Rockin' in Reading at King's Gym

A lot of exciting stuff has been happening lately at Jesse Harris’ JBA Boxing Gym where life, like boxing, is ever unpredictable. I have to take responsibility for some of that unpredictability—it was me who got us lost on the way to King’s Gym in Reading.

We were supposed to bring heavyweight professional boxer Jamil McKay down there with us to spar with former world heavyweight champ Hasim Rahman who’s on a march back to another title shot. Some misunderstood communications resulted in just the three of us: Jesse Harris, RJ Sockwell, and me.

With Jesse Harris weaving in and out of traffic fielding dozens of telephone calls, one eye on a road and the other on a movie we were watching, I realized that Jesse must have been the original progenitor of Attention Deficit Disorder.

After touring the Reading suburbs for about two hours and about 500 miles of Rte 222, and watching a movie called “Black Snake Moan” we arrived just in time to shake hands with Hasim Rahman who was leaving. Rahman was huge and reminded me of the Rock of Gibralter. His two professional boxers and sparring partners were names I’d heard: Dayton Wheeler and Maurice Harris. If Rahman was the Rock, these other guys were at least Battleships in the Surrounding Waters. I was so pissed we’d arrived too late to see this Battle of the Titans but I worried for RJ. His work was ahead of him. Without sleep, without food or water, and with a great deal of freeway miles laid unnecessarily on his head, he had to spar with the young pros stalking the gym.

Wheeler and Harris were kind enough to let me photograph them. They were real gentlemen and recognized me straight off as the village idiot. We'll have more about them when I get enough time to put up their pictures and bios. It’s been a hard day’s night. Check out Round One and RJ Sockwell rockin’ with Bobby Heath of King’s Gym in Reading.