A Throwback Punches In on Comeback

The fight mob calls them club fighters. They’re good but not very. They’re usually long on bravery and short on skill.

Not for them the bright lights and hundred-dollar seats of the Garden, the outdoor ballparks, the instant stadiums of Vegas. They make their livings in the creaky arenas in the old neighborhoods, or sometimes in fancier places where the customers eat steak and drink beer.

Their fights are mini-wars. They bleed like bad bulls but they never throw in a bad fight. They fight for short money and sometimes they have to have 9-to-5 jobs to go to between the nosebleeds. They make their fights like a guy on a ledge. They fight other guys who are tough, canny, impervious to pain. They act as if it’s a mortal sin to step backward.

Their payoff is scar tissue and laryngitis. Sometimes they bleed where it doesn’t show, like in the head. They treat defeat with a shrug, victory as luck, and they are frequently the nicest people in the skein of sport. They know there’s somebody out there just as tough as they are, something a guy in a three-piece suit who has three phones and a rug on the office floor may never get to think about. It makes them better persons.

They used to be what fighting was all about in the days before it became just another TV spectacular or a Saturday afternoon extravaganza in between the log rolls and the stunt skiing.

Twenty years ago, Frankie Duarte would have been a club fighter, a hero in the neighborhood but unranked nationally. But fighters today aren’t pros. They’re performers, hype artists, and there’s only a handful of them who have any clear idea what they’re doing in the ring.

Frankie Duarte knows. He could write the book on what to do in the ring, he’s been in so many of them. Frankie knows all about slipping punches, hooking off the jab, covering up in the corners and how to cut off a ring.

Frankie was one of the best in the business when he started his pro career. He knocked out 14 of his first 16 opponents, some in the first round. He had a dazzling left, and his right came in like a falling safe. His nickname in the projects was El Huero, or Paleface, but El Campeon was not entirely out of the question the way he started.

Then, our huero did what countless fighters out of the barrio--or the log cabins--had done historically: He overmatched himself.

He took on the bottle, the parties, the street drugs. He palled around with the backslappers, the fast talkers, the deal-makers.

He could handle himself in the ring but he began to take some shots to the liver from a glass that no glove could deliver, and some shots to the lungs that Jack Dempsey couldn’t have landed. Frankie had a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

He had trouble not only making the weight but also getting up in the morning. He finally fought Albert Davila, and it was like watching a train wreck.

Davila used Duarte’s head as a light bag and, when Frankie looked in the mirror after the fight, he thought it was two other people.

Frankie got $13,000 for that fight and a terrible headache. “Heck, I didn’t train,” he says. “I couldn’t make the weight and I weakened myself more. You might say Davila took me out in the fifth round, but I took myself out.”

Davila went on to title shots. Duarte went back to the bar and the guys who would tell him what he’d do to Davila the next time.

There was no next time. Davila didn’t need him anymore, and neither did anyone else.

Duarte drifted into retirement and culture shock.

“I palled around with Raul Rojas,” he said. “We used to go to this Scotchman’s bar near where we lived, and to me (Rojas) was a celebrity. He had been the featherweight champion of the world, after all, and I’d see the way these people treated him when we’d be drinking, like, ‘Oh, yeah, Raul Rojas, he’s getting kinda loud, I think we better go now.’

“Here’s a guy, he beat champions, and they treat him like he’s dirt! I couldn’t get over it.

“Then I went to Santa Monica College, and we go through this roll call and nobody even remembers me. I mean, I’d been on national TV, even. I’d fought contenders, and they didn’t even know who I was.”

Frankie even tried a pool-cleaning business for a while. “I wasn’t even any good at that,” he said. “I didn’t always show up.”

One day, he took stock and realized that booze and cigarettes roughed him up more than a dozen Albert Davilas could have.

“I quit,” he said. “I haven’t had a drink or cigarette or anything in 2 1/2, 3 years now.”

He even got his nose fixed. “I never got married. I’m kinda shy, but I thought maybe if I got my nose fixed, I might get to have a family.”

Instead, though, he went back to get it broken some more. Frankie Duarte had his first fight in 1973, and his last one had been in 1982 when he decided to return to the ring this year.

“At first, I turned purple in the gym,” he said. “I felt like I was under water. I kept thinking the canvas was loose and it was making my legs trip. Then I realized it was my legs that were loose.”

Duarte fought his sixth fight in his comeback on the Al Goossen fight card at the Country Club in Reseda the other night. They handed him a tough kid out of Denver, Ron Cisneros, a banger who was sneaky-quick and highly undiscourageable.

It took El Huero a few rounds to decipher Cisneros, but when he did, he painted a picture on him. Cisneros’ face looked like a sunset by the eighth round, when his corner stopped the fight.

At 31, Frankie Duarte is the classic club fighter, a throwback. His fights are as impersonal as a mob hit, as professional as a funeral. But the fight game being what it is today, the club fighter is the elite of his craft.

Frankie hopes that age and cunning will get him another shot at the top. This time, he’ll know what to do with it, and if he spends his money in a bar, it’ll be to own it.