MIKE GROSS | Sports Writer
The time Barry Stumpf likes best is as 9 p.m. nears most weeknights, meaning the evening at his boxing/boys club in Lancaster is drawing to an end.
“They’re all hanging around, having fun, snapping each other in the butt with a towel,” Stumpf said last week of the athletes in his care.
“This is a successful day. This is better than boxing. I got 15 kids off the street. Nobody got shot. They’re all in school. They’re all doing something. What (more) can I ask for?’’
Stumpf will be inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame the night of Oct. 15, at a dinner in Philadelphia. It will be, he reckons, his fifth or sixth hall of fame honor from various boxing associations or sanctioning bodies.
“This one matters to me because it’s local,’’ Stumpf said in his spectacularly cluttered office Wednesday.
“Joe Frazier’s in it. Bernard Hopkins. All the big names.”
Stumpf has been USA Boxing’s Coach of the Year four times, been part of U.S. Olympic coaching staffs five times, and trained boxers that won more than 50 Open-Class Golden Gloves titles, 15 National Golden Gloves title and 30 National Golden Gloves team titles.
But perhaps his greatest achievement is keeping the city’s Finefrock & Stumpf Golden Gloves Center open since 1974, using a brutal sport to provide a safe haven for generations of Lancaster city boys.
He says F&S is the only legally nonprofit gym in the area. Roughly 60 kids come through the place in a typical week, ages 8 to young adult.
“The fathers (of members) I have, they’re on top of their kids, but I would say 12 out of 15 of them have no idea where their dad’s at,’’ Stumpf said. “I have two autistic kids right now. I have kids who are so disappointed their dad’s not around that they take the name of their mom’s boyfriend, won’t even go by their family identity. It’s a struggle.’’
Dues are $60 a month, he says, “if you have it.’’
If you don’t have it, dues vary — down to $0.
“I just want to pay the rent,’’ he said of the third-floor space in a mixed-use building on Liberty Street in Lancaster city. “I got four good coaches now. Everybody’s on the same page.”
Stumpf was a tool-and-die maker for Federal Mogul in Lancaster until the early 1990s. Then he had a serious skin cancer scare. After surviving that, he says he told Federal Mogul, “ ‘I’m out.’ I didn’t know what was left on the clock, and it messed up my pension and things, but I truly believe I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Since then, with the exception of odd jobs, he’s run the gym and coached his sport full-time. He’s 76.
He has benefactors, like a local auto detailer who provided the van Stumpf uses to haul kids around, and a doctor friend who’s thrown in $1,000 so all the kids at the gym will be able to go to Philly for the dinner.
“A few of them, I have to work with their probation officer to take them out of town,’’ Stumpf said.
At his daughter’s urging, he’s digging up a suit and dress shoes to wear for Sunday's festivities.
And he grumbled at the thought of making an acceptance speech, but then admitted, “I’ve got to thank Philadelphia.”
