Historic Boxing Mecca Is on the Ropes

The Olympic Auditorium, which has hosted weekly boxing matches for most of its 62 years, is padlocked--closed since Sept. 30 when leaseholder Lester Kerschner’s agreement ran out. Its garish, yellow marquee is empty and old papers swirl around its entrance.

Opened Aug. 5, 1925, the mauve, concrete fortress at the corner of 18th Street and Grand Avenue had hosted scores of world championship fights and attracted such celebrity boxing fans as Al Jolson, Barbara Stanwyck, Steve McQueen, Sylvester Stallone and James Caan. It was the set for the original “Rocky” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight” movies and, when there was no boxing card, it gathered in hundreds of thousands of wrestling and roller derby fans. Briefly, it even served as a home for USC and UCLA basketball.

But the place felt like a boxing arena--and with boxing cards featuring Mexican national and Chicano fighters, it became a rallying place for Latino fight fans.

Now those same fans are wondering whether the Olympic has gone down for the final count.

The only person who can answer that question is owner Jack Needleman, and Needleman has been reluctant to talk. Both Kerschner and former Olympic fight promoter Rogelio Robles say they have been unable to work out a new lease with Needleman, who counts many parking lots among his 58 Los Angeles properties.

In a brief telephone interview, Needleman implied that an earlier Times story that speculated that the Olympic would be turned into a parking lot was incorrect. But he brushed aside more specific questions, adding only: “I’m out and running for lunch now. You do what you have to do.”

Wrestling With Possibilities

Fight fans hoping for a reprieve for the Olympic might take solace from the words of Edgar Fajardo of Benjamin Mora & Associates/California Pro Wrestling. Fajardo, who has been seeking a lease to promote wrestling at the auditorium, said Needleman told him that he realized the Olympic’s importance to the fight community, and that the building would not be torn down. It looks like the lease for the Olympic will go either to his organization, to a group run by Robles to promote boxing or to both, Fajardo said.

Whatever the machinations of promoters and owners, if the auditorium does go permanently dark, it will be the end of an era for fight fans.

“That Olympic had the magic,” said Danny Villanueva, the general manager of KMEX-TV (Channel 34) and a fight fan and one-time boxing promoter. “It was steamy in there and it was boxing like the guy said--down and dirty . . . with those tight, little dressing rooms with the low ceilings. You almost felt claustrophobic.

That atmosphere, Villanueva said, is missing at modern facilities like the Forum and such citadels of “yuppie boxing” as the Irvine Marriott Hotel.

There was a special feeling that swept the crowd, Villanueva remembered, when a “great fighter” like Pajarito Moreno was on the night’s card: “. . . when Pajarito left the dressing room, the ripple would go through the crowd even before they could see him. The guy’s charisma was so incredible that the people could sense him and that place would shake with chants of ‘Me-hee-co, Me-hee-co, Me-hee-co.’ ” For the person who was there for the first time, he added, “it was almost frightening because of the volume of the noise.”

That atmosphere--so real it could have been a boxing arena movie set--didn’t escape Luis B. Magana, 77, who for 45 years handled the Olympic’s publicity with the local Spanish-language press. “The Olympic smells like boxing gloves, it smells like resin, it smells like sweat,” Magana said. “That’s what makes the Olympic so great. . . .”

An original seating capacity of 15,300 made the auditorium the largest of its kind ever built for boxing in the West, Magana said, and fans began flocking to the arena almost as soon as the first event could be held.

The place felt like a boxing arena in part because of the seating arrangement. Except for the first 17 rows, fans in casual clothes sat in seats which had been steeply tiered from the lower floor to the balcony, so that a spectator could always see over the person in front of him. It was an atmosphere conducive to yelling and getting involved.

Spectator’s Stadium

When the auditorium opened in 1925, Times sports writer Bill Henry observed the tiered seating and also noted that “underneath the ring itself is a tunnel leading to the subterranean caverns where the gladiators are fed raw meat while the preliminaries are on. The tunnel also will serve as a handy means of exit for the humble journalists if the fans get to throwing things.” Henry’s remark was more on line than he knew.

One of the first Chicano idols was Bert Colima, a Whittier fighter whose real name was Epifanio Romero but who took the nom de plume Colima because he did not want his parents to know he was boxing.

Colima started an endless line of Chicano and Mexican national crowd pleasers who included Baby Arizmendi, Art Aragon, Enrique Bolanos, Danny (Little Red) Lopez, Carlos Palomino, Lupe Pintor, Pepino Quevas, Mando Ramos and Lauro Salas.

