Duarte Is Winning a Big Fight : His Bout Tonight Follows a Long One With Alcoholism

No matter how bad it got, and it got pretty bad, Frankie Duarte simply could not walk past a mirror. At home, or more likely in a bar, he just had to stop. Not that he liked what he saw so much. The alcohol and drugs were exacting a terrible toll. His once youthful exuberance had long since been flushed by that deadly solvent. No, he was a boxer. And whenever he saw a mirror, he just had to stop and flick out a combination.

Who didn’t know that he was a boxer, at least in the 1970s, when Duarte climbed all the way to No. 2 in the bantamweight division? In Los Angeles he was a sensational attraction, the kind of action fighter who galvanized the Olympic Auditorium crowd and sent the fans out to the streets in their own adrenaline frenzy.

But in the ‘80s, after a mysterious disappearance, who guessed this stumbling drunk had been anything but, well, a stumbling drunk? For three years, following his last fight in 1979, Duarte admittedly lived a low life of high times, not just a dropout of boxing but of society. His consumption of beer was quite literally staggering. His alliance with drugs went well beyond the recreational use of marijuana.

There was nothing more than his reflexive shadowboxing to suggest he had ever been in a ring.

“I had given up on life,” he said of the three years, which were punctuated as much by blackouts as parties. “Just drifting. I was broke, no car, no home, nothing. A job here and there, pool maintenance or, once, repairing luggage in a luggage factory. But, really, nothing. I couldn’t even sell anything because I had already sold everything I had. And just think: I had been a contender.”

In that bad time, he was a contender only in a barroom mirror or, on a lucky night, in his dreams. “In the dreams I was always in the ring with a top contender,” he said. “I could hear the crowd chanting, ‘Frankie, Frankie.’ And then I’d wake up into a nightmare. That’s when the nightmares started, when I woke up.”

This is not a new story. The tug of alcoholism has brought down many an athlete, with a gravity that is absolute. For Duarte, a likeable kid out of Venice, the tug was not even a sudden thing, although his retirement was abrupt enough. He began drinking at the age of 13, fooling with drugs only a little thereafter. Perhaps his success in the ring only masked the wreckage outside, delayed the inevitable. He was traveling downward all the while, on a steepening road.

But now, amazingly, Duarte is back near the top of that road. You’ve heard that news. He began his comeback two years and nine fights ago. The news is that the comeback has been sustained with a drive and determination he never knew during his athletic peak, and now, at the age of 31, he is fighting once more for contention.

In fact, should he get past the undefeated Jesus Salud tonight at the Forum, he will get more than the $50,000 first prize from the Stroh’s bantamweight tournament. Because it is a fight for the North American Boxing Federation bantamweight title as well, the winner tonight will likely get an automatic top-10 ranking. Duarte’s promoter, Dan Goossen, is already talking that boxing bromide--title shot.

No matter how far he gets, and even if he gets no further than this, Duarte has come a long way. The fact that he’s sober, hasn’t had a drink in four years to the day, suggests the length of his road back. Because it was a long trip going down.

He says he started drinking as a child simply because everyone else was doing it. His family bears no blame, he insists--he still lives with his mother.

“Bad environment,” he said. “That’s all it is.” For whatever reason, Duarte drank and partied and ran with a gang. Joy riding, theft, you name it. “As a teen-ager, it’s being mischievous,” Duarte says. “As an adult, it’s irresponsible.”

But Duarte never developed into a criminal. That wasn’t his style. “I had morals as an adult,” he said. “I never harmed anyone but myself,” a fact that may have had more to do with luck than intentions.

It was in 1979, before his state featherweight championship bout with Francisco Flores, that we last talked with Duarte. During the interview, held at the Olympic Auditorium, the always-obliging Duarte was nevertheless agitated. He was concerned about catching a bus. He had lost his driver’s license.

“What happened was I hit some parked cars and caused a five-car chain reaction crash,” he says.

And for that his license was taken away?

“No, for leaving the scene my license was taken away.”

