Kris Lopez’s Oakland-based boxing gym is aiming to repair damages from an incident that occurred on New Year’s Eve.
Lopez saw the front door to his Seminary Avenue-based gym destroyed when a stolen car rammed through it. The goal has become to raise funds to pay the trainers for the next two months, and so they have set up a GoFundMe page. The ring was damaged as well; the gym has been boarded up as they look to raise funds to repair the location.
“I see it as a hard reset button,” said Lopez, who recently spoke to BoxingScene about his son David, a promising welterweight. “I see the silver lining in this.”
Lopez recalled when he got the news on New Year’s Day.
“It was 6 AM, and I got a call from a former gym member,” he explained. “He said, ‘I am sorry to tell you this, but there is a car in the gym’.
“I was thinking the car might be in the alley behind the gym. We have a private parking spot, and maybe they hit the building. I never fathomed it would have driven cleanly through the front door and straight into my ring.”
A neighboring business owner sent Lopez photos to show the shocking scene. The images sparked a thought that Lopez had for a while. He noticed that the intersection in front of his gym had become popular for sideshows – unregulated events in which intersections are blocked off while drivers attempt “donuts” in the middle of the street. He had seen the effects, such as telephone poles knocked down.
“I had been thinking it might happen for a long time,” Lopez said. “Our building is on the corner. I had been wondering when something would happen here.”
Lopez, who opened his first gym in 2009, after his fighting career ended, has had various premises. The East Oakland location is the one that stuck; he made the move to his gym in 2016, and has been there ever since. He hopes that what happened can lead to changes in Oakland and a desire to regulate activities.
“We need some type of speed bumps in that intersection,” Lopez said. “They need to do something about this intersection.”
The incident occurred days after one of the brightest moments in his son’s professional career. David Lopez, 8-0 (6 KOs), knocked out Luis Garcia in two rounds in December in Dubai. The bout earned the 21-year-old from Oakland the inaugural Misfits welterweight title. It also happened to be the first title of Lopez’s career.
“[The year] 2024 for the gym was a fairytale, but 2025 outside of David’s career was a nightmare,” Lopez said. “That is what Dave brings to the table, when the chips are down, he is going to be the one who produces.”
The gym will relocate to Geoffrey’s Inner Circle, a historic Oakland nightclub, for the time being. For Lopez, the goal is for his gym to stay open for the fighters who want to continue to train. He is also eager to maintain his relationship with Unity High School, where six students a day can receive a 90 per cent discount to learn how to box.
