He’s His Own Man Now, and a Fighter : Roberto Medina Believes He Has Future as a Boxer and That His Past Is Buried

Roberto Medina and John Garcia finally parted ways June 12. Neither mourned the split. Theirs was an awkward association.

They never were friends. In fact, Medina despised Garcia and everything he stood for. Garcia knew he could never be like Medina. His past would not allow it.

Yet, their lives were entwined. They were closer than twins.

You see, Medina was Garcia and Garcia was Medina.

But on that Thursday morning last spring, John E. Garcia, a 30-year-old convict with a record of 61 arrests, walked out of a Colorado prison and became Roberto Medina, professional boxer and reputable citizen of St. Petersburg, Fla.

So ended Garcia’s bitter life, and thus began Medina’s.

“The other guy died the moment I left,” said Medina, who legally changed his name June 8. “Where I left, the other guy stayed. John Garcia stayed in prison.”

Actually, Medina was born one day in 1982, when Garcia, nearing the end of a sentence for forging stolen checks, walked away from an honor prison camp in Rifle, Colo., and made his way to this sleepy town on Florida’s west coast, best known for spring training baseball and retirees from the Midwest.

He struggled at first in finding work and a place to live. But he stayed out of trouble. Eventually, he found work as a handyman at a motel. He had taken up boxing in prison at Canyon City, Colo., to show how tough he was, and continued it here, prospering as an amateur at the St. Pete Boxing Club. He shared an apartment with a friend from the club.

Later, he turned pro and fought on the USA cable network’s fight of the week. At the club, he helped youngsters who had been in trouble, as he had during his youth.

Medina also met a local girl, Kathy Graham, and fell in love.

He built a 12-0-1 record and was matched with Olympian Meldrick Taylor in a six-round bout at Norfolk, Va., the fight to be shown on “Wide World of Sports.”

The past was past.

It is pass-out-on-your-feet hot on this Thursday afternoon in the St. Pete Boxing Club.

Gangly kids crowd the doorway, most of them only half wanting to go in. Perhaps it’s the heat that keeps them out on the stoop. There is not a wisp of air inside. It’s cooler outside.

Once, this building was a stately home. There’s the fireplace, not 10 feet from the ring. Over there is the bathroom, complete with tub and shower curtain.

Now, sweating kids pound bags, jump rope, do sit-ups. Barry McGuigan, Larry Holmes, Rocky Balboa, Muhammad Ali, champions all, stare out approvingly from posters on the wall.

Medina trains here every day with the same zeal he had when he first walked in off the street.

He will fight an opponent yet to be determined in a six-round bout Sept. 9 at Lexington, Ky. As he enters the building with manager Mike Blumberg, 20 pairs of eyes dart his way.

One voice hollers a greeting. It belongs to Jim McLoughlin, the club’s founder, manager and president.

McLoughlin, 35, once a boxer himself, opened the club to give troubled kids some place to go, something to do. In the process, he has attracted 125 fighters and developed one of the best amateur clubs in Florida.

He doesn’t make a penny out of it, either. He opens the club in the afternoon, then works as the general manager of a bar at night.

“I opened this club five years ago, while I was training for my own fight,” said McLoughlin, whose well defined arms still look quite capable of delivering crushing blows. “But I enjoyed teaching the kids more than my own fighting.”

Little did he know that a living, breathing example of his kind of teaching would one day walk through the door.

“The first day (Medina) walked in, he worked out for 2 1/2 hours,” McLoughlin said. “He made a lot of people wake up.”

Still, he was a mystery man. As long as he followed the rules, he was welcome, McLoughlin said.

“There’s not an older fighter that comes in here that hasn’t been in some kind of trouble with the law,” McLoughlin said. “I just don’t push their past.”

In Medina’s case, there appeared to be no reason to do so. Medina worked out every day. Often he was waiting on the step when McLoughlin got there to open the gym and was the last one to leave. And he showed great promise as a lightweight fighter.

“They were scared to fight Roberto in the amateurs,” Blumberg said. “He had never been knocked down in the gym. He’s one of the hardest punchers I’ve ever seen. He knocked down a heavyweight he was sparring against with a body punch.”

It did not matter that no one knew where he was from, how he’d become such an accomplished boxer without much experience or what his tattoos were all about.

Medina had three--on his arm, chest and back--but one was most curious. It said simply, “John.”

McLoughlin asked him about it one day, but Medina smiled and said in his soft voice: “It’s a long story.”

The tattoos, more than Meldrick Taylor, were his undoing in Norfolk that summer day last year.

Taylor hit Medina with 383 punches, as counted by a ringside computer, in winning a decision. But the tattoos betrayed him.

Before the fight, someone who had recognized him called the police and told them of Medina’s life as John Garcia and his escape from prison.

Medina says he had bad feelings before the fight. He was plagued by dreams of someone chasing him. He says he had an inkling that he was about to be exposed.

