‘A champion is someone that stands up when he can’t.’ –Patrick Dempsey
‘Inside of a ring or out, ain’t nothing wrong with going down. It’s staying down that’s wrong.’ –Muhammad Ali
‘When life gets tough put on your boxing gloves’ –Unknown
You can take the boxer out of the fight but you can’t take the fight out of the boxer! Nobody knows this better than Leo Samarelli. If you think you’re tough, you better check your credentials after meeting Leo. If the average tough guy has the heart of a lion then Leo has the heart of a great white shark and he smells blood in the water. Leo Samarelli is a highly decorated boxing champion with many titles, including national champ, Golden Gloves, Inter Regional title in Italy. He has sparred with the absolute best, has met legendary trainer Freddy Roach and was being mentored by the best in the business in LA and Oxnard, California. He has showed his best and everyone in the boxing community has embraced him. They love Leo for his heart, his skill and his thirst to be the best.
One day after parking his car in front of his mom’s home in North Vancouver, he stepped out of his car and was shot 4 times by a man he’d never met without warning. One of the bullets penetrated his spinal chord and Leo became paralyzed from the waist down. The average person would tap out or take a standing 8 count… but Leo is anything but average with gladiator blood. I believe they call it G-positive! It’s a rare blood type and it’s helped him to his road to recovery. In a few short years Leo has not only been back to the boxing gym to find himself, to find inspiration and to find his old friends, he’s also trained his ass off and won 3 silver medals in cross-country skiing and at the Canada Winter Games. The words Outstanding, Unbelievable, Underdog and Superior athlete fall short of describing Leo Samarelli’s incredible tenacity and his yearning to not be a prisoner of his chair and take back his life, his boxing life!
Enter the new era of adaptive boxing. Although Leo has had tremendous success in winter sports with cross-country skiing and biathlon, it couldn’t replace his love and passion for boxing. Black Rhino Creative is a film company that searches out stories that are unique, that has heart and can inspire. When they discovered Leo Sammarelli’s story, they new they had to document it and share it. Black Rhino Creative has great instincts for unique and intriguing stories with heart at the center. They are better known for Fearless, documenting a blind swimmer as she swims the English Channel and their last docu-series Red Chef Revival, a food and travel TV series that explores Indigenous cuisine through the eyes of 3 chefs.
I had the great privilege of speaking with the incredibly inspirational Leo Sammarelli and Danny Berish of Black Rhino Creative about the documentary and this tough as nails new sport of adaptive boxing.
HNM: “How old were you when you first started boxing and why did you take up the sport?”
Leo Sammarelli: “I was about 14 years old and lived in Italy in the region of Puglia, down south in a city called Monopoli. I took up the sport because I was an athlete and I never ran into a sport like boxing; boxing is something special. I’ve been involved in team sports before but the way I feel in the ring is incomparable to any other sport.”
HNM: “How did your film company Black Rhino Creative get involved in producing this documentary?”
Danny Berish: “I’ve always been interested in pursuing subject matter that I don’t know a lot about or am intimidated by. There’s a boxing club down the street that I’ve always wanted to go into but I didn’t because I was too intimidated. We use our cameras to go into places that are an interest to us and when we heard about Leo’s story we thought it was a perfect opportunity to follow that interest. We actually heard about Leo’s story when we made another documentary on the first female blind swimmer to cross the English Channel. Her swim coach sometimes coaches Leo. After looking at Leo’s Instagram account, we were blown away by the way he’s pioneering new training techniques and wondered… who is this guy!?”
HNM: “How many years did you train before your injury?”
Leo Sammarelli: “Probably 8 or 9 years. I was a high-level boxer, when I started out as an amateur I won the Inter-Regions in Italy. That ignited me to continue on boxing. When I moved from Italy to Vancouver I joined another boxing club and won the provincials, Golden-Gloves and moved onto the nationals and won that in Vancouver. When I graduated high school, I grabbed my gym bag and drove down to LA, which evolved my game in terms of finding my role models and sparring with some of them. I got the honour to spar and train with the great Vasiliy Lomachenko, who’s world champion right now. I had an opportunity to go to Robert Garcia’s gym in Oxnard (California), the Goose’s gym, Freddy Roach’s gym (Manny Pacquiao’s trainer) and the Wild Card gym. I was exposed to a whole new aspect of boxing and able to evolve my game. Who wouldn’t want to play basketball with Michael Jordan or a round of golf with Tiger Woods?”
