academically and personally. His volunteer work satisfied him so deeply, he says, that he switched from an accounting major to education.
“When a kid who had trouble came back and showed me an A on a test, I felt good that I was the one who helped him,” he says. “I could see what I’d done.”
A teacher in the boxing ring is nothing unusual, says Jack Cowen, a franchise holder of the not-for-profit amateur Golden Gloves tournament in Chicago. So many people like Berreles–professionals with an interest in boxing–have joined the tournament that Cowen created the senior novice division especially for them. The division is for adults who’ve had four fights or fewer, an improvement for newcomers over the traditional open division that used to include all adult boxers, regardless of experience level.
“We get schoolteachers, stock brokers, even a jockey from the racetrack, people with only two or three amateur fights. If they signed up for the open division, they might get last year’s champion,” he says. “Chances were that in the old days, they wouldn’t have made it past the first round.”
Berreles’ family has mixed feelings about his boxing. Berreles is a triplet, and his sisters Jeedy and Marisa, who also are teachers, live with their parents in West Dundee. His sisters screamed and cheered during his Golden Gloves bouts, but his mother refused to attend an event where someone was hitting her son, he says.
“They like how it keeps me in shape, but they don’t like it when I come home with a black eye here and there,” he says. “They don’t like it, but I’m willing to compete again.”
