Ted Lewin Returns to the Ring

From Publishers Weekly: 

Ted Lewin has created more than 100 books for children, including Caldecott Honor Book Peppe the Lamplighter and Market, named a New York Times Best Illustrated Book. Before launching his writing and illustration career, the aspiring artist attended Pratt Institute, and financed his tuition by working part-time as a professional wrestler, an experience that inspired his 1992 autobiography I Was a Teenage Professional Wrestler. Set at a renowned Brooklyn training venue for wrestlers and boxers, Lewin’s most recent work, At Gleason’s Gym, brought him back to a world that played a key role in his past.

Due from Roaring Brook’s Neal Porter Books this month, this picture book centers on Sugar Boy, a nine-year-old boxer in training for the state Silver Glove championship. Also training at Gleason’s Gym, and providing a supporting cast for Lewin’s book, are wrestlers and boxers of all ages and sizes. 

Lewin, whose older brother began training him to wrestle at a young age, says, “It was very comfortable and very nostalgic for me to first step inside the gym,” where he initially went to see Johnny Rodz, a former professional wrestler who now trains wrestlers at this gym. “As I walked in the door, the place just knocked me out. It was kind of like walking onto the set of Million Dollar Baby,” Lewin remarks. “It is a wonderful, gritty spot, with kids running around and training everywhere. I was immediately struck by its strong feeling of community. And I was especially drawn to one boy, eight years old at the time, who was training with his father. I watched the two of them together and the book idea came to me. I said, ‘This is fantastic. This boy is my handle.’ ”

Illustrator and former professional wrestler Ted Lewin.

Lewin went home to his townhouse nearby and jotted down his first impressions of Gleason’s Gym, what he describes as “a little haiku thing” that became the book’s opening lines. Then, while discussing another book project with Porter—illustrating a manuscript by another author that Lewin was not interested in undertaking—he mentioned his At Gleason’s Gym idea. The author notes, “It was the shortest pitch in history, but Neal said he loved it and we figured out where we would go with the idea.”

Where Lewin went was back to Gleason’s, which he visited three times a week for a year and a half. “When I first approached the gym’s owner, Bruce Silverglade, about the book, he was very excited,” Lewin recalls. “He is very dedicated to getting kids boxing and to encouraging self-discipline. He gave me permission to be a fly on the wall and take photographs. I became a fixture at the gym and everyone got used to me and paid me no attention.”

One day Lewin introduced himself to Sugar Boy and told him that he wanted him to be the main character in his picture book. The boy agreed, as did his trainer father. “The father thought it was really wonderful,” says Lewin. “He thought I was doing something for his kid and I don’t think he realized that the boy was doing something for me.” In a satisfying twist, as the author was wrapping up his narrative and art for At Gleason’s Gym, Sugar Boy won not only the state Silver Glove title but went on to clinch the national title as well. A final illustration of the triumphant boxer shows him wearing his championship belt.

“Sugar Boy flipped when he saw the f&gs of the book,” says Lewin. Porter, who has long admired Lewin’s work but had never before worked directly with him on a book project, was also impressed with the final product. “I am very proud of this book and believe it’s Ted’s best work ever,” he observes. “One interesting thing he did was incorporate with his typically magnificent full-color paintings lots of sketches, which gives the book an immediacy that is particularly terrific.”

Porter, who had imagined that some people would approach At Gleason’s Gym with some trepidation, thinking that boxing is a violent sport, says that instead, “I’ve been dumbstruck at the positive response of booksellers and librarians, who have said there is nothing else quite like this in the marketplace.”

Lauren Wohl, Roaring Brook’s associate publisher, has been exploring numerous avenues for promoting Lewin’s book, including exhibiting the original art at the gym—hanging from the ropes around the rings, holding an event at the gym in which Sugar Boy would participate, cross-marketing with companies that make boxing equipment and clothing and featuring the book in boxing and fitness magazines. “This is a whole new world for us, since we don’t speak boxing that fluently and some of these companies don’t speak books fluently,” she says. “But it seems that all the people we’ve been talking to are very curious, not only in the book, but in the author, too. There seems to be a great deal of interest in the two very different sides of Ted Lewin.”