HNM: “Where will this documentary/film be seen?”
Danny Berish: “This will play on AMI, which is accessible media and it will be part of a series called, Our Community.”
HNM:“Did you want to tell me how you became paralyzed?”
Leo Sammarelli: “Actually today is the anniversary of when I was shot. I was shot 4 times on March 13, 2017 in North Vancouver. I had parked in front of my moms house and was getting out of my car when an individual approached me and I was shot twice in the abdomen when I turned around, then once in the side of the rib and once in the back, in my T-8 (mid to lower area of spine) which did some damage. Nobody was ever caught.”
HNM: “This is quite a 180 from your last docu-series, Red Chef Revival. What sparked the change in trajectory?”
Danny Berish: “I think going from food to sports wasn’t a huge transition; they’re both highly competitive, highly skilled in what you’re doing and from our standpoint it’s all about the story, the personal bio depiction and the humanity. In every piece we do, it’s the human element and not just the exposition about the sport of boxing or Indigenous food, it’s about the people behind it. For this project, specifically it’s about the community that Leo is creating. It’s really a cool thing to see them building this from the ground up.”
HNM:“You won 3 silver medals in the Canada Winter Games. What sports were those in?”
Leo Sammarelli: “That was in cross-country skiing, biathlon and I’m currently also training for hand-cycling but I won all 3 silver medals in cross-country skiing at the Canada Winter Games and a bronze in the US Nationals this year. Of all the sports I’ve tried as a paraplegic, the most physically demanding was cross-country skiing. It’s shoulders, it’s technique and strategy.”
HNM:“What types of challenges did this documentary pose, if any?”
Danny Berish: “For us, the biggest challenge is always access and getting people to tell their stories and trusting us with those stories. We’ve never had any issues with that and these guys have been so helpful and trusting with us. The biggest issue for us has actually been the way we tell the story. It’s for AMI, so we have to frame it for people with disabilities/visual disabilities. We have to get the guys describing what they’re doing in more detail because if you can’t see what’s happening you have to describe what’s happening. We’ve had to frame the story with more of an A to B narrative as opposed to these long montages with beautiful visuals. We can’t do any of that because it’s IDV (Integrated Described Video). You almost have to create it the same way as a radio show.”
HNM: “How long after you became a paraplegic /paralyzed, did you get the idea to continue boxing/adaptive boxing from of a wheelchair?”
Leo Sammarelli: “It took me awhile before I could even go into a boxing gym. It was hard seeing my friends, my sparring partners and my coaches. When you’re in a wheelchair you can’t do the same things you did before… you definitely tell yourself that. I wanted to change the way I worked out to make it more interesting, like shadow boxing; even when I was in the hospital bed I was trying to throw some punches. I definitely miss it. It was my meaning before, it was my passion and that’s who I identified myself as. It wasn’t without the help of community, such as my old friends from boxing and my old coaches. The first couple of times I went to go watch a fight on TV I felt like going to the gym to try some stuff out. That’s when we started adapting everything. Being in a wheelchair you might think that you’d lose everything but the mechanics of the way people move in the ring, the distances and the technique, I can really start picking that apart from a different angle.”
Leo teaches people how to move and people like his input, especially other boxers. He sits on the BC Boxing Board and they’ve asked him to become a provincial coach for the Nationals when they go to Ontario. He does evaluations for fighters when they go to events for upcoming fights. He still has a boxing eye and he can teach. He says ‘you just have to adapt’.
HNM:“Your company creates many documentaries, do you see yourself producing a screenplay in the future?”
Danny Berish: “(Laughter) We do a lot of documentary stuff but we’ve never really dabbled in scripted material. I think for us, reality is so much better than anything you can write on a page. We had a commercial shoot we were trying to write a script for but the stories that people can tell from their own personal experiences is always better, unless of course we had top Hollywood writers.”
HNM: “How has training from a wheelchair changed?”
