By Joaquin Ramirez-Andrade, Hola Iowa
It was a Friday evening at Liver Shot Boxing Club. Six o’clock. The youth session was supposed to start. One kid showed up. His father took one look at the near-empty gym and decided it wasn’t worth the wait. They left.
Adan Rodriguez didn’t flinch. He straightened up, looked around the room, and kept moving, because that’s what he does. Not out of obligation. Not for recognition. Just because this place means something, and walking away isn’t something he knows how to do.
This is Liver Shot. And this is Adan.
By day, Adan Rodriguez details cars. By late afternoon, he’s here — gloves on the wall, bags hanging — coaching the next generation of fighters in Marshalltown, Iowa. He’s been in combat sports for more than a decade, has competed himself, and still plans to. When I asked him what drives him, he didn’t mention a trophy or a record. He pointed to the people in this room.
Liver Shot Boxing Club was founded by three coaches — Adan Rodriguez, Luis Alejandre, and Adan Ortiz — all of whom came up together through Marshalltown’s boxing community. The club has been running since 2023, operates as a nonprofit, and keeps its doors open to anyone age eight and up. Around 20 members call it home. Some come to compete. Others come to grow.
When I asked Adan what he feels the moment a new member walks in, he was direct.
“It takes a lot of guts to show up to a boxing gym,” he told me. “The most difficult thing is showing up and going through that door.”
From the moment someone steps inside Liver Shot, Adan believes the coaches are obligated — his word — to make that person feel welcome. It doesn’t matter if they’re eight years old or forty. It doesn’t matter if they’ve never thrown a punch in their life. The act of showing up, to him, is already something worth celebrating.
“When we have a new kid, a new person, we’re obligated to make them feel welcome,” he said. “To make them know that it’s a proud moment to be here.”
That responsibility doesn’t stop at the door. Adan describes the relationship between coach and fighter less like an athletic partnership and more like a family dynamic. Progress reports, school check-ins, tough conversations — all of it happens inside these walls.
“Are you doing good in school? No? Okay, what are we going to do?” he said. “That’s what makes it a family here. That’s how it should be.”
The longer I talked with Adan, the clearer one thing became. Every answer circles back to the same idea: boxing and life are not two different things. They never have been.
“Boxing transitions into life and life transitions into boxing,” he told me. “So many ways that many people don’t understand.”
He’s just as deliberate about what he brings into the gym.
“Morals, being respectful, looking out for the people within the community here in our gym,” he said. “Things that I feel like a lot of the new generations lack.”
It’s a philosophy born from his own relationship with the sport. Adan has been in combat sports for more than a decade — boxing, mixed martial arts, karate, taekwondo, judo. At the center of all of it, one thing has always stood above the rest.
“Boxing has always been my love.”
And like any great love, it has taught him things no classroom could. Chief among them: the difference between motivation and discipline.
“You can show up one day motivated and the next day you’re not motivated, but you have the discipline to show up,” he told me. “Sometimes it’s the better days when you don’t feel like showing up and just kill it. That’s discipline.”
It’s a lesson he models as much as he teaches. Adan still competes while balancing a full-time job, a detailing business, and coaching, and his fighters have seen him in the ring. To him, that visibility matters.
“You did your training camp, you did your dieting, you were disciplined and you showed up and you fought,” he said. “I think they see that and it motivates them. It shows them what to do.”
There is a stigma that follows boxing wherever it goes. Aggressive. Violent. Not for everyone. When I brought it up, Adan didn’t get defensive. He just smiled.
“People see boxing for something that it completely might not be,” he said. “Boxing is actually a beauty. It’s peace.”
It’s a word you might not expect from someone who still steps into the ring. But the more Adan explains it, the more it makes sense.
“You have to have peace in the ring where you’re fighting somebody that just wants to rip your head off,” he told me. “You got to be smart, touch and move. It’s about being in control of yourself — taking those blows, those hits that you get in life, and you absorb it. And you become something better.”
He put it another way.
“I’d rather be in the garden and be at peace — because the day I have to use my self-defense, I know what to do. This is peace to me.”
To Adan, walking through the door at Liver Shot doesn’t mean you have to become a fighter in the ring. It means you become better equipped for everything outside of it.
“Being here doesn’t necessarily mean you’re supposed to be a fighter in the ring,” he said. “But you are a fighter in life.”
Marshalltown is a city Adan knows well. He grew up here, built his business here, and chose to plant Liver Shot here. So when I asked him what the city needs more of, his answer didn’t surprise me, but the weight behind it did.
“There’s a lot of kids that are on the bad paths,” he said. “They’re quick to have a gun, they’re quick to start a fight. They’re quick to judge, they’re quick to do stupid things — and that’s okay, but you have to be corrected.”
He paused before adding something that stuck with me.
“I always thought of a mistake as a great learning opportunity. A way to grow.”
Adan isn’t naïve about what one gym can do for an entire city. But he believes Liver Shot is part of the answer: a place where kids can be redirected, challenged, and seen. Where a coach might notice something a parent missed. Where showing up on a Friday night, even when no one else does, still means something.
“A lot of suicides, a lot of killings,” he said quietly. “Being here keeps you intact. It keeps you at peace.”
In Marshalltown, that kind of peace isn’t just welcome. It’s being built, one session at a time.
Before I left, I asked Adan one last question. When does the fighting stop?
He didn’t blink.
“I don’t think we ever stop fighting,” he said. “Fighting is until you’re dead. Even as an older person, you’re not fighting in the ring, but you’re fighting in life.”
It’s the kind of answer that tells you everything about who Adan Rodriguez is. Not a man chasing glory or waiting for the right moment. Just someone who shows up — to the gym, to his fighters, to his city — because that’s what he knows how to do.
Liver Shot Boxing Club is located at 1106 West Lincoln Way in Marshalltown. Classes run Monday through Friday, 6 to 7 p.m. for youth and 7 to 8 p.m. for adults. The first visit is free. Ages eight and up are welcome.
At Liver Shot, the door is always open. It just takes courage to walk through it.
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