Shoe Boxes Are Full of Ring Feats

It is a scene that has been repeated countless times.

A reporter approaches a boxer and asks him his record.

“My record?” repeats the fighter, wide-eyed, as if you’d asked him to show his income tax returns. “Uh, my record. Make it 8-5. Yeah, that’s it. Eight and five.”

Make it 8-5? Then the fighter leans over your note pad as you write to make sure you mark down 8-5.

Next you ask him how many knockouts he has.

Again the puzzled look.

“Oh,” he’ll finally say, “give me about . . . four. No, say five. Yeah, five.”

So you go to his manager and he might tell you, rather than 8-5, the record should be 10-5. On to the promoter who will assure you that it is actually 15-5.

The final resort in California is the State Athletic Commission, but even that organization doesn’t always have the answers. Many fighters, especially in this part of the country, are from Mexico and some fights there are not recorded.

One fighter, having given his record as 12-8, was told it actually was listed as 12-9. He had forgotten, he was informed, a loss suffered in Mexico.

“Nope,” he insisted, “I don’t recognize that one.”

And if it wasn’t for Dean Lohuis, maybe no one else would, either.

Lohuis is a soft-spoken accountant with a home in Corona and a front-row seat at every fight arena in Southern California. Whether it’s the Country Club in Reseda or the Forum in Inglewood or the Spruce Goose in Long Beach, Lohuis probably will be there, charting every round of every fight. His specialty is the West Coast, Mexico and Hawaii.

But that’s only the start.

Lohuis has the up-to-date record, age (another area of frequent fabrication among fighters) and manager of every eight-round fighter in the world . He has the same information for every six-round fighter in the United States.

That shifty middleweight from Vegas who thought he put one over on reporters because they didn’t know about that six-round loss in Tibet?

Lohuis knows.

“When I have any doubts about a fighter’s record,” says Marty Denkin of the State Athletic Commission, “I go to Dean Lohuis.”

Lohuis calculates that he has the records of about 15,000 fighters written on index cards stored in nearly two dozen shoe boxes in a room of his house. Lately, he has begun storing material on computer.

He gets his information from an informal worldwide network of friends--stat freaks like himself--who live everywhere from South America to England. He says there are about 25 people who do what he does. Few are as thorough.

“I just had a friend call me up,” he says, “to give me the the complete records of all Italian fighters.”

In addition, Lohuis subscribes to boxing papers and magazines from Australia to South Africa to anywhere else two men enter a ring wearing gloves. Lohuis keeps in contact with state athletic commissions, tapes every fight on every cable station and, of course, is ringside whenever he’s not wasting his time doing something frivolous. Like sleeping. He will travel as far as Tijuana to watch a fight.

This kind of hobby can get expensive, but Lohuis breaks even by publishing his own ring record book, which includes every West Coast fighter, twice a year. He also serves as West Coast editor for a national ring record book.

But Lohuis pays a heavy price in time. He estimates that he devotes about three hours a night on boxing during the week and as much as five to six hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

All this plus a full-time job, a wife and two kids. A pretty complete life, right?

Not for Lohuis.

He officiates football and baseball for high schools and colleges, plus high-school soccer, and keeps statistics for the Cal State Fullerton football and basketball teams. He also travels with the radio crew that broadcasts Fullerton games.

Lohuis, 35, has kept boxing records for 14 years. But what does he do when he needs a break? Surely he must go on vacation.

“Oh yes, that’s the best time to catch up,” he says. “What I’ll do is rent a house by the beach and take my family down there for two weeks. That’s the time when I do nothing but boxing.”

But what about all his records?

“Oh, I just pile all my shoe boxes in the car and take them with me.”

Lohuis has thought about getting a full-time job in boxing, but it hasn’t worked out yet.

“Until I started,” he says, “nobody was doing this. Ring magazine keeps a lot of records, but they couldn’t do it with every fighter in the country. You need someone localized who knows that boxing area.

“Sometimes, for example, you have fighters with the same name. There could be three or four John Browns. Daniel Garcia fought the other night at the Country Club. Well, there is another Daniel Garcia fighting. Sometimes guys with the same name will be fighting in the same weight category. Someone back East keeping records wouldn’t know that. There was a guy in Georgia a couple of years back who fought in six different states in eight days under different names.”

Sometimes all the confusion can result in serious violations.

For example, after a fighter is knocked out in California, he is not supposed to fight again for 45 days. Just recently, however, a fighter was knocked out in San Jose, yet fought about a month later in Arizona, where he was knocked out again.

“There’s a monthly bulletin,” Lohuis says, “listing fighters who have been knocked out. But by the time it comes out, the fighter may have already fought again somewhere else. They are found out eventually, but by then, it’s too late.

“The best thing to do would be to have a passport system. A fighter would have a book with his name in it, his record, his picture, and perhaps his Social Security number. He would have to show it before he could fight anywhere. After a fight, a judge would write down the results in the passport and the fighter would have to show it again the next time he fought. A guy on suspension in one state couldn’t fight in another.”

Don’t hold you breath until that happens.

For now, the worldwide sport of boxing will have to maintain its integrity through a couple of dozen shoe boxes in a Southern California home.