Diaz Boxing Club opens on South Main St. as dream come true for Ryan & Amanda

It was a dream deferred, but to the beautiful dreamers, the new Diaz Boxing Club on South Main Street in Port Chester was well worth waiting for—and dreaming about.

For one of the founders, Ryan Diaz, it meant jumping out of airplanes for years as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles as an infantryman trying to save up the money to help start his own boxing club someday because "boxing was and still is the only sport that I live and breathe."

For his co-founder and partner in life as well as in the club, Port Chester native Amanda Mickatavage sublimated her love for theatre and the arts to save money by working as a SoulCycle manager in Rye Brook.

For them both, starting the local boxing club together was the next natural step in building their relationship—especially since their daughter Charlee, now five weeks old, is also part of their lives.

Role boxing plays

"Boxing has been a part of my life from as early as I can remember," Diaz said during the club’s grand opening last Sunday, Mar. 1 at 141 South Main St., across the street from Auto Zone and sandwiched between a Peruvian restaurant and an electronics factory. "Growing up, my father and I would watch all the fights. And I found myself studying every little dynamic of boxing. It was and still is the only sport I live and breathe with heavyweight great Mike Tyson my favorite of all time."

But when you mention Tyson, you think of Cus D'Amato, his trainer as well as one of the great boxing trainers of all time, who brought along other great trainers such as Teddy Atlas and Kenny Weldon. Just as when you think of the great Manny Pacquaio, you think of his trainer Freddie Roach and when you look into Floyd Mayweather Jr,’s family tree, you see three great pros came from the Mayweather clan. Even with the legendary movie heavyweight champ Rocky Balboa, the Italian stallion played by Sylvester Stallone, his film trainer, the no-nonsense Mickey Goldmill played so memorably by Burgess Meredith looms in the background.

Tyson, Pacquaio, Mayweather, Rocky and the Mick (Goldmill) are all part of the decor at the sparingly new Diaz Boxing Club.

Pro in the Carolinas

Diaz is almost as familiar with the techniques of each of those boxers and their trainers as he is with himself.

Especially after his brief time spent in the ring as a pro light heavyweight in North Carolina.

"After my time serving in the U.S. Army, I began coaching boxing here in Westchester at multiple boxing clubs working with a number of local pros and picking up many great tactics along the way," he recalled. "But none of those boxing clubs quite felt like home. Which is why I wanted to start my own club."

He met Mickatavage and started talking about those boxing dreams. She shared them.

"My great grandfather, Joseph Maranco, used to coach boxing at the Don Bosco Center right around the corner from where our club is now. So somehow it seemed fated that we get together after one of my friends from Port Chester High School, Maria Martinez, introduced us. I used to spend most of my time working in theatre and the arts in high school, and that came in handy when we thought about decorating the boxing club once we found the site," Amanda recalled, thinking back to her days at the high school circa 2010.

Time at SoulCycle

She drifted away from her artistry when she began working as a manager for SoulCycle in the Rye Ridge Shopping Center. But that enabled her to save some money.

By then she and Ryan had started dating and were an item. And Ryan started looking for the right space to start the club in Port Chester.

That was around two years ago.

"When Ryan found this space, I was eight months pregnant with our daughter Charlee. While we had been planning to open a space of our own, I thought the timing was a little chaotic," Mickatavage remembered. "But we loved the location. Port Chester has such a hometown feel to it. Ryan, who has lived a little bit of everywhere before coming here, loved the tight-knit community. And serendipitously, the location was right around the corner from where my great grandfather used to teach boxing. It just seemed right. The right time. The right place.

"Preparing for a baby and opening a business has been quite the adventure, but knowing that we are creating something special for the community and something to leave behind for our children makes it all worthwhile."

Sign of times

That something special involves a large black awning advertising the Diaz Boxing Club in white letters in front of a large room that breaks down into a small gym with a heavy boxing bag, a light boxing bag, a mini-boxing ring, a TV screening boxing bouts and lots of decorative art with inscriptions from boxing legends ranging from Tyson ("Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face") to motivational tools ("The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy") to Rockyisms about picking yourself up when you are down because the world can be a mean place where it isn't always sunshine and rainbows.

The words and pictures were painted by Mickatavage while pregnant as well as while carrying baby Charlee papoose style. Fleshing out those words are what Diaz does.

As they talked, there was a lot going around them, from two young girls punching away at one another in the mini-ring, their tiny hands all but blanketed by boxing gloves, while two lovely Latinas, grandmother and mother, gazed warily at the punching bags while their teenaged granddaughter/daughter looked as though she couldn't wait to start whaling away at the boxing bags.

Home away from home

Ryan and his brother Michael were talking about how they wanted to teach the boxing basics to would-be learners, from the rhythm that goes into a glide one leg at a time, almost like a dance step, to how to throw combinations off the jab. Not with the idea of building a potential boxing champion, but of teaching a boxing aspirant the art of boxing in a choreographed setting.

"We want to create a home away from home at our boxing club, a perfect place to come to hang out, destress, learn, let loose and have some fun," Amanda said with Ryan voicing the same sentiments.

The cost of memberships and lessons vary, depending on the time and duration, with discounted packages available. Both partners want to make the club a vital community asset.

Port Chester hasn't had a boxer of note since Bryant (Peewee) Cruz finished second in the national Golden Gloves lightweight division and had a brief fling as a pro a few seasons ago. But pro or no, Amanda and Ryan think their boxing club could be a lot of fun as well as a learning lab for the ABCs of the sport with how far you go up to you because they feel they are capable of unlocking the true potential that may be locked within.

For further information: www.diazboxingclub.com, [email protected], phone: 914: 214-7070.