Doyel: Gym teaches ‘Parkies’ to fall and more importantly to get back up

Snoopy is crawling across the floor, trying so hard to get to his feet, and an entire boxing gym has stopped to watch. This is not defeat — this is victory — and fighters are now cheering as Jack “Snoopy” Schulse creeps closer to the ring post.

Closer. And closer.

Men and women are encouraging him. You can do it, Snoopy. Go, Snoopy.

Snoopy is 80 years old, and like the other fighters in this boxing class near 75th and Shadeland, he has Parkinson’s disease — the incurable and degenerative neuromuscular disorder diagnosed in Michael J. Fox, Muhammad Ali and nearly 1 million other Americans today. This gym was made exclusively for people like Snoopy, “Parkies” as they call themselves, but more in a minute on Rock Steady Boxing and its impact and its audacious goals.

For now, watch Snoopy go. Hear his classmates screaming at him.

You got this Snoopy!

Like he’s crawling through water, Snoopy inches across the gym floor until he reaches the corner of the boxing ring, which hovers above him. He raises up to grab the ring’s edge, then the post. Now he’s to his knees.

Go Snoopy!

One more surge, and he’s on his feet. The gym erupts. A tiny trainer sprints over to give him a high five — more on the tiny trainer in a minute — and now Snoopy is walking back to the class, reaching for his boxing gloves.

Snoopy is ready to fight some more.

* * *

The first time Joyce Johnson called me, I scolded her. Because you should have called me earlier, I was telling the executive director of Rock Steady Boxing. How did I not know this story already? How does the world not know what is happening here in Indianapolis?

“We’re trying to spread the word,” Joyce was saying.

“Society has forgotten these people,” says Rock Steady’s program director, Chris Timberlake.

Well, there are things society would rather not notice. And doctors aren’t sure what to make of Rock Steady Boxing, though club leaders tell me the medical community is coming around. UIndy professor Stephanie Combs-Miller has done multiple studies that reach the same conclusion: Parkies who undergo high-intensity workouts like the ones at Rock Steady boxing — Miller studied club members — walk better, fall less and enjoy a higher quality of life than those in lower-impact workouts like yoga.

But one after another, the fighters here — and make no mistake, they are fighters — told me how their doctors initially urged them not to participate in non-contact but strenuous boxing workouts. By all means they should exercise, doctors told these Parkinson’s patients, but not like that. You could get hurt. You could fall.

“They will fall!” Chris Timberlake is practically screaming at me. “That’s life. We give them the tools to get back up.”

Indeed, in the first round of class — there is no contact but these are boxing workouts; they cycle through three-minute rounds with one minute of rest — the Parkies practice going down and getting up. Visiting trainers come for seminars and are aghast at the drill.

“They say, ‘Oh, no, you didn’t just do that,’ ” Timberlake says. “Oh, yes, we do. Respectfully.”

“Part of our curriculum is teaching them to fall better,” says Rock Steady boxing head coach Kristy Rose Follmar — more on her in a minute — “and to get back up.”

Snoopy is telling me how it used to be, before he found Rock Steady Boxing. Parkies tend to fall because their strength and balance are affected. Used to be, Snoopy would fall down and he’d stay there. This retired USPS mail carrier, 31 years of walking the beat, simply couldn’t get to his feet.

“Now I can get up. Now I do,” Snoopy says. “But you know what? I don’t fall as much as I used to.”

Another Rock Steady Boxing victory.

* * *

Next to the ring, Steve Doyle is doing crunches on a bosu ball. Last round he was skipping rope, the tremor in his hand gone as he spins the rope over his head. David Bowie is blaring on the speakers and around the room men and women are throwing medicine balls against the wall, slamming heavy ropes against the ground and hitting a trainer’s punch mitts.

Now Steve Doyle is slacking. Hey, I like Steve. Plus he’s 75. This guy with the last name “Doyle” was kidding me about my name being misspelled until I grabbed some gloves and started playfully sparring with him  — easy on the body shots next time, Steve — but he was slacking on the sit-up drill.

And here comes Marcia.

She’s tiny, Marcia Wilson. Less than 5 feet tall is my guess. Less than 90 pounds.

Marcia Wilson is ferocious. She’s a trainer at Rock Steady, a force of nature who came here in 2009 after her father died of Parkinson’s. She wanted to help others fight this disease, wanted to believe it could be done, and she heard about Rock Steady Boxing.

