In the first season with the UMass boxing club, Lopez convinced Snow that he was ready for national competition.
![Boxing Coach Rocky Snow Coaches South Hadley's Josue Lopez]()
The Republican | Don TreegerBoxing coach Stephen "Rocky" Snow (right) has coached South Hadley's Josue Lopez (left) to the 2012 National Collegiate Boxing Championships where he won the light weight division. They train at the fitness center at Westover Air Force Base.CHICOPEE — They came together by accident – a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam and a college sophomore looking for something to do with his summer.
They met at the fitness center at Westover Air Reserve Base, and soon formed a bond based on mutual respect and a passion for the sport known as “the sweet science.”
Yes, boxing has changed the lives of Stephen “Rocky” Snow, 61, and Josue Lopez, 21.
In July 1970, Snow came home from Vietnam, angry and depressed. Eventually, he found his way to boxing at the Holyoke Boys Club, and the sport led him to a new life as dedicated teacher, coach and volunteer for good works.
As for Lopez, boxing has led him to a national championship in the lightweight division, two All-America certificates and the hope of turning pro after he completes his education at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He will enter his senior year this fall, carrying a 3.9 grade-point average (4.00 means all A's).
Beyond all that he has accomplished in only two years as a boxer, Lopez has enhanced his already considerable work ethic by training with Snow, whom he calls “an old-school guy” regarding conditioning.
“I’m never going to lose because I didn’t run that extra mile or do that extra sparring,” Lopez says. “As Rocky says, you win the fight before you go into the ring.”
Both men are from South Hadley, but never knew each other until one morning in the summer of 2010, when a friend who had access to the Westover center invited Lopez to work out with him.
“That’s when I met Rocky, and after talking to him, I got interested in boxing. I liked basketball as a kid, but I was really more interested in a one-on-one kind of sport,” he said. “In the ring, there’s no one to blame but yourself if you lose, and no one to thank but yourself if you win.”
Sensing Lopez’s interest in the sport, Snow asked him if he wanted to start a boxing team at UMass.
“I loved the idea,” Lopez said recently. “I never even knew intercollegiate boxing existed until Rocky told me about it. He knew, because he had experience coaching college teams at Western New England (University) and Central Connecticut (State University).”
In the first season with the UMass boxing club, Lopez convinced Snow that he was ready for national competition.
“I won’t put a kid into a tournament until he’s ready, and Josh was. Now, he has teammates who could be ready by next season. I think we’re going to have a smokin’ UMass team in 2013,” Snow said.
Lopez was so ready that he made it all the way to the 2011 national intercollegiate tournament, conducted at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.
“Josh came in third and made All-America,” Snow said. “Not too bad for a first-year guy.”
From there, Lopez continued to improve, concentrating on the techniques and training provided by his mentor. That training sometimes includes sparring with Snow.
“Can I beat coach? Nobody beats coach,” Lopez said. “He’s 61, and he can take anybody on our team.”
In advance of this year’s intercollegiate tournament, Snow knew what he had in Lopez, so he arranged bouts with top competition.
“Rocky set up a fight on Nov. 21 with the defending NCAA champion, and I beat him,” Lopez said. “Then on Jan. 28, I fought the national runner-up, and beat him, too.”
His buildup for the nationals continued in March, when he went against the fourth-place finisher from 2011. Another victory for Lopez.
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All of that gave him a No. 1 ranking going into the eastern regionals. He drew a bye, won the championship and, in April, headed for the NCAA tournament at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.
“I won three fights at the nationals and brought home the championship belt. I can’t wear it, though. Too big for me,” Lopez said.
At UMass, boxing is a “club” – not recognized as part of the university’s varsity sports program. That doesn’t stop Snow from doing what’s necessary for his team.
“If there’s a fight, we’ll go, and don’t worry about the money,” he said. “Josh’s championship belt and All-America certificates aren’t on display at UMass. They’re here, at Westover. That’s because my team does all its work here, and considers this home.”
All the training done by Lopez – as much as three to four hours a day – serves him well in the ring.
“In college, the fights are three, 2-minute rounds. That means each round is a sprint – you have to go all out every second. A lot of guys are good fighters for one round – we call them one-round wonders – but it’s the third round that usually makes the difference. I explode in the third round, and I win a lot of fights decisively.”
The training that Lopez gets at Westover is merely a part of what Snow does – often putting in eight hours a day, providing help in the gym for military personnel, along with the time he gives to the UMass boxing team.
