John Golomb's worldwide production headquarters are on the fourth floor of a
factory that once produced paper clips, in an industrial corner of the South
Bronx known as Port Morris, a drab amalgam of warehouses and production plants
and truck-rental companies marooned on the far side of the Bruckner
Expressway.
At the moment, Golomb has a grand total of four employees, one of whom is his
wife, Barbara. They occupy three rooms and a couple of long hallways strewn
with boxes and jagged metal parts and towering rolls of cardboard. They share
the floor with a company that manufactures supports for wedding dresses.
It is easy to cling to nostalgia in a place like this, even easier if
you traffic in nostalgia, like John Golomb; half of his business, known as The
Sports Doctor, is targeted squarely at people who cannot let go of their past.
They send him their baseball mitts, dog-eared and torn, the stuffing leaking
out of the leather, and Golomb restores them and mails them back, good as new.
If this isn't sufficient, he'll sell them replica gloves, unwieldy models of
the precise kind that, say, Gehrig used to catch Tony Lazzeri's throws from
second base.
But it is the other half of his business that makes John Golomb wonder
sometimes if he is rooted too deeply in his own past. This half of his company
is called Legacy Boxing, and it is a relatively new operation, launched in
2003, with the first products just beginning to roll off what is essentially a
two-person assembly line, in a room lined with generations-old Singer sewing
machines.
Legacy makes boxing gloves, headgear, focus mitts, striking bags and pro cups;
it is some of the only American-manufactured boxing equipment you will find
anywhere these days. But Legacy also is a needle in a haystack, a tiny
start-up nipping at the heels of established equipment-makers such as, oh,
say, Everlast, a company with which John Golomb has a certain intimate
familiarity.
In other words, Legacy is what is known in the boxing world as an underdog.
And John Golomb would like to think that Legacy is the embodiment of all those
feel-good Made-in-America concepts that, in a modern business climate dictated
by stock prices and earning statements and cheap overseas labor and Wal-Mart-sized
monoliths, seem to have little relevance.
"My idea is to preserve the craft here in this country," Golomb
said, sitting in his office, itself a paean to Depression-era Americana, with
a Superman poster on the wall and a Joe Jackson-model mitt lying on a work
table in front of him. "I have a real problem understanding why new
materials can be shipped to China, assembled and sent back here for cheaper
than it can be done here."
Lower East Side, and beyond
In truth, this is a story about loss, and what comes of it. And in truth,
there is nothing much that is new about Legacy Boxing except the name. This
has always been the family business, ever since Jacob Golomb, John's
grandfather, began selling boxing equipment on the Lower East Side, ever since
he began designing for Jack Dempsey, and the boxing and sporting equipment
conglomerate known as Everlast was born.
That company was passed on from Jacob Golomb to Danny Golomb, John's father,
who eventually took on a partner. Danny moved Everlast from the Lower East
Side into a massive facility in Port Morris, a couple of blocks from John
Golomb's current digs. It continued to grow through the '60s and '70s and in
1995, Danny Golomb died of a heart attack.
His business partner, Ben Nadorf, took over the company; for the first time,
Everlast was no longer a Golomb-owned operation. John Golomb already had left
the company to start his glove repair and nostalgia business, The Sports
Doctor, in suburban New Jersey. He thought he might come back someday. He
thought they might need his help again; he couldn't help but think they might
need his expertise again as well.
By the time a former New York City teacher named George Horowitz became CEO in
2000, Everlast -- which already had moved much of its American operation to a
Missouri town called Moberly -- was struggling, and relying heavily on the
licensing of its name to foreign-made products. What it had forgotten were the
simple things, such as how to design a modern boxing glove. Its primary
business was being co-opted by companies such as Reyes, which knew how to
cater to Hispanic fighters, which designed gloves with modern materials and
marketed with a personal touch.
So Horowitz turned to Golomb. He made him a product designer and had him
oversee the assembly line, and here is where things got contentious, as they
often do in business disputes. "John really didn't want to change the
gloves," Horowitz said. "He was more old-school."
This was not how Golomb saw it. "I think they had plans," he said.
"I don't believe I understood their plans. I really wanted to make a very
good quality product with what I had [in the factory], but it was like trying
to cut tomatoes with a dull knife."
And so Golomb either helped or did not help the company find its way again.
