“He had just won the championship, but he was busy thinking about me and what would be best for me,” Higgins recalled. After Day won the Golden Glove championship, he told Higgins that he should take the job, but Higgins refused in order to continue training his pupil. Higgins said he had the opportunity to take the coaching job at Camp Lejeune, where he himself trained when he was 17, back in 2012, when he was training Day. Day took that mission to heart, helping Higgins mentor young men, some of whom got into fights after school.ĭay’s commitment to the others motivated Higgins to expand the boxing program, even as he is busy working nearly 600 miles away. No one could fight like him.”Ĭharacter building, Higgins said, is at the heart of the Freeport PAL boxing program, which started 26 years ago as an outlet for teenagers and young adults. “He was my main sparring partner and really pushed me to win. “We all learned a lot from him,” Famous Wilson, 23, added. “He loved to give out advice,” Alan Teemer, 23, said, “and not just about boxing, but about life in general.” With a major title in hand, Higgins said he saw Day become a role model to the young men at the PAL gym.
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Higgins, a retired New York City firefighter, had years of experience as an amateur boxer and saw promise in Day.īy 2012, Day rose to prominence as a boxer, winning the New York Daily News Golden Glove championship, becoming the Sugar Ray Robinson Outstanding Athlete of the Year and the USA Boxing national champion and serving as an alternate for Team USA at the London Olympic Games that year.ĭay’s professional boxing career began in 2013, and four years later, he defeated Eric Walker for the WBC Continental Americas welterweight title. Day was 14 when he joined the gym under Higgins, his neighbor, now 60.
“Patrick always believed this place could be more, and I owe it to him to make that happen.”Įven through the pandemic, Day’s spirit is alive and well at the gym, with a poster of the boxing star overlooking the young people who come from across Long Island to train and hone their fighting skills.
“It’ll become a place not just to learn boxing, but also to tutor kids and provide career planning services,” Higgins said. He said he hoped to start the remodeling process this summer. Now, nearly a year and a half after Day’s death, Higgins is reinventing the PAL’s gym as a center for youth boxing and mentoring. The closures put a strain on the gym, and although it was able to reopen in September, it could only accommodate a handful of athletes at a time because of state regulations.Īnother major change came in December, when Higgins, a Marine Corps veteran, took a job training participants in the Marine Expeditionary Force’s Martial Arts Center of Excellence boxing program at Camp Lejuene in North Carolina.ĭespite landing his dream job, Higgins still returns to Freeport regularly to look after the gym as part of a promise he made to Patrick Day, a champion boxer who came up through the ranks in the PAL but who died after suffering a traumatic blow to the head during a match in 2019. Three local 22-year-old fighters were ready to take on the challenge, but the coronavirus pandemic shut down not only the championship tournament, but also the PAL’s gym, in Northeast Park, for half a year. Last year, Joe Higgins, of Freeport, prepped his young athletes at the Freeport Police Athletic League’s boxing program for the 2020 MSG Ring Masters Champions.
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