The Rarest of Gyms : Backyard Boxing Shrine Houses a Treasure of Untold Worth

From the time he was a street kid growing up in East Los Angeles, Joe Meza had been hearing the stories about his Uncle Ramone the Fighter, the most famous relative in the family. Ramone Montoya was a professional in the 1930s, and a good one, winning the California featherweight crown. He once beat a top contender named Newsboy Brown. But he never got a shot at the world title.

At 13, Meza visited his uncle in Brawley, a California town just a few miles north of Mexicali, Mexico. He met the legend and the legend grew larger. Meza would read the newspaper clippings in a scrapbook compiled by his Aunt Jessie. He would talk with his uncle about boxing. To a young boy, the experience was magical. It gave him a lifelong love of boxing and it ignited a dream.

One day, Joe Meza would open his own gym.

It is 5 p.m. on a weekday on a quiet Pacoima street. The modest neighborhood is known for the junior high where rock ‘n’ roller Richie Valens went to school. Pine and palm trees share the same front yard. Men push ice-cream carts on the sidewalks. Urchins play in the driveway of a house where white ceramic ducks stand guard on the front lawn.

Ricardo Alvarez, a sixth-grader, pedals an old, repainted bike toward a stucco ranch house set back from the street. A white fence runs across the front yard and a cord of firewood is stacked against a wall. At first glance, the house doesn’t look any different from its neighbors. It’s just bigger, thanks to a recent 20-by-30-foot addition that butts up against the garage.

Alvarez rides up a long driveway and parks his bike by the room. Curtains cover the only window. Alvarez, short and pudgy with a bristling flattop, looks serious as he walks through the door and steps into a dream-come-true, the Joe Meza Gym.

“I built it with these hands,” Meza says, holding out calloused palms. Meza, lean and wiry with flecks of gray in his hair and mustache, stands in his driveway and looks lovingly at the gym. Reality was every bit as good as the dream. Disguised as a recreation room, the place is a modern-day version of what used to be called the “backyard gym,” which is thought to be extinct in the San Fernando Valley.

“As far as we know, this is the only one of its kind left,” Meza says, shaking his head sadly. Every afternoon on weekdays, Meza, 58, opens the gym from 5 to 7 and the sounds of boxing filter softly into the neighborhood. Cops often show up with carloads of youngsters. Alvarez rides five blocks to learn to fight. Eddie Michel, 11, comes all the way from Encino. On some days, three or four boxers work out; on others, as many as a dozen pack the little gym.

When he opened the gym, Meza didn’t charge for its use and it was often overloaded with 20 or 30 youths. “But they weren’t putting anything into it, and so they weren’t getting anything out of it,” Meza says. “Now I charge $10 a month, and they figure, ‘I got 10 bucks invested,’ so they care. We teach them to be good citizens, to be responsible, but a lot can’t afford the money, so I don’t press it.”

Gentle and patient, Meza supervises the workouts, a hand covering his chin as he sinks deeply into thought. “You’re dropping your left hand too much when you back up,” he says to a super-bantamweight named Javier Macias, the only pro Meza trains. Activity swirls around Meza, who is always swiveling to catch the action. Macias is sparring in the ring, his face peeking out from behind protective headgear. Alvarez and Michel are popping the two heavy bags that are suspended from thick pine beams. Meza swivels.

“Don’t hop,” he says to Alvarez. “It’s one-two-three automatic. Fool him into thinking the left is coming. Get in position.” Alvarez is unsuccessful. Meza gets behind him and they move in sync. “Let me explain again so you remember what I tell you,” he says softly. “Get those hands higher. Pivot those feet.”

Meza is clearly doing what he enjoys best. “I love this,” he says. “It’s in my heart. I am a lucky man.”

It was luck that eventually guided Meza into boxing. Twenty-five years passed since his visit to Uncle Ramone. He married and raised three children with his wife Gloria. Meza supported his family as a masonry contractor. He and Gloria spent a lot of nights at the fights in places like the Olympic Auditorium and the Hollywood Legion Stadium. The closest he came to opening a gym was stuffing a duffel bag with rags and hanging it in the garage for Joe Jr.

Joe Jr. went to the fights with his parents. Fueled by his father’s passion for the sport, he wanted to learn to box. In 1969, Gloria was working part-time in a Pacoima thrift shop run by the late Hal Benson. Benson also managed fighters, and one day he was visited in the shop by Johnny Flores. More than 20 years before, Flores had entered the fight game as a social worker for the Catholic Youth Organization at a settlement house in Watts. By the ‘50s, he was training fighters at his backyard gym in Pacoima.

“I told Joe, ‘Maybe you can take Joey to his gym,’ ” Gloria recalls. The first day Meza showed up with his son in tow, he knew his life was going to change. As an unpaid volunteer, he spent every afternoon at the gym, first doing menial jobs but always observing, soaking up boxing’s rigid training techniques.

“I kept my eyes opened and learned,” Meza says. He watched fighters like Jerry Quarry and Bobby Chacon develop their skills in Flores’ gym. He saw Joe Jr. become a Junior Golden Gloves champion of Los Angeles. When Flores needed someone to help him run the gym in 1970, he didn’t have to look far. “It was automatic,” Meza says. “I was there every day anyway. I never boxed myself, but Johnny was a great teacher. Everything I know I learned from him.”

