Pint-Sized Pugilists Learn How to Put the KO on Fear

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 the KO on fear. That’s the theme of this program. . . , “ the 70-year-old Goodman said. “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 said. 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 said, recalling the occasional panicked newcomer who did not think that getting hit was such a great idea and had to be lifted bodily and put into 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 said. “They were just punching at me, and I was picking and countering.”

As Goodman explained, 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,” she recalled. “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.”

“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 getting 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,” Land said.

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

Goodman has been boxing since he was a child in Philadelphia. “I never got in a fight myself with anyone,” he said. “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 1936 Olympics trials. He never went to Berlin. He was approached before the games by Jewish leaders, he said. “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 viewed that lost opportunity “with the regret of any great athlete.”

“I wrote the book on it,” Goodman said 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 1950s, Goodman’s “Kid Gloves” was a network TV show, in which kids in boxing gloves did the darndest things, including bolting from the ring and running, crying, into the arms of Mommy.

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 has taught thousands of boys, including such distinguished alumni as Jerry and Mike Quarry.