ADELINO DA COSTA peered above his red leather boxing gloves and locked eyes with his opponent.
Their knees bent, their bodies at an angle, the two men dodged, ducked, jabbed and wove within a 20-foot-by-20-foot red carpeted ring raised above a polished concrete floor marked with yellow and orange stripes.Releasing his right elbow like a spring, Mr. Da Costa shot a fist forward, straight and swift. Gloves collided, producing a sound like a drum punctuating the music of Tabanka Djaz, a band from Mr. Da Costa’s native Guinea-Bissau, in West Africa. The music blasted through the subterranean boxing gym on Madison Avenue near 78th Street, just steps from where afternoon tea was being served in delicate bone china cups at the Carlyle Hotel.
As an uppercut shot past his head and into thin air, Mr. Da Costa raised his arm to signal a halt to the sparring and embraced his opponent, a boxing student who had paid $145 an hour to hone his skills in this netherworld. As the student removed his face guard and shook his head with discouragement, Mr. Da Costa smiled.“Make mistakes,” he whispered, “but make them with confidence.”
It was 6 p.m. on a recent Wednesday at Punch Fitness Center, the gym established a year ago by Mr. Da Costa, a former Portuguese national kickboxing champion who is 30 and now lives on the Upper West Side. Seven clients — lawyers, hedge fund managers and a model — were practicing fancy footwork; at other times during the day, the brightly striped gray floor would be filled with 4-year-olds, octogenarians, young mothers and tattooed professional fighters.
The neophytes winced as the trainers instructed them to squat and stay put while their hands were wrapped in long cotton bands and then eased into thickly padded, mitten-shaped boxing gloves, preparing them to take aim at more than 20 punching bags of various kinds, four mean-faced mannequins and the trainers themselves.
Aquilino Delgado, one of the gym’s 11 trainers, urged a woman in her 20s with glutes as firm and round as unripe cantaloupes to loosen up and move with the beat of the music. “Pow! Pow!” Mr. Delgado grinned and jabbed. “Salsa boxing!”
“Oh,” she said, laughing. “That’s my favorite kind!”
It has taken a year, but the people above ground are slowly discovering what is going on one story beneath the street. Little did they realize as they shopped for $975 chinchilla ascots at Parker or $2,300 cocktail suits at Luca Luca, two high-end boutiques next to the gym’s entrance, that sweat was flying beneath their elegantly shod feet.Mr. Da Costa, who discovered his gift and passion for boxing as a child in Portugal and went on to twice become that country’s middleweight kickboxing champion, has a reputation and a following. In the world of professional boxers, word traveled fast that Punch was a place to come to train for a big match. But for the uninitiated, the only clues were two boxing gloves, one red, one yellow, above a recessed doorway at street level in a five-story office building.
In the gym’s early days, Mr. Da Costa occasionally emerged to invite homeward-bound moguls to stop by for a visit. For the most part, they politely rejected his offer: Thanks, Rasta Man, another time. But eventually, with dreams of Sugar Ray dancing in their heads, a few dared to descend those stairs.
Now barely a year old, the gym is a thriving business that recently doubled its space to 3,000 square feet and added 15 pieces of punching equipment, a massage room, space for group training and the new regulation ring for training professional mixed martial arts fighters.Yet despite its owner’s panache, Punch is not to everyone’s taste.
“That chichi place?” said Lou DiBella, president of DiBella Entertainment, a leading boxing promoter. “You won’t find me there. I promote world champs. Punch isn’t my kind of gym. Rich kids don’t box. They play tennis. Poor kids fight.”