Still Fighting: : Ex-Boxer Muniz Battles the Real World

Former welterweight contender Armando Muniz tries not to sound bitter about his boxing career. But it isn’t always easy.

More than seven years after retiring from the sport with his dream of becoming a champion shattered, the 40-year-old Muniz is still struggling for an identity outside of the boxing ring.

He is making progress, but it isn’t always easy.

It has meant driving long distances from his home in Mira Loma near Riverside and working long hours at two jobs in the San Gabriel Valley.

He teaches eighth grade science and learning-opportunity classes at Baker Intermediate School in El Monte and also sells real estate in Monterey Park. Most of his working days are at least 14 hours, leaving little time for fun and family.

It isn’t the easiest of life styles, but for Muniz it is a means toward achieving long-term goals.

“If I decide to work eight hours like the average guy, that’s all I’ll ever be,” he said. “It’s the price I’m paying to keep my family satisfied. I’m doing it because I have to, but it’s also because I want to.”

Muniz hopes to achieve the financial security and professional acclaim that always seemed to elude him as a boxer.

With a 65-9-1 record as a pro, Muniz certainly had the mark of a winner. But his four defeats in welterweight championship bouts, two of which ended with controversial suddenness, are embedded in Muniz’s mind.

The first, against long-time champion Jose Napoles of Mexico in March of 1975 in Acapulco, might have been the most difficult loss for Muniz to accept.

A heavy underdog, Muniz was on the verge of putting Napoles away, when referee Ramon Berumen stopped the bout in the 12th round of the scheduled 15. Napoles was bloodied and struggling, but Berumen ruled that Napoles’ cuts had been caused by Muniz’s head, said that the champion had been leading on points and therefore retained the title.

“They stopped the fight and declared him a winner because they said I butted him in the third round and that caused cuts over both eyes,” Muniz recalled.

Muniz had been warned four times about butting, three times in the third round.

He still blames Jose Sulaiman, president of the World Boxing Council, for stopping that fight. He says Sulaiman was at ringside and conferred with the referee before the fight was stopped.

“To this day, I know I beat him and Jose Sulaiman knows that too,” Muniz said. “ . . . He knows it and I know it. Some day, we’ll get together again and he’ll ask, ‘What did I ever do to you?’ But I won’t have to say a thing. He’ll know.”

Muniz got a rematch in July of 1975 in Mexico City, and Napoles a unanimous decision.

“I fought the wrong fight and I wasn’t prepared,” Muniz said. “But if I had won the first fight, the rematch would not have been in Mexico City”

Despite his disenchantment, Muniz decided to work toward another title shot.

“The dream was there, but I was 31 years old and by that time it was all psychological,” he said. “After the Napoles fight, nobody would fight me. To put it bluntly, I was naive. I thought that if I worked hard and fought hard, I could win the championship.”

Muniz finally did get another title bout, against Carlos Palomino in January of 1977 at the Olympic Auditorium. Palomino was declared the winner on a technical knockout with 36 seconds left in the 15th round of what would probably have been a split decision had the fight gone to the end of the round. At the start of the 15th, each fighter was ahead on one official card and the third had them even. Muniz, however, was knocked down just before referee John Thomas stopped the fight.

Thomas was quoted at the time as saying: “I didn’t stop it sooner because I thought (Muniz) was still in the fight. But then I had to stop it because Muniz was going to get hurt.”

Muniz remembered it another way. “I was not cut and I wasn’t hurt,” he said. “I was just very tired. I could have gone another few seconds. The referee shouldn’t have stopped the fight.”

He got a rematch with Palomino in May of 1978 at the Olympic Auditorium but lost a unanimous 15-round decision.

“I was 32 years old and I was kidding myself,” he said. “I lost the fight fair and square.”

Muniz had thought of retiring after the second fight against Palomino and, in fact, did step away from the ring for a while, trying his hand at politics.

Taking advantage of his popularity among Latinos, Muniz ran as an independent for the state assembly’s 59th district in Montebello in November of 1978. Although he started his campaign late, he says he still wound up with 24% of the vote.