The club was founded in 2006 by former Marion County prosecutor Scott Newman, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 40 and encouraged by a friend to try boxing workouts. See, what Parkinson’s does is slowly kill off nerve cells in the brain, the cells that carry messages to muscles. Connection lost, the muscles start to tremor, slow down. Parkies stiffen, hunch over, fall.

Exercise — intense exercise — slows the progression. In Newman’s case, it damn near stopped it. Blown away by the results after just a few months, he opened Rock Steady Boxing in the corner of a private gym. Six people showed up for the first class. In February 2011 the club moved to its current digs, as big and clean and solid a boxing gym as I’ve ever seen. Newman is still fighting, and over the years 500 Parkies have been here to fight with him.

In 2009 Marcia Wilson walked into the gym, looking for hope.

“Chris and Kristy pulled me into the first class,” Marcia says, “and I just never left.”

And poor Steve Doyle, he has the sweat to show for it. After slacking on his bosu crunches, he comes face to face with the ferocity of Marcia Wilson. She bounds across the gym and onto the ring apron, where she looms above him and screams, “Come on Steve!” and holds out a hand for Doyle to punch at the top of his crunch. He strains to get there, but he does. He punches her hand.

The bell sounds and the round ends. Steve Doyle collapses onto his back. I ask my sparring partner how he’s doing.

“I feel great!” he says. “But we have the weekend off. That’s terrible.”

* * *

Word is getting out. Not fast enough, it’ll never be fast enough — roughly 60,000 Americans are diagnosed every year with Parkinson’s — but word is spreading. Six people attended the first class in 2006. Today there are 47 Rock Steady Boxing affiliates in 11 states and Italy, Australia and Canada.

“Sounds great,” says Kristy Rose Follmar. “But we haven’t done anything.”

So, about Kristy Rose Follmar. She doesn’t do what you would call “settling.” She won two world boxing titles before retiring in 2009 at age 29. Scott Newman had called her in 2006, a friend of a friend, and asked her to become the Rock Steady Boxing coach. Follmar came like Marcia Wilson in 2009, like Chris Timberlake — whose husband, Tom, has Parkinson’s — in 2007. They came to Rock Steady Boxing to see what it was all about. And just never left.

Joyce Johnson, the executive director, tells me Rock Steady’s plan.

“A gym in every community,” Johnson says.

Every community fights this fight. A 16-panel quilt hanging on the gym wall is a reminder. It has squares with words like “Parkinson’s sucks” and “Team Fox” and “Have you hugged a Parkie today?” Another panel lists 50 names, famous Parkies like Salvador Dali and Billy Graham and Howard Cosell and Pope John Paul II. The final two words on that panel:

“And me.”

Some day “me” could really be me — or you, your father, your mother. In September 2014 it was Suzanne Brown, a retired minister who was so mortified by what the disease was doing to her that she started to isolate. She spent two months withdrawing from society, this retired minister not even attending church, before hearing about Rock Steady Boxing.

Today she’s 73 and in a boxing class with later-stage Parkies, most of them in chairs. One round of their workout is to get up and sit down, over and over. This is not easy, and Suzanne, this Southern belle from Jackson, Miss., is the last to get up. But she gets there, and Chris Timberlake yells, “She did it, man!”

On her minute of rest between rounds, Suzanne Brown is telling me why she skipped church.

“I didn’t want to drive,” she says.

How did you get to Rock Steady Boxing?

“I drove.”

So maybe, I say, it wasn’t the drive that was keeping you out of church.

“No,” Suzanne says. “I guess not.”

Almost immediately the boxing workouts stopped her Parkinson’s progression in its tracks, another victory for Rock Steady Boxing. And then, the knockout blow:

Eight months after ducking services, Suzanne Brown is back in church every Sunday.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel

Rock Steady Boxing is having a fund-raiser Friday night, Aug. 7, featuring three-round bouts between several promising local amateurs and a three-round main event between UFC veteran Chris “Lights Out” Lytle (13-1-1 as a boxing pro) and IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel (4-0, 3 KO’s, amateur). For more information, click this link or contact Joyce Johnson at 317.205.9198 or jjohnson@rocksteadyboxing.org. Ring girls will be Circle City Derby skaters.

Rock Steady Boxing charges $60 for unlimited monthly classes, and offers scholarships. “Nobody is turned away,” says trainer Chris Timberlake. Monthly dues cover just 20 percent of the gym’s cost; the rest comes from grants and fundraisers like the one on Aug. 7. Classes are offered six days a week.