Manny Sobral was at the Dairy Queen when his cell phone rang.

“Hey Manny, what are you doing?” said the voice on the line.

“Not much,” replied Sobral, trying to figure out who was calling him.

“Manny, it’s Lennox. I’m heading to the club, you gonna be there?”

That’s Lennox, as in Lewis, former Canadian Olympic gold medalist and professional heavyweight boxing champion. The club he was going to was the North Burnaby Boxing Club.

Sobral paid for his ice cream and hustled down Hastings Street to the musty old school gymnasium at the back of the Burnaby Heights Resource Centre that’s been a mecca for young boxers off and on since the early 1980s.

Lewis was one of those young boxers when the Canadian Olympic team used the venue as a training base to prepare for the ‘88 Seoul Olympics. He was in town to do a little work with Electronic Arts and he wanted to pop by his old stomping ground.

Though more than 20 years had passed since Lewis last walked through the blue steel doors into the gym, not much had changed.

Lewis was taken aback.

“Manny, the place looks the same,” Lewis told his old friend, with whom he’d jogged plenty of early-morning miles around the gravel track in Confederation Park, just behind the club, when they were both young up-and-comers.

As a memento of his visit, Lewis signed the back wall of the gym.

But that wall will soon be gone, as the City of Burnaby is demolishing the former school turned community gathering place. The boxing club will have to vacate its home, on the gymnasium stage, by the end of the year. On Friday, they will be hosting their 12th - and final - Friday Night Fights boxing card, featuring another rising star, 2008 Canadian cadet men’s junior welterweight champion, Robert Couzens.

When the lights go out for the last time, and the doors close behind him forever, Sobral says the boxing community, and the City of Burnaby, will be losing more than just another tired old gym.

“What’s special about it is the history,” says Sobral. “In the early 1980s there was a tournament here almost every weekend.”

Seven boxers who spent time at the North Burnaby Boxing Club went on to become Olympic medalists, including Lewis, Sean O’Sullivan, Willie DeWitt, Burnaby’s own Dale Walters, Eggerton Marcus and Raymond Downey.

“You cannot walk into too many fitness facilities and say seven Olympic medalists trained here,” says Sobral. “For amateur boxing in the early 1980s in Canada, this was THE place.”

So much so, the ‘84 and ‘88 Canadian Olympic boxing teams used the club as a training base to prepare for those games. In ‘84, the Finnish national team also set up camp, on their way to the Los Angeles Games, where they won one medal.

But for every champion who passed through the doors, there’s many more aspiring boxers upon whom the club left an indelible mark.

“I’m sure there’s thousands of people who’ve boxed here over the years,” says Sobral, who figures he fought about 15 or 20 matches at the club. “Some of those guys had their first matches here. Some of them had their only matches here. It’s one thing about boxing; once you get in the ring, it’s an experience you’ll never forget.”

Like the electric atmosphere when the gym lights go off and the ring lights are turned up. Or the smell of liniment that hangs heavy in the air. Or the fearful anxiety that sits like a rock in the pit of a boxer’s stomach as he prepares to enter the ring.

“You’re not fearful of getting hurt, you’re just fearful because you don’t know what to expect,” says Sobral, who faced his first tests at the club while wearing the green tank top of the old Shamrock Boxing Club.

His fighting days behind him, Sobral now fears for the future. The clock is ticking and the North Burnaby Boxing Club has yet to secure a new home; it’s not easy finding a facility that can accommodate an 18 foot by 18 foot boxing ring, plus heavy bags and elasticized speed bags suspended from the ceiling.

He fears for all the young kids who could find in boxing the discipline and direction they may otherwise be lacking in their lives.

And he fears for the history that will be lost when the walls of the old gym come crashing down in the new year.

“I just sort of enjoy the days now, enjoy the memories,” says Sobral.

The last Friday Night Fights boxing card at the Burnaby Heights Resource Centre begins at 7 p.m.