But with bills piling up, Muniz could not afford to stay away from boxing. He gladly accepted when he was offered $26,000 to fight Sugar Ray Leonard, then a fast rising welterweight, in January of 1979.

“After seven months with no money and no fighting, I wanted to fight again,” Muniz said. “I had to fight because I needed the money and the only guy I could get a fight with was Leonard. I was in shape, but in retrospect I was fighting time.”

He was also fighting bursitis, which flared up when Leonard hit him in the elbow in the third round. After the round, Muniz’ manager, Vic Weiss, told the referee that the fight was over. Not long after the bout, Muniz decided that it had been his last.

“It was an anticlimactic ending,” Muniz said. “I cried like a baby afterward, but Vic told me I had to quit fighting and start thinking about my family.

“My kid even got into a fight in school over it. After I found out, I just went upstairs and cried. That’s when it hit me that I had to quit. I had promised my wife that I would quit.”

The boxing career ended about as inconspicuously as it had started for Muniz.

Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, Muniz moved with his family to El Paso, Tex., when he was 7, and began boxing when he was 13.

“I was an average kid and, to be honest, I was basically a little chicken,” Muniz said. “I wasn’t the kind who used to get into fights. I was a good kid, but I wasn’t the strongest kid on the block. So I got picked on.”

Muniz remembers watching boxing on television with his father, who idolized the top fighters, and that encouraged him to become a boxer.

“My dad was a hard man and I never felt he accepted me, so I decided to become a fighter,” Muniz said. “It was hard to measure up to my dad’s standards because of it. One day I saw an ad in the El Paso Times for (the) Golden Gloves (program) and I was only 13 years old and you had to be 14. So I lied about my age.”

He was accepted for Golden Gloves and was matched against a fighter named Tony Romero in a three-round bout. Muniz lost a decision and said it was the longest six minutes of his life. But there was a positive side.

“Afterward, a kid from school who saw me fight came up to me and said, ‘Boy, are you tough.’

“The next day in school, it was the difference between night and day. All of my friends heard I was in a fight and all of a sudden it was ‘Stay away from Armando. He’s a boxer.’ It was instant respect.”

Muniz had to put his boxing career on hold, though, when he moved to Artesia with his family about a year later. Under California Interscholastic Federation rules, he could not compete as a boxer and play prep sports, and he was also involved in other sports. At Artesia High, Muniz starred in football, wrestling and track and was an honor student with a 3.5 grade-point average.

“I was following my dad’s wish for me to be a good student,” Muniz said. “ My high school years were devoted to my school work. During the summer, I trained as a boxer, but I didn’t fight.”

He was a good enough football player to receive a scholarship to Cerritos College in Norwalk, where he played for two years before transferring to UCLA on a wrestling scholarship. In his spare time, he boxed as an amateur.

Muniz would have finished college in 1968 if it had not been for the Vietnam War. He got his draft notice before his fourth year.

But before reporting, Muniz competed in the Western Region Olympic trials and won in the welterweight division, which earned him an opportunity to compete in the 1968 U.S. Olympic boxing team trials.

“I won the trials out of nowhere,” he said. “They told me, ‘Win the fight and you go to the Olympics.’ If I had lost, I probably would have gone to Vietnam. How’s that for incentive? Once I was on the Olympic team I was reassigned (by the Army) and got a chance to continue fighting.”

Although Muniz lost in the quarterfinals at the Mexico City Games, he said: “My being there was a dream come true.”

Muniz spent his remaining two years of military service representing the Army in boxing competitions, and won in the first of the U.S.-Soviet matchups.

He did not wait long to start his professional boxing career after leaving the Army. “I left the Army in June of 1968 and went into pro fighting in July,” he said. “After my first fight as a pro, I knew I wouldn’t need to have another career for a while.”

Although Muniz never got to wear a world championship belt, his 12-year pro career did have its moments. He defeated Canada’s Clyde Gray for the North American Boxing Federation welterweight title in 1972. He also fought most of the top welterweights of the 1970s including Napoles, Palomino, Emile Griffith, Hedgemon Lewis and Ernie (Indian Red) Lopez.

