By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Oregon photographer Jim Lommasson thought "this was meant to be."
How else to explain traveling from Philadelphia, stopping in Detroit to shoot trainer Emanuel Steward at Kronk Boxing Gym and meeting an Ann Arbor dentist who steered him to another stop as he went west toward Chicago?
Maryann, the dentist, even put Lommasson in touch with her brother, Larry Seurynck, who founded Dowagiac Boxing Club with Muhammad Ali's old 22-foot ring and in July 2003 opened an Italian restaurant, Wood Fire.
What was meant to be now is and it will knock you out.
Two Lommasson pictures which accompanied Sports Editor Scott Novak's story in the Daily News made the book - the view of "Muhammad's Alley" and Mike Kasper at the top of the boxing club stairs downtown before it evolved into the Police Athletic League (PAL) and moved to the community center the city created with Lincoln School.
Seurynck's essay, a snapshot preserving a particular moment in Dowagiac when it possessed the sort of boxing gym found almost exclusively in big cities, subtly reinforces the words of another, "Save the Tiger" by Joe Rein of Los Angeles:
Seurynck dissects Dowagiac's dichotomy of being a "bustling small town" and a "nice place," yet beset by "its share of big-city problems - poverty, drugs, limited opportunities for youth."
A boxing club extended a "lifeline, one of the few safe places in their lives, a place to find an adult who cares."
His relationship with Ali and his wife Lonnie and the proximity of their Berrien Springs home to Dowagiac leads to the Greatest's old ring being loaded onto a boat trailer and hauled here to be set up on the second floor of a former dance studio.
Hopes for 20 kids mushroomed into more than 200 within 12 months. Membership dues included community service - kids sweeping sidewalks, pulling weeds, cutting grass and visiting nursing homes.
Seurynck's essay, "Praise Ali," shares space with the writing of some of the biggest names in boxing, including Mark Kram Jr. of the Philadelphia Daily News, whose work has appeared three times in "The Best American Sports Writing"; Katherine Dunn, author of "Geek Love," a 1989 National Book Award finalist, whose writing on the sport has been published in Playboy, Mother Jones, Esquire, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Sports Illustrated for Women; Kate Sekules, who wrote a book with Marion Jones; Lucius Shepard, who writes about boxing for CNN/Sports Illustrated; Ralph Wiley, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and a commentator on ESPN's SportsCenter before his 2004 death; and Bert Randolph Sugar, former editor of The Ring and Boxing Illustrated, author of more than 50 books and named the "Greatest Boxing Writer of All Time" by the International Veteran Boxers Association.
Seurynck even initiated a meeting between Ali and Lommasson. "I thought to myself, 'I'm sitting in Muhammad Ali's house and he's doing magic tricks just for us.' " Lommasson also shared with Ali a spiral binder of photos already taken and informed the legend that there was a chapter about him.
The following morning Lammasson, whose father was an amateur fighter, questioned his wife to make sure he hadn't dreamed the meeting. Cindy assured him it happened.
Former world heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, a gold medalist at the 1964 Olympic games and a member of the Boxing Hall of Fame, ought to know.
The book makes the point that local boxing clubs are often the safest place in tough neighborhoods, a refuge where kids and young adults are drawn to pugilism by violence in their own lives.
There they learn to channel aggressive impulses in an environment that stresses discipline, hard work and respect for authority. In communities too often divided by race and ethnicity, they are remarkably democratic places where a boxer's skill and "heart" easily overshadow any consideration of color, nationality or gender.
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