Pint-Size Pugilists Taught How to Counterpunch Fears Away

It can be a real jungle out there on the jungle gym, which is one reason Ryan Stern of Encino boxes Saturday mornings at Goodman’s Gym in Van Nuys.

As trainer Frankie Goodman, the Pied Piper of Pugilism, looks on, Ryan skillfully pummels the same punching bag on which former heavyweight champion Michael Dokes, who also trains at the gym, works out.

Ryan is new to the sweet science of boxing, but he is mastering the moves.

Weighing in at 48 pounds, the 7-year-old even remembers to keep both feet on the stool, without which the bag would be as inaccessible as a basketball hoop.

Ryan is one of 10 boys in Goodman’s Kid Gloves Training School, a program that grew out of his conviction that children can learn to counterpunch their fears away.

Putting ‘KO on Fear’

“Putting the KO on fear. That’s the theme of this program . . ., “ says the 70-year-old Goodman. “When a child learns that he can block a punch and defend himself, he gains a little confidence.

“I’ve had psychiatrists refer children to me,” Goodman says. He also gets frequent phone calls from his own graduates, who are alarmed to see the same terrors in their sons that they fought off in Goodman’s classes.

“I’ve had them crawl under the ring, they were so frightened,” Goodman says, recalling the occasional panicked newcomer who didn’t think getting hit was such a great idea and had to be lifted up bodily and put in the ring.

The 10 boys here today are smiling, however, as they trade blows. Ryan appears unfazed even by an exercise in which each of his fellow students tries to land one on him.

“I wasn’t scared,” he reports. “They were just punching at me, and I was picking and countering.”

As Goodman explains, picking means dropping the arm from the place alongside the forehead where it is the best defense against an opponent’s left hook, to the spot in front of the chin where it best wards off the dreaded left jab, boxing’s premier punch. Countering is hitting back.

“We thought boxing would help build their self-respect,” Debbie Land of North Hollywood said, as she watched sons Arron, 11, and Caleb, 9, sparring with their partners.

“My little one had gotten into several fights at school. He had been roughed up pretty bad. And he was late getting home from school all the time. We couldn’t figure it out, and then we learned he was riding his bike a mile out of his way to avoid these kids,” she recalls.

“His older brother went to school with him one day, and they confronted these three kids, and they both became intimidated. They both refused to go to school after that.”

Land, whose grandfather was professional fighter Irving Spunt, isn’t fearful that boxing will put her sons at risk of cauliflower ears or battered brains, because the situation at Goodman’s is controlled.

“I don’t want to see their faces messed up, but I don’t worry about it.”

Her boys also square dance, Land says. “That teaches them charm, grace, movement and courtesy.”

Boxer Since Childhood

Goodman has been boxing since he was a child in Philadelphia. “I never got in a fight myself with anyone,” he says. “But I fought everybody, because whenever anyone else got into a fight, they’d say, ‘Wait. Let’s get Frankie.’ ”

As a 135-pound lightweight, Goodman won a semifinal match in the trials for the 1936 Olympics. He never went to Berlin. He was approached before the games by Jewish leaders, he says. “They said it wasn’t nice for a Jewish boy to go to Hitler’s Olympics.”

Goodman boycotted the games, as requested, an honorable act that did not bring him the status of Jewish hero that he had been led to expect. He also views that lost opportunity “with the regret of any great athlete.”

“I wrote the book on it,” Goodman says of his 35 years of teaching boys self-esteem through self-defense. He points to the book--”How to Teach a Boy to Box”--a yellowing handbook published in 1959 and illustrated with photos of a child boxer sparring nose-to-nose with Goodman, as he stands in a hole cut in the ring.

During the fight-happy ‘50s, Goodman’s “Kid Gloves” was a network TV show, in which kids in boxing gloves did the darnedest things, including bolting from the ring and running, crying, into the arms of Mommy.

Teaches Boxers’ Boxing

Goodman teaches boxing to children, not children’s boxing. “I teach the same formula, but I take a little more time before I let the kids get into the actual hitting.”

Goodman says he has taught thousands of boys, including such distinguished alumni as Jerry and Mike Quarry, Bobby Chacon and Mando Ramos. He’s also trained six girls, including one aspiring actress who incorrectly thought that a literal knock-out would attract the attention of Hollywood.

In all his classes, for which he charges $30 a month, Goodman emphasizes defense, the lost art of contemporary boxing, he believes.

“Michael Dokes is a good offensive fighter, but he doesn’t know how to defend himself because he didn’t learn it at the beginning.”

Back when Goodman was a minor TV celebrity, he was often asked if he had taught his own children to box.

“All of them went to ballet school,” he recalls of his four daughters. “It taught them self-confidence.”