“It’s more than just a boxing club” - Mick Rowe’s journey from a lock-up garage to his state-of-the-art boxing and fitness club in Halifax

Rowe is the beating heart of Halifax Boxing Sports and Fitness Club, which has expanded from a lock-up garage to a sprawling, state-of-the-art facility at Ladyship Mills over the past 20 years.

Rowe was born and bred in Illingworth, and is passionate about improving the lives of people in north Halifax.

Through hard-work, determination and sheer bloodymindedness, Rowe has created one of Yorkshire’s largest independently run non-for-profit boxing, sport and fitness facilities.

“I did karate for about 25 years, but that club was dwindling down so I started looking at other clubs,” Rowe says.

“I couldn’t find a decent club to train at, and I was already sparring with boxers, when a lock-up came up for sale on Old Lane, in 2000.

“It was about £25 a week, I put a makeshift ring inside, a few punch-bags. I was still working full-time at Marshalls, and in the first weekend there were about 10 or 15 kids there, asking for pad work.

“It was too hard to do karate in there, it wasn’t big enough, so we started doing pads and bag work.

“I quickly realised there was no boxing club in Halifax, the Star club was sort of coming and going.

“We started training them, the boys started doing well and they started looking for a pathway.

“So I started looking into amateur boxing, the Star club, affiliations, and I quickly started learning and got affiliated to England Boxing.

“But the club wasn’t suitable as a venue, so we moved next door in 2004, while I was still working full-time and supporting the club.

“There was a room next door twice as big, about £675 a month.

“At the time I’d just met my wife and we decided to put an extension on our house, so I nicked a few thousand pounds out of the extension money and built a brand new ring, decorated it, carpeted it, put pictures up, new bags up.

“Then we invited England Boxing over to have a look, and they passed us with flying colours, and said it was one of the best clubs they’d seen.

“We were then able to get the boxers out boxing. I’m a quick learner but it was difficult, I was learning as we were going along.

“I remember taking bus-loads of people to watch boxing, across to Leeds or wherever.

“I was very nervous because I didn’t know if I was any good at it. I was putting these guys in the ring and I didn’t know whether they were going to be any good.

“But they started winning, a lot. I think the first or second year we started we got our first national champion, Scott Gladwyn.

“He won all the Yorkshire regionals and went on to the nationals, boxed in Bethnal Green at York Hall.

“I drove Scott down in my mother-in-law’s car, we slept overnight, went to York Hall. Even now it seems like a daze, and he won the national championships.

“Then we drove all the way back. Unbelievable.

“From then it’s just been a success story.

“But there was no parking outside that club, and it was getting so busy that Old Lane was just full of cars from one end to the other.

“One of my many jobs was that I used to sweep the road so it looked nice outside, and the landlord on the other side of the road had a tenant that had just moved out of a massive hall, which was £1,200 a month.

“It had a car park, it was safer, I thought, with a lot of work, we could turn it into a really good boxing gym.

“My wife and everybody on the committee were saying ‘you’re crazy, you’re mad,l it’s going to cost a lot of money’ where are you going to get the money from?’

“I worked out if I did overtime I could pay for it, and that weekend we moved in, in 2007.

“We’ve turned it into one of the best gyms in Yorkshire, if not England. It’s a state-of-the-art boxing club.

“Our sponsorship from Yorkshire Timber has been a massive help too. Without their sponsorship of local clubs it would be impossible to survive.”And so has the dedication of our volunteer coaches Jonny Maude, Damo MacCallum and Scott Butler.

“We’ve expanded the building, made a massive gymnasium, to help the boxers develop but also to bring more finances in to support the boxing.

“The boxing does a lot of work in the community with schools, young people struggling with mental health, but it was never designed to be financially sustainable.

“So I’ve had to look at other ways to make the boxing club survive. So we do boxing shows, music events, charity events and the gym is now getting really busy, there’s about 300 members.”

Rowe has worked with hundreds of boxers over the years, six of whom have turned professional.

