Since 1958, Brookline has boasted a boxing club that's trained possibly hundreds of young students, and now another of the biggest and most pristine boxing clubs in the Pittsburgh area is just a stone's throw from Dormont.
Wolfpack Boxing Club recently moved from its small gym in Bridgeville to a sprawling warehouse building on Gregg Street in Scott Township, near Carnegie.
Jeff Mucci, 41, of Cecil, took over the boxing club from former Pittsburgh Steelers player Craig Wolfley and current broadcaster, last January and has been working to expand its membership.
“I just outgrew it,” Mucci said of the old gym on Station Street behind the PNC Bank. “When I saw that brick wall, I was sold on (this building). I had to snatch this place up quick.”
That brick wall goes the entire length of the gym and gives the cavernous building a rugged personality. The building located in the Scott Township industrial park just outside of Carnegie was an old ammunition depot built in 1856.
The move instantly doubled the size of the boxing club to 6,000-square feet. It also gave Mucci the ability to install a second ring to train more customers and possibly host boxing tournaments.
Mucci is proud of the new location and the fact it’s one of the biggest–if not the biggest–boxing club in the Pittsburgh area.
Anyone can come in and not have to worry about “head contact” if they just want to exercise. Mucci said they offer many different training levels and have members that span from 8 years old to 62. In fact, 30 percent of their clients are women, he said.
Mucci has been boxing since he attended Penn State in the mid-1990s. Outside the boxing ring (where he’s 22-0 in official bouts) he worked in Corporate America with Fortune 500 companies. He’s using his business acumen to build up the boxing club.
“I went from white collar to blue collar,” Mucci said. “I work more. It’s a labor of love. I’ve always been a boxing fan.”
But he loved the physicality of boxing and how it could be fun for anyone. He likened it to “karate meets LA Fitness meets Rocky.”
“It takes a special kind of person,” Mucci said. “It’s all about the chess match and the physicality, one-on-one. You have no where to run. It’s sink or swim.”
The Brookline "Charlie's Angels" Boxing Club, also known as the Pittsburgh Boxing Club, is still in existence. For more information about that club, see the Brookline Connection website.
This article originally appeared on Chartiers Valley Patch.