We paused to understand this, then followed up by asking why in the world he would leave the scene of a five-car crash.

“I didn’t think anybody’d notice,” he’d said.

Reminded of that conversation, Duarte laughed. “I guess I didn’t tell you I was bombed at the time,” he said.

In fact, Duarte was bombed most of the time, and when he wasn’t bombed, he was looking forward to getting bombed. “My only desire in the ‘70s was to get the fight over,” he said. “Even as I went into the ring, I was thinking of the party afterward, bigshot drinker.”

The marvel of his career was that he did as well as he did. “I had natural ability and I was willing to fight to the death,” he said. “I just had a burning desire to win. That I did win, it surely wasn’t because I trained.”

But in a very short time, Duarte began to think exclusively of the partying, less of the fighting and nothing of the training. So, after a fight with Rolando Navarette in June of 1979, Duarte disappeared from the ring and began a party that didn’t stop for three years.

Was it a good time? Duarte might be the wrong person to ask, as most of it was spent in an alcoholic haze. All he remembers is going into a bar with the express purpose of “getting bombed as quickly as possible. They say you can’t get drunk on beer,” he said, “but if you go at it with two hands, you can.”

Anyway, it didn’t take that much to do the job. And what a job it did. “I’d say I was a sloppy drunk,” he said. “I was the kind of drunk I’d be embarrassed to be with.”

It was not any one thing that caused him to stop drinking back in 1982. One thing, though, was the condition of a former featherweight champion he was running with. No, not just the condition of the former champion, but the disrespect he was getting. Could this happen to me, Duarte wondered. Of course, it already had. “That was the shocker,” he said. “I realized, I’ve got to pick myself up, become a responsible citizen.”

There was no more motive than that. The idea of a comeback, certainly lodged in the back of his mind, did not stir him to sobriety. The idea of being 29 and so far behind the rest of his generation, that’s what did it. He had just logged some lost time. It could never be recovered, but the rest of his life could be saved.

So Frankie Duarte, top contender in his day, embarked on a new era and enrolled in welding school. He knew it was a new era when, at the class’ first roll call, nobody stirred at the mention of his name. “That hit me,” he said. “I was used to being stopped on the street. But there, not a soul knew who I was.”

A couple of weeks before he would have tested for a welder’s certificate, Duarte paused. “If I do this, I’ll never come back (to the ring),” he told himself. And that thought surprised him. Through all this, that’s still what he was, then and forever--a boxer. He just hadn’t realized it.

Nobody else believed it, though. The boxing community, which has a monumental tolerance of substandard behavior, wouldn’t touch Duarte. Only Dan and Joe Goossen of the Ten Goose stable in Reseda were willing to take a chance. Though warned away, they invited Duarte to the Ten Goose gym.

If this was a comeback, though, there was work to be done. “I remember the first time I sparred,” Duarte says, “I told Joe Goossen, my trainer, that the canvas is kind of loose, it was gathering around my feet. Later I realized it was that my legs weren’t moving. I was stumbling over the canvas.”

Still, he managed to turn back the clock some. Last year, in a non-title bout with Richie Sandoval, Duarte announced his comeback in earnest, extending the champion all 10 rounds before losing a split decision.

“I’m better then I was at my peak,” he said. “I work harder than I ever did before. I was never a fancy-dan boxer, but now I know how to slip a punch. Now I have desire.”

Duarte credits the Ten Goose gym and Joe Goossen with his comeback, calling the gym his particular Alcoholics Anonymous. But he knows, too, that this thirst for approval is more important to his sobriety and career than anything else. He wants to be liked, respected.

“Stopping drinking, it was hard,” he says. “But then I started getting a couple of pats on the back. It was easier then. Pats on the back--that’s one of the reasons I’m fighting again, or ever did. The crowd chanting, ‘Frankie, Frankie,’ again. . . . “

So, after all this time, the nightmare finally becomes a dream-come-true. And now, when Duarte stops in front of a mirror, he likes what he sees.