Rowe was a black belt at Shotokan karate, training under Les Charlesworth for 23 years, and fighting all over the country.  

“I decided to open the boxing club up to everybody, of all abilities, so you didn’t have to spar, you didn’t have to become a boxer, but you could do running, exercise,” Rowe says.”The discipline was there but you didn’t have to compete at any level.

“The customer base is what pays for the club, it’s much bigger than the boxing side.

“We have 30 competing boxers, but there’s 300 members, and they help support the club financially.

“All the boxing I’ve learned over the years is what I’ve watched, Googled and observed.

“I started learning about movement, feet work and balance.

“I was a good learner, I learned what was wrong and what was right, how to treat people, and that attracted more customers.

“A good coach will attract people, a bad coach will drive them away.

“We don’t let people get away with things, we don’t like smoking, we don’t like drugs, we don’t like eating bad, we don’t like drinking alcohol too much.

“We put that across to everybody, and it must work because they keep coming back.

“Some of the boxers have been with me since they were nine-years-old, and now they’re in their twenties.”

Rowe’s tireless efforts have been recognised with being named Halifax Courier Sports Club of the Year and the Ovenden Initiative’s Sports Club of the Year.

“One minute I’ve been painting a floor, which has taken me the best part of a day, and then I’ve had to go home and fill a form in, and learn how to fill forms in, to apply for funding,” he says of his early days at the club.

“Then get turned down because I’ve filled it in wrong. Then I’ve got to get changed into my gym kit and travel to Doncaster because one of our lads is boxing there.

“I like my holidays, if I get chance to go away, and when I do I have to get eight people to do my job.

“It’s more than just a boxing club. It’s open seven days a week and it’s so busy.”

When Rowe says it’s more than just a boxing club, he’s not wrong. And Rowe is so much more than just a boxing trainer.

“There’s a lot of mental health groups about, doing really well, getting a lot of funding. A lot of them want to be involved with the boxing club,” he says. “We’ve been doing that for 20-odd years, but we don’t advertise it.

“The boxers win a fight, the story goes in the Courier and that highlights the work we do.

“But the hundreds of other people that come - there’s people with disabilities, with autism, their wives have left them, they’re drinking too much, they’re overweight.

“I sit down with them talk to them and try to give them some sort of pathway to say ‘look, come to the club, don’t worry about money, I’ll do a few private sessions with you’.

“It can be physically and mentally draining. We do a lot more than just boxing.

“We’ve had schools with us, youth offending teams, Project Challenge, the Basement Project, the list is endless.

“The stuff we do with them and how successful we are with them is just unbelievable. It’s amazing.

“We’ll do a class with maybe 25, 28 adults, and there’ll be seven or eight of them that have been coming for a long time, but originally came because of mental health problems.

“We’ll start off with a phone call, then a visit, we’ll walk round and have a chit-chat, we’ll show them a bit of exercise, a bit of pad work to make them feel good.

“I do come across as tough when I’m in sessions with them. We don’t take any rubbish off them, so they do look up to you.

“I call it ‘the hook’, if you get the hook into them, same with the young kids and the parents who bring them.

“We have a motto at the club ‘fitness wins’.

“That’s what we like to get across to people. If you’re fit, and you get divorced, you’re going to be alright.

“If you lose your job and you’re fit, you’re going to be alright, you can go out for a run and get moving.

“If you’ve got mental health problems, go for a run. We try to get that message out there to people, fitness is one of the key things that will get you through any situation.

“I know because I’ve been there myself.”

If Rowe is the driving force behind the club, the wife Lyn is the driving force behind Rowe.

They have been married 15 years and have a son Mikey, 13, who trains at the club.

“We never knew it was going to be like this,” he says. “I was working full-time at Marshall’s on a really good wage, I’d just met her, and then I bought the lock-up.

“When she looked at the lock-up she went ‘what are you doing?’ but it was only £25 a week so she was quite happy for me to train three nights a week.

