Here’s how ‘hitting people’ and this Fort Worth boxing program changes kids’ lives

Sounds from the rhythmic pounding of leather boxing gloves mix with pulsing music in the Diamond Hill boxing gym.

Gilbert Magallon commands 10 young boxers in their work with punching bags. “Go,” he yells. Gloves smash against the 10 suspended bags in unison, and the noise takes over the gym.

A few feet away, in the boxing ring, coaches with padded mitts put their hands out as the boxers connect with an array of punches and dodge swipes from their coaches.

Magallon has run the boxing program for over two decades in the Diamond Hill Community Center. His goal today is the same as when he started: teach children discipline and keep them off the streets.

“I want to just keep them off drugs, alcohol and the gangs,” Magallon said.

Twenty percent of the people in Diamond Hill live below the poverty line, according to the census. The median household income is $51,972, nearly $16,000 below the median household income for the city as a whole, according to the city of Fort Worth. Eighty-one percent of the people in Daimond Hill and the surrounding area are Hispanic.

Diamond Hill is a ‘hidden gem’ of Fort Worth

Raul Meza III, coordinator of the Diamond Hill Community Center, describes the area as a hidden gem in Fort Worth.

The 25,000-square-foot community center was revitalized through a project funded by a 2018 bond program. It reopened Nov. 4 with additions such as a new 20-by-20-foot boxing ring, fitness area, gym floor, dance room, kitchen, game room and computer lab.

The new center can accommodate a variety of interests and is accessible to anyone from children through the neighborhood’s more senior residents, Meza said.

The boxing program has been an important feature of the Diamond Hill Community Center for decades. The program started in 1992 with a boxing ring taking up half of the the basketball court, before a grant allowed for the expansion of a boxing gym in the center in 1998.

Coach sees role as giving back to the community

Magallon, 72, grew up on the city’s north side and remembers how Main Street was a dividing line in the 1950s, with mainly white people to the west and Hispanic people to the east.

When he was 15 years old, a neighbor took him to the Golden Gloves boxing gym, which was on the east side of Main Street at the time, and taught him to box. Magallon boxed for a few years and then decided to give back to the community by teaching young people to box.

The program is open for children as young as 8 years old through adults and costs $20 a month.

Finding sponsors and community support are crucial - and sometimes represent a struggle - to help boxers travel out of town and out of state for tournaments, Magallon said.

“I went bankrupt one time when I was younger, when I first started,” he said. “ I started using my credit card every time we went to the hotel or somewhere. Next thing I knew my credit card [debt] was $80,000.”

Boxing represents a ‘safe place’ amid challenges

Crystal Bonilla travels with her daughter Yariela from Keller to Diamond Hill for boxing practice. Bonilla grew up in the Diamond Hill area.

She came from a boxing family, and her brother went to the community center in the early 2000s to learn to box. She remembers how Diamond Hill was rougher then with crime and gangs and kids needing to leave unstable homes. The boxing program represented a safe place away from those challenges, she said.

“I feel like this helped a lot of kids to get away from that and have somewhere to call home,” Bonilla said “Their home wasn’t a home.”

Bonilla has three kids who have gone through the boxing program. It provided discipline and structure, she said.

She helps where she can as the only woman assistant coach in the program. She tapes boxers hands and gloves, drives people to and from practice, helps pay for memberships and provides moral support.

Yariela, 11, has been boxing since she was 7 years old, but, at 3 she hit the punching bag while her older sister trained. Her mother has seen her competitiveness and discipline flourish as she has grown more comfortable boxing and competing in tournaments.

Yariela said she likes how boxing makes her feel.

“When there’s problems, it can clear my mind and all my anger goes away,” Yariela said.

Championship dreams

Angeles Ibarra, 10, participates in the program and sees boxing in her future.

What does she love about boxing?

“Hitting people,” she said. “It just gets my anger out when I’m mad.”

She started boxing when she was 5 and dreams of being the No. 1 girl in her weight class. She said she wants to have a championship belt like famous boxers such as Julio César Chávez, Canelo Álvarez and Muhammad Ali.

Her mother Jessica Bautista grew up in Diamond Hill and was discouraged from boxing by her parents. She loved to fight and got in trouble in school, she said, because it didn’t have the structure of the boxing program to keep her focused.

Now, seeing her daughter box, she wonders what her life would have been like if she had a program like that after school to show her discipline.

“In boxing, everything’s coordinated,” Jessica said. “You have to be able to put one, two, three and four punches together, and you have to coordinate that in life.”

Sebastian Vazquez, 19, grew up around boxers and started boxing in ninth grade.

Vasquez lives in Keene but comes to Diamond Hill because of the close relationship his father has with Magallon.

He said he’s attracted to boxing because he can see his hard work - running three miles a day, the grind of preparing for an opponent - pay off.

The boxing program has been critical to Vasquez’s development, and he said he wants others to support the program as well.

“You take the kids off the streets. Then the community has a brighter future,” Vasquez says. “The kids have discipline. That means when they become adults, they will know how to discipline the kids. So once they know how to discipline the kids, the community starts getting better, and the city starts getting better.”