A few hundred yards from the Workers' Gymnasium, the Olympics boxing venue, there's a 24-hour ex-pat bar and restaurant called The Den Mark, which apparently serves an excellent steak and kidney pie.
In the past few days, it has also become the unofficial headquarters of the friends and relatives of the British boxers competing in Beijing.
After super-heavyweight David Price stopped world No.1 Islam Timurziev on Wednesday, The Den Mark was a happy, raucous place to be for the rest of the night.
It hummed with boxing gossip, mainly about why gold medal hope Frankie Gavin had lost his battle to make the lightweight limit for the Games and returned home last week.
The lure of an offer of a professional contract and a place on a bill in a big fight in America was one theory.
A long-standing inability to get down to the 60kg limit was another.
Others talked about the scoring system in the boxing here and how its vagaries appear to have been responsible for the early exit of highly-rated bantamweight Joe Murray.
There was more of the same controversy yesterday, when welterweight Billy Joe Saunders, 18, was eliminated in the second round by Cuban Carlos Banteaux Suarez.
Saunders was beaten fairly but felt he had been placed under undue pressure early in the fight when the judges failed to reward him for scoring shots.
"I felt I should have had six or seven points for my body shots, but they're not scoring body shots," Saunders said.
"You might as well do fencing, not boxing, if they're going to do that." But the best thing about being in The Den Mark on Wednesday night was listening to Phil Jeffries and getting a glimpse into the hopes and dreams of a young boxer and his father.
Jeffries' son, Tony, reached the quarter finals yesterday when he won a narrow decision over Colombian Eleider Alvarez after their light-heavyweight bout ended level on points.
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Tony is now just one victory over Hungarian Imre Szello away from becoming the first-ever native of Sunderland to win an Olympic medal.
That's what Phil Jeffries was saying on Wednesday night anyway.
People kept asking him how much money Tony would make if he won a medal and turned pro but he said Tony didn't care about the money. He said all Tony wanted was to make the people of Sunderland happy.
"I'm so proud of him for just getting to the Olympics," the fighter's father said.
"But if he could win just one fight, just one, that would be great." Phil wore his Sunderland shirt for the fight yesterday.
He said his son used to man a burger stand outside the Stadium of Light even though his dad kept telling him all the flipping could damage his wrist and ruin his career.
He mentioned that Tony's trainer Bobby Bute had died of cancer and that some time before he set off for the Olympics, he rolled up a trouser leg and showed him the tattoo of his name he had had inscribed in his honour.
He's become involved in cancer fund-raisers since then. "He's such a good kid," his dad said.
"People who meet him outside the ring find it hard to believe he's a boxer sometimes." Tension pinned Phil Jeffries to his seat yesterday while all around him people stood and cheered on his son. Afterwards, he was drained.
"I'd quite like to get home," he said. "But it looks like I'll be staying until Monday now. At least until Monday."
