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JOEL DIAZ STANDS on the ring apron while there’s chaos all around him. In two rings beside each other, there are two fights going on at the same time. Instructions are yelled in four languages; English, Spanish, Uzbek and Russian. And if all that weren’t enough, there’s always someone calling his phone.
He’s on the main ring, next to the banner with his logo on it, a gamecock wearing boxing gloves, circled by the gym’s name: Joel Diaz Training Camp. The gym is located in California’s Coachella Valley, in the desert town of Indio, roughly 120 miles away from Los Angeles.
As the fists and shoulders of fighters brush by him, it looks as if their violence might spill over. He simply moves, resets and continues yelling.
“Jab! Jab!”
He stands, sometimes with his hands on the top rope and other times holding them behind his back. If he weren’t watching men fight, he’d look like an appraiser examining a piece of art. Despite having diminished vision, he sees everything, his single functioning eye darting in every direction.
He was just 23 years old when boxing took it from him. With his right eye gone, so too went his dreams. To make the hurt worse, he was one round short of qualifying for California’s boxer pension. In the nearly two years that followed, Diaz walked through nihilism’s dark desert as a man angry at God.
“Things happened for a reason,” he says. His gravelly voice, built for teaching people how to fight, makes you wonder whether he has found peace at 50 years old, or whether he’s too busy to give much thought to what he lost more than a half-life ago. While still yelling instructions, Diaz is organizing who’ll fight next. He’s showing fighters how to pivot their feet to maximize their leverage. He’s wrapping hands and tying gloves. He’s looking at a boxer’s pinkie to see how badly it’s hurt.
“Let me go grab my gun,” he says, “I’ll shoot that thing off.”
The boxer with the hurt pinkie laughs.
Diaz shouts between sneaking looks at two clocks. One to keep track of…
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