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As members slowly trickle into Front Range Boxing Academy on a mid-September evening, silence gives way to a familiar and comforting soundtrack. The rapid and steady rhythm of the speed bag bouncing off its wooden platform; gloves pounding against vinyl; jump ropes whirring. A solid smack reverberates through the musty gym when someone throws a particularly forceful punch. A loud grunt always follows. Every few minutes, a bell sounds, offering some degree of order to the proceedings.
For decades, this has been Dave Gaudette’s sanctuary, the place where he and so many others gather for a sense of peace. In Boulder, an affluent and idyllic town few would associate with such brute physicality, this boxing gym is an institution.
This month, Front Range Boxing turned 30 years old—making it older than many of the athletes gathered inside of it on that early September night. The anniversary certainly exceeds the modest expectations Gaudette had when he opened the gym’s doors in 1994. “At first, I was just going to have some heavy bags and a speed bag,” Gaudette says. “I was afraid of liability and I thought, Well, it’s Boulder, so nobody’s going to want to hit each other. But I ended up buying a ring. It turns out that for some people, it touches a part of their lives and psyches that a lot of other things don’t touch. They become more well-rounded people.”
The walls of Front Range Boxing tell the story of not only the gym but its eclectic owner, a Buddhist who quotes Rudyard Kipling and Meister Eckhart while discussing proper footwork and uppercut techniques.
Inside his boxing temple, there’s a laminated Daily Camera article from 20 years ago with the headline “A hard-hitting philosopher.” There are signed pictures of Gaudette standing beside boxing luminaries like Marvelous Marvin Hagler, the undisputed middleweight champion for much of the 1980s, and Angelo Dundee, the legendary trainer most famous for his work with Muhammed Ali. Gaudette knew both men but is modest when discussing the photographs, simply noting that they were next to “that bum from New Hampshire.”
Gaudette’s self-deprecation belies the fascinating, seldom straightforward path that brought him to Colorado and made Front Range Boxing a reality. He was raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, before moving to New York as a teenager to attend a seminary where he studied to become a Franciscan priest. While there, he was introduced to boxing by a friend. He fell in love with it, enamored by the discipline and determination it required. Over time, it consumed him. He may have arrived in New York with the goal of becoming a priest, but he left with a different kind of dream—and a different kind of robe.
When Gaudette left seminary for Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, he began training in nearby Brockton, where he met Allie Colombo, Rocky Marciano’s longtime friend and trainer, as well as brothers Goody and Pat Petronelli, both of whom went on to train Hagler. Though Gaudette had little interest in sports growing up, he proved to be a natural in the ring. He won the New Hampshire amateur lightweight championship in 1969, two years after first taking up the sport, and he was crowned the New England amateur junior welterweight champion in 1971.
Still, after graduating from school in 1972, Gaudette found himself unsure of what was next. “[Leaving the priesthood] really affected me seriously in terms of my outlook on life,” Gaudette says. “I had an existential crisis—not about dying, but that I had just lost all meaning.” He eventually found an answer to some of those quandaries in Boulder, where the University of Colorado was one of only a few schools nationally that offered a master’s program in philosophy that focused on both Eastern and Western traditions and beliefs. As he puts it years later, “I didn’t have a direction, but I had to do something.”
In his early years in Colorado, Gaudette held a series of odd jobs while pursuing his studies, from teaching an expository writing course to working construction. He had sought out a boxing trainer and professional fighting opportunities, but couldn’t find any. And so he opened his own boxing gym. “People thought I was crazy to open up a boxing gym in, of all places, Boulder,” he says. “But this is what I love. Sink or swim, make it or break it, I’m going to try it.”
The original iteration of Front Range Boxing opened in October 1994 in a shared space with a karate studio. The gym bounced around to a few different locations in its early years before landing in its current home—off Pearl Street near the Foothills overpass—in 2001. The building, Gaudette admits, is weird. It’s a half-cylinder structure, which patrons describe as a small airplane hangar or an oversize irrigation pipe. “It’s a great location,” Gaudette says. “What else are you going to put besides a gym in here?”
Inside the building is everything a boxer needs: a ring, a slew of heavy and speed bags, jump ropes, and rows of cherry-red gloves. Signs and shirts with sayings like “Sweat is Good,” “Cheaper Than Therapy,” and “I’m Nicer After Boxing” are plastered on the walls or in display cases for sale. Gaudette’s cats, Leo and Taco, wander around and greet folks who walk through the door.
The gym’s spartan aesthetic is part of its appeal to those who go there. “I felt like I walked into a Rocky movie,” says Johnny Argrow, who has been training at Front Range Boxing for about 15 years. “You could tell right when you walk in the grit of the gym. When I say ‘grit,’ it’s not just the dust and stuff. There’s something about it that’s like, Man, there are some warriors in here.”