“Even though I didn’t win a title, I fought everybody who was anybody in the division,” Muniz said. “That’s something a lot of champions can’t say. People today don’t fight the best competition to become a champion.”

Unfortunately for Muniz, for all the fights he won and all the big-name opponents he fought, there were never great financial rewards. His biggest purses were $30,000 for the second fight against Napoles, the $26,000 he got for the Leonard fight, and $20,000 for each of the Palomino bouts.

“Maybe they could have used me on television if I would’ve been a champion because people told me they would have,” Muniz said. “But you can market an ex-champion, not an ex-contender.”

Muniz was able to use his name --”I still had a big name in the Mexican community.”--to his advantage toward the end of his pro career. He was a color commentator with Dick Enberg and Stu Nahan on NBC Sportsworld bouts in 1977 and 1978 and later did commentary for the Galavision cable TV network and for KDOC-TV (Channel 56). But he admits that those jobs were mostly to stay close to boxing, not to earn a lot of money.

He also did promotional work for the Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co. during the last six months of his boxing career. That was when he struck up a friendship with Willie Davis, former Green Bay Packer star and pro football Hall of Famer, who was a beer distributor for Schlitz.

Muniz worked for Davis for six years and was hoping to become the company’s first Latino distributor. That was before Schlitz was bought out by the Stroh Brewery Co. and Muniz was released from his contract.

That left Muniz unemployed and at a crossroads. He first turned to real estate, getting his license in 1985.

Muniz, who received his bachelor’s degree in education in 1979, did not have an interest in teaching until a friend, Al Gasparian, suggested that he complete his credential work in 1985.

“We had a community parents’ group meeting on drugs at school and Armando was speaker,” recalled Gasparian, who was principal at Baker School at the time. “During that time, I found out that he was one of only two boxers to have a B.A. degree (Palomino is the other). In the conversation, I asked him if he ever considered teaching.”

Gasparian, now principal at Cogswell Street Elementary School in El Monte, persuaded Muniz to apply as a substitute teacher. Within two months, Muniz had passed the California Basic Educational Skills Test and was a full-time teacher at Baker.

Soon after that, Gasparian learned that the Muniz name still carries weight--at least with parents.

“Last year (at Baker), I was talking to one of the students after school in my office. He had gotten in trouble and his father was there and he thought he saw Armando walk by and he asked in amazement, ‘Is that Armando Muniz?’ I said yes and brought (Muniz) in to say hello and (the father) was very excited.”

Unfortunately for Muniz, he doesn’t have the same name identification with students.

“Kids at the junior high level are impressed, but it’s not lasting,” he said. “They know me as an ex-fighter and they see me on “Taxi” (he made a guest appearance on the show as a boxer) or on KMEX (where he has done Spanish-language commercials), but they’re still here to learn and sometimes it is difficult for them. Being in front of the classroom is not easy because you have to keep the kids under control and maintain your educational objective.”

Teaching, however, is not a high-paying job, which explains why Muniz also sells real estate.

“Unfortunately, my other profession takes priority because in order to do what I want to do in life I need to make a decent living,” he said. “I want to send my kids to college and take my wife on nice vacations and because of that I have to do well in real estate.”

Working at two full-time jobs and commuting long distances has not been easy for Muniz. But he figures it is a fair trade-off considering the unyielding devotion he has received from his wife, Yolanda, and three children over the years.

Muniz has a daughter, Alice, 17, and sons Armando Jr. and Bobby, 15 and 13. Alice is an honor student with a 4.0 grade-point average at Rubidoux High in Riverside, Armando was the quarterback of the Rubidoux freshman football team last season, and Bobby is close to becoming an eagle scout.

Despite never having won a title and having to work long hours, Muniz considers himself fortunate.

“I sorrow over the fact that I didn’t win the championship,” he said. “But in spite of everything, I still consider myself a rich man because I have a wife and three children who love me and I have the gumption to keep on trying.”