Leo Sammarelli: “We’ve had to reinvent almost everything, from movement to positioning. It’s a technique in itself and using the wheelchair properly where you can strike and not get hit or roll up without being square to the opponent. You’d use a sport chair that would allow good balance, you also need to be strapped in and we’d try to match you up with someone with the same level of injury. L section with lower lumbar and T section matched with thoracic. It’s much more fair like that. I’ve sparred with all levels and you have to change up your game plan to adapt to their ability. In our class, we do the warm up, we work on technique, shadow boxing and then we group out and do circuit training at different stations. At the end of that we usually partner up for more technique or do some technical sparring. Each session lasts about 1 ½ hours and we have people from 16 – 32.”
HNM: “What type of impact do you hope this film will have on the public?”
Danny Berish: “I think my mission is the same as Leo’s mission, which is to spread the idea that people in wheelchairs can box. This is a new sport and I hope that more people will come into the gym and get that workout while gaining a community of friends. I feel like I’m fighting alongside these guys to put the sport on the map because many people don’t believe this is possible. Leo is such an aspiring guy with the can’t stop won’t stop attitude.”
HNM: “Did you have a hard time getting people interested in supporting the idea of the sport of adaptive boxing?”
Leo Sammarelli: “Peoples first reaction was definitely ‘what, you’re gonna hop in a chair and beat each other up?’ That has changed though and we were going to have the opportunity to display that and show that we can perform the ‘sweet science’ on Saturday, March 21 at the Hard Rock Casino. We’ll get our chance again to show people what we’re capable of doing. After they see how much fun we have and the smiles on our faces… this goes much further than boxing. When I’m boxing, we’re all equal and I don’t see it, I don’t feel it, we’re all in it together.”
HNM: “How long have you been following Leo and the other adaptive boxers?”
Danny Berish: “Two months. We’ve identified three main characters that we want to follow in addition to Leo’s story. They’re the guys that are going to be in the ring boxing.”
The adaptive boxers get into the ring with headgear and 16 oz. gloves. The premiere of the sport in Vancouver will be an exhibition match/sparring to introduce the new sport to the public. They’re hoping to have sanctioned fights in the future with the possibilities of a WWB belt up for grabs. The sky is the limit.
HNM: “Can you explain how the rules have changed in an adaptive boxing match?”
Leo Sammarelli: “Just as in able bodied boxing, if someone can’t protect themselves/they’re getting hit and overwhelmed then there’s an 8 count and a stoppage. In a wheelchair if you get backed into the ropes and trapped where you can’t respond or do anything, we’d reposition you to the center of the ring. If another opponent does get the other one trapped in the corner and is teeing off, we’ll reposition them and possibly give that opponent a point. We have rules in place and we’re in talks with the wheelchair boxing world. We’re taking all the necessary precautions. I was invited down to Mexico already this weekend because they’ve already sanctioned pro level wheelchair boxing. I turned it down because I want to take a look at their rules and regulations first as well as their safety measures. I know what my role is once the sport catches on and I want to maintain a certain image around the sport. This is much bigger than me.”
HNM: “What has producing this documentary taught you?”
Danny Berish: “It’s that can’t stop won’t stop attitude and things that I thought I’d never be able to do that I’m thinking about now. It’s taught me that, if Leo can do it I can do it, so it’s inspired me to take steps in my own life; things I was afraid to do, just do it. Like Leo was saying, ‘you can do more than you think you’re capable of’ and that has inspired me the most.”
HNM: “What happens when someone gets knocked out?”
Leo Sammarelli: “I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to knock someone out from a wheelchair. Have you seen my left hooks (laughing)? I actually throw a better left hook now than I did when I was an able bodied boxer. If someone can’t defend themselve, refs will have to be taught and a system will have to be put into place to ensure everyone is safe. The chance of someone getting knocked out is very low.”
HNM: “How does it feel to know that an official boxing match has been scheduled for next Saturday at the Hard Rock Casino in Vancouver?”
Leo Sammarelli: “It’s a great honour. I have a big presence in the boxing community here and it’s also a great honour to be able to display this to everyone and show people around the world that we can ‘box’ and this is a new sport on its way up.”
Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 virus the boxing match at the Hard Rock Casino in Vancouver was cancelled. It will definitely be rescheduled and will happen once the country and the world can feel safe again. The film is scheduled to be wrapped up in early May.
Leo Samarelli trains his adaptive boxing twice/week (Sundays and Wed) at Raincity Boxing club but because the sport is still new, they still need funding for new equipment and better training space. If you would like to donate, you can find Leo Sammarelli on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.