Flores and Meza became partners. “He’s a perfectionist,” says Flores, now assistant director of the Youth Club for the Los Angeles Dept. of Recreation and Parks. Three years ago, after 30 years in the same house, Flores and his wife decided to move to Valencia. Their three children were grown and had moved out and the house was too big for two people. As soon as the for-sale sign went up, Meza took it as a cue to began work on his own gym. From the time Flores’ place was closed to the moment Meza opened his, only four weeks passed without a backyard gym in Pacoima.

Construction took about three months. Meza, with help from his son and a few fighters, did all the work himself for about $7,000. Flores gave him the ring and some equipment. “Johnny is forever helping me out,” Meza says. When Flores found out that boxing equipment--mouthpieces to gloves--from the 1984 Olympics was being given away, he made sure Meza’s gym was one of four local clubs to share the leftovers.

With whitewashed walls devoid of the obligatory boxing posters, Meza’s gym would lack character were it not for the old equipment, which gives the room the feel of a museum. One of the heavy bags, its leather cracked and faded, is bound with duct tape to hide the wounds. An ancient medicine ball has been pounded over the years into an spheroid weighing, what, about 12 pounds?

Meza frowns. Only 12 pounds? he says. “I’ve caught fish bigger than that.” He reaches under a bench and produces a worn bathroom scale, its calibrations barely visible anymore. He puts the medicine ball on the scale. “Fifteen pounds,” he announces, satisfied that his eye hadn’t failed him.

Youngsters who work out in his gym are told at the start about the history of the ring. It is thought to be more than 50 years old. In 1950, Flores dismantled it in his backyard, loaded it on a truck and drove to Las Vegas, where the ring was used for the Sugar Ray Robinson-Gene Fullmer middleweight title fight. Other boxing greats have danced on its spongy canvas. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier took turns sparring in the ring before the Thrilla in Manila.

Meza runs a hand over the ropes, which are barely covered with crumbling rubber. “I probably should get some new wrapping for these,” he says.

To his chagrin, Meza had to cut a foot off the ring to fit it in his gym, so the dimensions are now 20-feet-long by 19-feet-wide. But it wasn’t a case of bad planning. “I knew I’d have to do it,” Meza says. “I didn’t want to go any wider with the gym. It would have stuck out in the driveway too far. This way I could keep my house the way I wanted it.”

The age of the equipment reflects the time-honored traditional approach Meza takes to boxing. No Nautilus or biofeedback machines for him. Like all old-time boxing men, he doesn’t believe in weights. Just the basics: sit-ups, rope jumping, roadwork, sparring, shadow boxing and bag punching, repetition and discipline.

“I like the format here,” says Eddie Michel’s father, Bob. “There are a lot of values to be learned in this. I told Eddie when he started, ‘It’s like life. You want to be good, you’ve got to work. It’s not going to be easy.’ ”

Bob Michel, owner of an alarm company, watches Eddie attempt to box the so-called “crazy bag,” which is suspended at head level by rubber ropes anchored to both the ceiling and floor. The bag responds unpredictably to a punch, often snapping back at the attacker. Meza goes over to him, gets into a crouch and demonstrates the correct stance.

“Get that chin behind those hands,” he says. Eddie has been working out at the gym for a few weeks. His father found it only by making numerous phone calls, finally tracking it down after reaching the Ten Goose Gym, which referred him to the California Boxing Commission, which told him to call Johnny Flores. For Eddie’s first few lessons, all he did was skip around the ring punching air with his left hand.

“It all starts with the jab,” said Joe Jr., a Lockheed machinist who teaches at the gym at least three days a week. “Then you show them how to place their feet. Everything works off that. After they learn those things, they can work the right hand off the jab.”

Joe Jr., who gave up boxing to concentrate on cross-country and became a City champion at San Fernando High, is not the only member of the family to help out at the gym. Gloria Meza washes towels, gets gloves stitched at a local shoe-repair shop, handles calls from promoters and advises fighters on their diet. But her interest in attending fights diminished when she was involved in a riot at the Forum a few years ago.

“The fans didn’t like the decision,” Meza says, “and tore the Forum apart. They burned seats and overturned cars. I hid Gloria behind the cigarette machine, and then I heard a guy yell, ‘Let’s go get the cigarette machine!’ We got out of there by the skin of our teeth. She stopped going to fights.”

Now that he’s satisfied his dream, Meza has one more fantasy in mind: winning a championship. “We want to come up with a fighter who’ll make it to the top,” he says. “It’s like roulette. Spin the wheel and here comes your guy. We came close a few years ago. We had a featherweight who beat the No. 9 contender. But he went back to college to get his master’s degree. I told him, ‘You can make a lot of money in the ring. Get an education later.’ ”

Meza likes to tell the story about a fighter he trained for only one fight. “He was a local kid from San Fernando High,” Meza says. “He came to the gym and asked me to teach him how to box. He had something going with some guy at school. So I trained him for two months and then he didn’t show up for a while. When he came back, he told me, ‘I won.’ That’s my unbeaten fighter.”