Boxers put through agony in practice

Charlie Fisher's face looked like a kettle of tea that had been left on the stove a few minutes past its boiling point. The sweat streamed freely from his forehead, coating the rest of his beet-red face with a thin glossy finish.

Fisher wasn't the only one who was blowing steam. He was joined by his teammates from the Penn State boxing team, who grunted under the watchful eye of coach Bill Wrable.

"I'm just totally crushing 'em today," Wrable said during practice Monday without taking his eyes off of his team. "It's an hour of hell. They never get a rest in here."

"Here" is the wrestling room in the Intramural Building, one of two sites (Rec Hall being the other) where the Penn State boxers meet three times a week to push their bodies to the limit. It's a limit that stretches beyond most ordinary athletic boundaries.

Wrable keeps his boxers moving nonstop for the entire practice. Fisher had been running up and down three flights of stairs for 20 minutes before even entering the dimly lit wrestling room Monday. When he did finally show up drenched with sweat, Wrable told him and some others to begin jumping over a series of five, one-and-a-half foot high benches aligned at the far end of the room.

"Thumbs up going over," Wrable boomed in a hoarse voice. "Run back. Don't walk."

Wrable paced toward the other end of the room where other boxers were paired up with partners holding mitts and medicine balls to hit. Looking back to Fisher's group of bench jumpers, he grimaced in disgust.

"Next guy who walks back I'm adding five minutes," Wrable said. "I said, 'Run back.' Don't walk."

A few minutes later, a shoeless Wrable wearing a blue Teamster's union T-shirt, tells the boxers to switch to an adjacent string of end to end benches, which they must leap over from side to side.

"It picks up throughout the season," the 156-pound Fisher said through a black mouthpiece. "It's getting intense now."

Wrable migrated toward the boxers paired up with partners and barked more commands. He zeroed in on heavyweight Tim Scott, whose sweating was so profuse it no longer could be soaked up by his drenched gray T-shirt.

"C'mon Tim. You gotta punch through it," Wrable said. "Here's where you win the fight. It only hurts if you let it hurt. Punch until I tell you to stop."

The boxers work within timed rounds, which Wrable mixes up from practice to practice. A bell signifies the beginning and end of each round, but some days Wrable decides when his fighters can quit. In the last round the boxers are instructed to "burn out," or in other words keep throwing rapid-fire punches until told to stop.

After splitting eight matches at last Saturday's Lock Haven Invitational, the Penn State squad will head to Shippensburg on Saturday. In two weeks, the boxers will be home again in final preparation for the March 21 Northeast Regional, which Penn State hosts.

And the closer that Northeast Regional date becomes, the more militaristic Wrable's practice regimens will become. Proof the hard work pays off for the boxers can be seen in the past three invitationals Penn State has attended. In the three -- the Nittany Lion Invitational, VMI's Keydet Invitational and the Lock Haven Invitational -- the team has compiled an overall record of 13-7.

Fisher has been responsible for two of those wins.

"You gotta keep pushing," he said. "It makes it fun in the ring when you kill yourself in here."