At least some of the gym’s charm and character can be attributed to the man who owns and operates it. There aren’t many places like Front Range Boxing because there aren’t many, if any, people like Gaudette: a hardened boxer with a soft, enlightened soul. Around the time Gaudette faced his self-described existential crisis, he developed an interest in Buddhism. Though the religion’s first noble truth of suffering initially turned him off—“I mean, I’m suffering, but I’m not always suffering,” he says—Buddhism’s broader philosophies quickly clicked with him. He earned his master’s in comparative philosophy, with a thesis structured in part around Buddhist teachings. “Intellectually, it appealed to me,” he says. “I’d go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a whole different way of seeing things. It makes a lot of sense, more sense than what I was taught to believe in,’ which is basically a lot of myth.”
Gaudette doesn’t believe there’s an inherent contradiction in being a Buddhist who fights and teaches others to do the same. In his view, boxing is controlled and disciplined violence, not unhinged and driven by hatred. Two opponents enter the ring and exchange blows, but they leave with a mutual sense of respect. For all of the blood and bruises, boxing has lofty ideals that can help guide people through life’s toughest seasons, Gaudette believes.
That ethos has come to define Front Range Boxing Academy. Gaudette makes it clear to anyone who walks into the gym that he doesn’t coach bullies. The techniques he teaches aren’t to be used in a predatory way. Argrow, who is Black, recalls an instance in which someone called him a slur and Gaudette immediately threw the person out. The gym’s members are hugely diverse, from what they do for a living to their racial identities to what brings them there in the first place. “It’s like an old-school boxing gym, but it’s got a new-school face on it,” says Eric Miller, who has known Gaudette and worked with him dating back to Front Range Boxing’s early days in the back of the karate studio. “It’s a reflection of his mentality and views on life.”
To many of its members, Front Range Boxing has become more than just a place to train—like it did for Gaudette. For Miller, who “got in a little trouble” as a young man, boxing provided him with the kind of structure and accountability he needed. When Argrow first moved to Boulder 17 years ago from his native Oklahoma, he says he felt lost until he discovered Front Range Boxing. “It’s always been there,” he says. “You’re going to get out what you put into it. It’s reliable that way. I tell people, ‘Boxing saved me.’ When I walked into that gym, I didn’t realize how much of a low point I was actually at.”
The fact the gym has remained open long enough to celebrate its 30-year anniversary is a testament to the strength of its community. There have been many times throughout its existence that Gaudette worried it might not survive. There was its three-month closure during the COVID-19 pandemic, of course. And most recently, skyrocketing rent has raised questions about whether he should change his membership model to focus on private lessons or even move the gym to somewhere more affordable outside Boulder, like Louisville, Lafayette, or Broomfield. But every time Gaudette considers closing shop, he simply can’t fathom leaving behind what he helped create.
By his own admission, Gaudette isn’t the most polished businessman. Sometimes, he says, boxers have owed him several months of membership fees before he realizes it. He’s a boxer who happened to open a gym, not a businessman who saw boxing as a way to profit. He earns enough to pay his rent and other bills, which is all that matters to him. “If I got into this business to make money, I would be considered a complete failure,” he says. “But I got into it because it’s really the thing I do best and the thing I love the most.”
Now 74, Gaudette understands that he won’t be able to provide the kind of demonstration-driven instruction he does now for much longer. In that sense, Front Range Boxing’s 30th birthday isn’t just a celebration of its past, but a moment to consider the future. Although the thought of retirement seldom crosses Gaudette’s mind, he does have a succession plan in place, with Argrow—Gaudette’s longtime pupil and a trainer—set to take over whenever the owner steps aside. For now, there’s no rush by either party. “I tell him, ‘We’re going to have your head in a jar like on Futurama,’ ” Argrow says. “ ‘You’re not going anywhere, Dave.’ ”
In the meantime, Gaudette, true to his Buddhist faith, is living in the moment. He’s working on a book (tentatively titled Confessions of a Buddhist Boxer). With some help from Front Range Boxing members, his business is modernizing, with an updated website and a membership-management system, among other things. He continues to teach, including to children of people he first trained years ago. Miller, for example, recently brought his 14-year-old son to work with Gaudette.
“It makes me feel valuable,” Gaudette says. “It isn’t just an ego thing. There is that, of course. People listen to you and they say, ‘Oh, thank you so much.’ But just being able to demonstrate the moves and see how beautiful it is—how freakin’ beautiful it is. It’s like an artist or a writer—you do it because you love it and you’re good at it. I’m one of the luckiest guys in the world.”