Norfolk police, in cooperation with authorities in Colorado, knew where Medina was staying, when he arrived, when he would leave and where he would go afterward. They needed only to wait for Medina to take off his robe, revealing the tattoos. The police made the pinch in the dressing room after the fight.

It sounded like a plot from a bad TV show. Some people even thought it was funny.

It wasn’t funny to Medina. It was the lowest point in what had been a mostly miserable life.

It was back to prison for Medina. Back to that “ugly” place. Back to where he had spent the better part of his life since his 18th birthday. Back with the drug addicts, thieves and murderers he had sought so desperately to leave behind.

All Medina could think of were Kathy and his friends in St. Pete.

“I felt bad about all the people,” he said. “I didn’t want those people thinking I was a phony. . . . All those people who trusted me.”

Those who had trusted him were stunned.

“We were in the Bahamas (at a boxing tournament) when we heard,” said McLoughlin. “We were shocked. The first thing we said was: ‘They got the wrong guy.’ Then the only thing I could think of was: ‘How can I help?’ ”

Medina said he knows who called the police, but doesn’t want to say anything in case that person somehow winds up floating face down in Tampa Bay. He would be the first one accused, Medina said.

“(Capture) was always on my mind,” he said. “I tried to put it out of my mind and I did a pretty good job of it for three years.

“Whoever turned me in tried to hurt me, but they helped me. They did something I wasn’t able to do myself.”

Back in Colorado, a judge sentenced Medina to another year in prison.

This despite an outpouring of support from friends in St. Pete. Letters arrived by the bagful. Kathy, her mother Marlyn and McLoughlin testified as character witnesses.

This was something Medina did not want to part with. The love and admiration of his St. Pete friends was something he never had from his own parents or the hoods he had hung around while growing up in Denver.

This was different.

Medina was born John Garcia in Price, Utah, but moved with his mother to Colorado soon afterward. By the time he was 14, his mother and father had split and his mother’s new husband delivered an ultimatum: “Either he goes or I go.”

The youngster left and soon was earning his living on the streets, mostly in the Denver area. His friends were heroin addicts. Almost everything they did was done to maintain their habits.

Medina tried drugs, but did not like the feelings he got from them. So he sniffed paint instead.

He was in trouble from the time he left home. He was arrested for joy-riding, then for trespassing, then for stealing a bicycle. All before he was 18.

After his first conviction as an adult, he escaped from prison in 1975, staying on the loose for 23 days before he was captured.

He was sentenced to 10 years for his escape, was paroled in 1978, then was back in prison six months later.

“When I was younger I deserved to be in jail, sure,” Medina said. “I didn’t know nothing. I didn’t care. The only people in (jail) are fools and idiots. You can get away with something once. Greed will make you do it again and you’ll get caught. I know I was (a fool). My record speaks for itself.”

Somehow, amid his 61 arrests, Medina found time to get married. He and his wife have been together only six months in the nine years they have been legally married. He has been trying to serve her divorce papers, but he can’t find her.

He hasn’t seen her since shortly after escaping.

While at the honor camp at Rifle--honor camp is the last step before convicts are released--he was assigned to drive a water truck, sprinkling the dirt streets of the town, keeping down the dust.

One day, he drove to the outskirts of town, parked the truck, hiked to a nearby highway then hitchhiked to California to visit his wife.

She didn’t want to see him but told him of a cousin she had in Tampa, so he headed there. The cousin also wanted nothing to do with him.

“I said, ‘Hey, I didn’t ask for no handout,’ ” said Medina, who was running out of places to turn for help. “I took off. I wanted to go to the (Florida) Keys. I wanted to get as far away from Colorado as possible.”

He wound up in St. Petersburg, instead, just across the bay from Tampa. He got a job as a maintenance man at a motel, just a block or so from where he now lives with Graham and her family. He slept on the steps or in a vacant motel room until he had saved enough money to rent an apartment.

“I got ahold of the master key and slept in the rooms,” he said. “I would wake up early and clean it up before I went to work.”

The cozy house in the northwest section of St. Petersburg is a far cry from that motel.

There, love surrounds Medina.

From Kathy. From Mrs. Graham, whose scrapbook serves to chronicle Medina’s boxing career and, indeed, his life as Roberto Medina.

“I had never been to a fight in my 55 years,” said Marlyn Graham, carefully turning the pages. “Here I am, going to boxing, which I hate. Of course, you can hear me screaming (for Roberto).”

There are programs, pictures taken by a nervous hand at ringside, stories from the local papers.

That scrapbook, though, covers only the early career of Roberto Medina, when John Garcia was always just a step or two away.

The fight Sept. 9 will complete Medina’s evolution. Then, he will be fighting under his own name, not an assumed one. And John Garcia will be nowhere around.

“I’m not proud of anything I’ve done,” Medina said. “I’ve been through a lot. I’m me now. I’m happy. I’m not two people. I’m not that other dude. That’s all been disposed of.”