But once it did, around Thanksgiving of 2003, Everlast decided the Bronx
factory was a liability neither it nor its shareholders could afford. It
closed the facilities, laid off more than 100 employees, most of them
working-class immigrants, and moved to Missouri, saving about $2.8 million.
John Golomb could have gone along, could himself have been outsourced to a
factory town in middle America. He was offered a job but chose to stay behind,
in part because he refused to sign a non-competing agreement. "They could
take the equipment out of the Bronx," he said, "but they can't take
the Bronx out of the equipment."
'He's not really competition'
This was a very noble thing for one man to do, of course, to take a stand
against corporate homogenization, against the outsourcing of jobs, against the
co-opting of family businesses. This much George Horowitz could understand, if
only that were his own perception of what Everlast had done.
"We're not even close to being a big conglomerate," he said.
Everlast, in fact, still manufactures its professional boxing equipment by
hand in Moberly, in a small-town factory with fewer than 200 employees.
"I very much loved his father. I loved the Golomb family. He should be
happy with the fact that we've become a world-class brand with incredible
exposure. I really don't understand him trying to compete and saying bad
things about us ... He's not really competition to us."
The truth about Golomb's departure, about his contributions to Everlast, about
the nature of Everlast itself, about the nature of modern business itself --
these are all issues orbiting around the primary question in Golomb's mind:
Was this a smart business decision?
On occasion, it is a debate that rages in Golomb's own head. He would like
to think he did not make this move out of some trace of hidden guilt, or out
of nostalgia or obligation or need. He would like to think he made this move
because it fulfills a need.
Golomb was an art major in college; he is a craftsman by trade. He would
like to think there is still a place for the neighborhood artisan. He would
like to think that personal connections still mean something, that
businesses grow from the grass-roots level, especially in a sport as
provincial as boxing. He does not envision Legacy blossoming into something
as far-reaching as Everlast. He cannot afford to imagine anything like that.
He has to think small, to think locally. He has to begin in places like the
Cornerstone.
In this Cornerstone . . .
The men who run the Cornerstone Gym are celluloid characters writ into
flesh. They are thick-necked and weathered and wear watch caps and work
boots spattered with paint. They refer quite often, in colorful idioms, to
the glory of the Lord, and they don't permit cursing or music outside of the
Christian genre.
The man in charge at the Cornerstone, Ralph Farrait, is a pastor. He's 54,
and he's been training boxers since 18. Two years ago, with the help of his
wife, who is also a pastor at a nearby church, they opened this place in a
converted storefront in a rough-hewn South Bronx neighborhood a short drive
from John Golomb's worldwide headquarters. "To preach the glory of the
Lord," Farrait said.
At the moment, there's not much to it; some jump ropes, some heavy bags and
a makeshift ring in the back. The changing room is the bathroom. On a recent
afternoon, they were in the early stages of finishing the basement, wading
through concrete and loose wires and stirring up so much soot you could
hardly breathe.
The Cornerstone is as much youth center as boxing gym. It is a place for the
neighborhood's lonely children to come and work out their aggression. On
Wednesdays, the gym gives away a free meal. The money to maintain it comes
from the church collection plate. Farrait and Eddie Acevedo, whose nickname
is "Mousey," will train all comers as long as they stay sober and
abide by the rules.
And so when they learned John Golomb was willing to offer free trials of his
new equipment, and offering to mend their broken headgear, the men at the
Cornerstone weren't about to refuse. They tend toward underdogs at a place
like this. It is the type of synergy Golomb was hoping to find; it's through
men like this, he learned from the family business, that one builds a better
boxing glove. And someday, when the Cornerstone finishes building a new ring
downstairs, says Mousey Acevedo, they'll adorn the stanchions with the
Legacy boxing logo.
The boxing game, "it's all about business deals," Farrait said.
"It all comes down to dollars and cents. Of course, he's not as big as
Everlast. But I'm not as big as Gleason's. So he'll start with us. He'll
start small."
This is how it used to work, of course. John Golomb's grandfather formed
Everlast in the Jewish ghettos of the Lower East Side. It was a family
business, and father passed it on to son before the company passed on into
modernity. "My father didn't believe in importing," John Golomb
said. "If you want to hold on to something, you've got to do it
yourself."
He would like to think this is not antiquated logic. What if the family
business can be resurrected? He would like to think it still can be done,
even here, in this little corner of the Bronx, in a neighborhood that may as
well be frozen in time.
"There are some things people can't do in China," Golomb said.
"I think something will be lost if we just let all that go."