Snow, who is retired from the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Postal Service, does all of it as a volunteer.
“A while back, we got some boxing apparatus,” said Janice Wheeler, director of the Westover fitness center. “I said, ‘Why not use it?’”
Then Snow came along, and started working with Army Staff Sgt. Luis Delgado, a fighter he had known years before at boys club in Holyoke. Soon, other base personnel began joining in, and boxing at Westover just took off.
“Rocky has such a humble attitude about what he’s doing, people love him for it,” Wheeler said. “And, he sure knows how to work them. People don’t realize how out of shape they are until he puts them on our rock-climbing wall,”
Snow specializes in giving back. In 2006, he donated a kidney to JoAnn Dion, a 50-year-old nurse from West Springfield whom he did not even know.
Over the years, he has done 17,000 hours of volunteer work for the U.S. Veterans Administration, helping his brothers-in-arms. He also serves as president of the Pioneer Valley chapter of the Leathernecks Motorcycle Club. His bike’s custom paint job includes a replica of the unforgettable World War II scene at the peak of Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, when five Marines and a Navy corpsman raised the American flag on Feb. 23, 1945.
“My bike also carries the name of my unit: 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines,” he said.
When Snow came home from Vietnam as a 20-year-old corporal who had seen combat, there was no heartfelt greeting, no warm welcome, no parade to mark the occasion.
It was a time of social upheaval, including public demonstrations against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Such strong anti-war feelings often were misdirected, with homecoming veterans as the target.
“People looked down at us. They spit at us. Go for a job interview, and they asked you to roll up your sleeve. They expected to see heroin tracks,” Snow said. “We served as honorably as our troops did in any war, but people didn’t like this war, so we were the enemy.”
He spent time in a U.S. Navy hospital. “Nothing physical, but I was messed up from things that happened over there,” he said.
Now, 42 years after his service in Vietnam, Snow has evolved dramatically from the seething, bitter young man he once was.
How did he deal with the anger issues that nearly consumed him?
“When I first got back, I used to get into fights – I had so much hostility. Then one day I decided to check out what was happening at the Holyoke Boys Club. I thought it might help if I could swim or play some basketball,” he said.
That was in 1975, the year he ran across Pat Bartlett, a boxing man who trained many a Golden Gloves fighter when the Holyoke club hosted the New England tournament each February.
“Pat saw me one day and said, ‘Hey, you want to box? I got a guy here who needs a sparring partner.’ I did it, and I liked it so much, I came back the next day, and it just went on from there,” Snow recalled. “I can truthfully say that getting into boxing at the Holyoke Boys Club saved me.”
Snow proved to be perfectly suited for the sport, from the nickname “Rocky” to the talent and fortitude he brought to the ring. Soon, he was fighting Golden Gloves matches as a 126-pound featherweight.
He turned pro at age 24, fighting for 10 years in the 135- and 147-pound weight classes.
“Was I a champion,” he said. “No, but that wasn’t the point. For me, boxing was therapeutic, a way to keep my life balanced.”
While he was pursuing his pro career, the director of the boys club at the time, Bruce Thompson – a former Marine Corps captain, asked him about working with youngsters at the club.
“It was a rule that you couldn’t start in Golden Gloves until you were 16. Bruce wanted something for the younger kids,” Snow said. “So I got involved in a Junior Olympic program, training kids from the ages of 8 to 15. We wound up having the No. 1 team in New England five years in a row.”
Snow went on to become a college coach, and now looks forward to seeing his UMass team members when they get back from their summer away from school. He expects them to train, hard.
“They can tell me they ran, but I’ll take them in the ring and I’ll know if they ran,” he said.
He doesn’t have to wonder about Lopez. They will be together over the summer, aiming toward another national championship.
“Josh is a natural, and he’s left-handed,” Snow said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something special about left-handed fighters.”
For both Snow and Lopez, boxing is much more than it might seem at first glance.
“People think of boxing as two guys in a barroom. It’s nothing like that,” Snow said. “It’s like chess, and the idea is to score points without being scored upon.”
Lopez, who hopes for a career in law enforcement after his boxing days are over, firmly believes in the value of his chosen sport as an art in itself.
“People think boxing is a brutal and masochistic sport,” he said, “but to me, there’s nothing more honorable than stepping into the ring, going one-on-one, and seeing who is the better man.”