“The second gym for £675 a month, when you walked into it, it was a disgrace. the building was falling down, the windows weren’t there. She looked at it with a tear in her eye and said ‘you must be crazy, what are you doing?’

“I said ‘well I could do a bit of overtime, I can put £200 in’.

“She knows what I’m like. When I first moved in I was there all day painting, decorating, cleaning. We got a lot of work done in that first day or two.

“And she came down to have a look and there was a little glint in her eye to say ‘mmmm, that’s better’.

“I’ve got a picture in the club now of me in-front of a brand new ring that’d just been built. She took the picture and then looked over the camera and went ‘where’s that ring come from?’

“And then I had to tell her that I’d nicked £3,000 out of the extension money.

“It always brings a smile to my face when I look at it.”

Rowe says the extension did get built in the end.

“I’ve put my endowment policy into it, I’ve put my redundancy money into it, my pension money,” he says of the club.

“It’ll be thousands and thousands of pounds. What’s hard is the hours you put in.

“So I’ve supported it a great deal, but what’s supported me is my wife.”

Rowe is so passionate about the people he comes into contact with at the club because he can identify with them.

Often, he’ll have been in their shoes, and can empathise with their problems.

“When I started in the lock-up I was training my nephew, then we started getting kids coming in, knocking on the door asking to do pad work,” he says.

“I thought ‘there’s nothing for them to do, nowhere for them to go’.

“The youth clubs in the area were pretty rubbish, the kids were just doing whatever they wanted, so we started giving them a little bit of an education about what we’ve been through.

“I was exactly the same on Illingworth Gardens, obviously it was a lot rougher in my day, a lot harder, a lot less to do.

“I remember my mum getting me into a karate club when I was 11 and that was the difference, that’s what made me different.

“While my mates were all out playing and doing stuff they shouldn’t have been, I was going to karate three times a week, and that was keeping me on the straight and narrow.

“I’ve had so much stuff go wrong in my life. I’ve been in prison, I’ve been in fights in town. The only thing that’s kept me going and kept me out of alcohol and drugs, and eventually violence, was the discipline of training and exercising.”

Rowe says his motivation is simply “to make the place better for the kids”.

“It’s great to see their faces when we go to other boxing clubs and they say ‘wow, ours is better than this’,” he says.

“I wanted it to be the best. We got £100,000 off Sport England the other year and then got match funding, which paid for new toilets and showers.

“The club is brilliant, which is why we host three or four shows a year through the Yorkshire Amateur Boxing Association (YABA).

“I love showing people the gym. They’ll say ‘we didn’t know it was here’ but when they look round they go ‘wow, this is something else’.

“Whatever happens, we’ve done our best.”

The club has produced four national champions and around 40 Yorkshire champions at junior and senior level.

Among Rowe’s proudest achievements is becoming chairman of the YABA, despite never having boxed in his life - “Calzaghe’s dad wasn’t a boxer either!”  

Coronavirus restrictions mean no boxing or sparring can take place at the club, but Rowe is hoping things return to normal sooner rather than later, and that he can get back to what he loves doing.

“In 2009 I took redundancy at work and started working full-time at the club, doing all the sessions myself,” he says.

“I’m still only paid minimum wage by the club. I do 15 hours a day, seven days a week.

“If the boxing season was open I’d be travelling all over the country.

“I’m 58-years-old now and I’m getting a bit tired. Every year I get more tired.

“I’m working on building some apprenticeships and employing some young people to take over the jobs I do, which will hopefully take some weight off my shoulders and then I can go back to focusing on the boxing, which is what I really want

to do.

“I started teaching you people boxing but now I’m running a business, which has taken me away from the boxing.

“So I’m getting help to give me time to get back to the boxing, because that’s very intense.

“Some of the boxers have turned professional and they’re doing really well, but I have to let them go because I don’t have time to spend with them, the four or five days training a week they need.

“So the future is that I get help, and then I can keep the amateur side but keep some of the professionals as well.”