A situation took place yesterday to which both Snickers and I were so glad we were waking up to a Saturday. Hulk's is closed on both Saturday and Sunday and though we know the situation will resume on Monday, for now we have two days off the drama. It didn't mean we could fully escape the drama, I wish, but instead it meant we could ponder over it, digest it a bit, and then meet with our business mentor/ sponsors to discus what to do next.
So what's the drama you ask, well, on Friday I had to ban someone from Hulk's. The irony of it all though was that this person wouldn't have even been banned if it were for the fault of his parents, in particular his father.
A minor situation arose with one of our mini Hulkies yesterday -- a mentally handicap boy that is as strange as he is fun to joke around with. He's a bit in-your-face to visitors and new members but his strange manner and whatnot doesn't really phase anyone who has clued into his situation and I argue it's because he's different that makes him fun. He goes around throwing everyone the "West side" hand signal, occasionally has to be told not to touch himself, and he's curious about what many people are doing if they're not specifically training. I claim he's innocent and, though he may be 16, he's mentally still very much a young child.
My mother used to take care of handicap children in our house as long as I could remember via Durham Respite Services so I was always around other children who had varying needs. So when this particular member first joined our club and his parents visited with him, I was quite optimistic about him joining and viewed it as both a positive situation for him and our members. The club would provide him a kind of safe haven for him to train, play and develop socially in and our members would also develop socially with being around such a person that perhaps they may not normally have interacted with. We have quite the array of members here and he just happens to add a bit more color to our diverse group; I am all in favour of differences.
Well, yesterday he had taken a bit of pocket change from two other members, a total of $13, and when I found out I called his parents to ask them to ask their son about it. A simple matter of elimination with regards to who was at the club at the time it happened made it quite clear that he had done it, there is no question, but we didn't want to alarm the parents or make them overly concerned. We've never had a situation like this before but we didn't think it was such a big deal considering. We simply told the parents the situation and then asked them if they could sit down to ask him. We could have made him come back to the club and publicly confronted him but we wanted to avoid embarrassing him plus we figured with them being the parents and thus closer to him that maybe he'd be more likely to confide and confess to them. Well, apparently that was the wrong thing to do. Two minutes into a conversation with the father on the phone and he suddenly is cursing us out and threatening us about supposedly having gang connections. You want to talk about gangs, I thought to myself, I've trained about 30 members from one gang so don't even start with that nonsense.
Snickers recorded the call but then hung up once the father clearly was off his rocker.
Then the mother called my phone.
She gave a half-effort apology and then we ended the phone conversation by telling her not to send her son back to our club. I was upset to have to say that because what started off with a simple problem that could have been erased with the boy's apology to our members and the $13 being returned, escalated well beyond expectations by his parents. Usually when we have a mini Hulkie sign up, as in the case with this particular member, we often get the parent to sign the consent form so that they know the rules of the club and can help us enforce them. Our rules aren't long and complicated, nor are they anything that one shouldn't expect.
Rule 2 of 7 as stated in our members consent form:Discriminatory language or manner will not be tolerated and failure to stop will result in the member being asked to leave. If asked to leave, the member will not be reimbursed for any membership fees paid.상식에 어긋나는 언행을 자제하여주시고 만약 이를 여러 차례 어기실 경우 복싱클럽 회원들을 위해서 복싱클럽 회원 강제 탈퇴시키겠습니다.
Rules are rules but we thought we'd make an exception not because he's young or handicap but because he is a long time member and ya, perhaps because kids are kids. We've only ever had to kick a member out once before, two young boys who got into a fist fight in our locker room. Anyways, with this case it was the parents' language and manner that got him kicked out. It's their name on the consent form and thus they play a responsibility here too to keeping the rules.
Our club's main sponsor was absolutely disgusted when we told him the news as were other members who heard the situation being dragged out over a span of two+ hours. I had the two other members (one who lost $3 and one who lost $10) to deal with plus the father calling the one phone, the mother calling the other, sparring going on and all that that involved (getting boxers geared up and snapping pictures), a long-time-no-see special visitor, and the rest of the club to manage. It made for a really, really, REALLY rough end to an already super busy week. And I know Monday this situation will resume. I'm anticipating the father to come storming into Hulk's, demanding his money back and spitting out more curse words and threats our way.
The thought that makes me question everything is the particular young Hulkie who started this. Despite him being mentally challenged and despite him being really young, he's always shown such good manners to us considering -- he bows and greets everyone (often repetitively too during training), he trains hard, he always puts his equipment away -- and yet how did he come from parents like that?!
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