They fought hundreds of fights and many championship bouts at the Olympic, and many were most brought along by the expert development and marketing techniques of promoter Aileen Eaton.

The hard-boiled and sometimes charming redhead, the most successful female promoter in boxing history, reigned at the Olympic from 1942 through 1980, developing fighters on small boxing cards which lost money--to get them ready for big bouts which more than recouped the losses.

Sometimes when a dream match developed, the fans did not like the result. After Japan’s Hiroyuki Ebihara scored a split decision over Mexican flyweight Alacran Torres in 1964, some of the 9,400 spectators ripped out heavy steel chairs and billboards from the balcony and hurled them down on the main floor.

According to news reports, several people were cut by flying bottles, and fans ripped out water pipes which sent water streaming down the balcony stairs to the main floor. “I locked myself in an upstairs office,” recalls Don Fraser, boxing public relations director with Magana at the Auditorium between 1959 and 1967. “They were smashing at the doors. I thought they were going to throw me out an upstairs window. Fortunately the doors held.”

Tragedy In the Ring

Sometimes the boxers did not fare well, either. In 1980 Welshman Johnny Owen, 24, was knocked out by bantamweight champion Lupe Pintor. He never regained consciousness and died six weeks later. Three years afterward, baby-faced bantamweight Kiko Bejines died of injuries suffered in a championship bout with Albert Davila.

But most fans remember the Olympic as a pleasant place. “It was never frightening or threatening. It was just good-natured sports fans. We never had trouble,” said actor James Caan, a frequent spectator at the Olympic and now the manager of his own fighter, heavyweight Mike Hunter.

The Olympic reminded him, Caan said, “of St. Nicholas Arena on the west side of Manhattan in New York. Those neighborhood people came every week. Everybody knew everybody else. It was sort of like a town meeting.”

Indeed, the central location in downtown Los Angeles enabled fans to come from all over by car or, in the early days, street car. Once inside, the spectators in the balcony might play cards and talk boxing while waiting for the first event. The smell of hot dogs and mustard wafted through the air.

Once the fights started, fans often found themselves in distinguished company. “All of a sudden you turn your head to the right and you see Sylvester Stallone,” said Eduardo (Lalo) Diaz, a Los Angeles meat market owner who bought ringside tickets for the fights for 30 years. “Then you see Burt Reynolds. Once, during the fight of Bobby Chacon, I had the pleasure to be sitting down with Steve McQueen.”

Many Mexican national and Chicano boxers who heard those cheers were doubly pumped up because they knew the bouts were being broadcast not only to the Southland but to Mexico. Former lightweight champion Mando Ramos remembers that as soon as he began riding to the Olympic fights at age 8 with his father, he started dreaming about fighting there. “I used to sit back in the bleachers and dream about filling that place up. And (later) I did,” he said.

Part of L.A. Heritage

Fraser contends that the Olympic is a much more important part of the community than the Los Feliz movie theater, whose threatened demolition has aroused preservationists.

“There’s been more to do about that (the theater) than there has been about the Olympic, and yet it couldn’t stand close to the Olympic as far as heritage and what it’s been to the city,” Fraser said. “The Olympic was a major event when it opened. It was the biggest boxing arena in the West (for decades).”

Magana agreed. “It’s a landmark,” he said. “There’s some old houses that they’re trying to save in the Olympic area. This is much more important.”

If the building is a landmark, one way to keep it standing, temporarily at least, would be to have it designated a Historical Cultural Landmark by the city.

If the city took such action, it would probably take Needleman up to a year to take out permits and file a required environmental impact report, according to Jay Oren, the architect for the city’s Cultural Affairs Department.

Oren said the Olympic “might well” qualify for Cultural Landmark status by meeting city standards as a building of “particular historic or cultural significance” or as a structure “. . . identified with the main currents of . . . local history.”

But Cultural Landmark designation would not guarantee the Olympic’s survival. Needleman could still tear the auditorium down if his impact report met state requirements, Oren said.

If Needleman keeps the Olympic closed or tears it down, fight fans will be forced to go elsewhere to indulge their passion.

“The real what we called hueso colorado (red-boned) fans will go to the Forum, to the Sports Arena,” Magana said, “but the other ones won’t. They say that’s for ice skating, that’s for basketball, that’s for hockey.”

Interest Waning

Others say that if the Olympic dies, so will local Latino interest in boxing.

“Mexican fans are now getting real Americanized and are going for baseball ever since Fernando Valenzuela went with the Dodgers,” said Joe Olmos, chief inspector for the California State Athletic Commission.

“They’re also going to soccer,” said Olmos, a former boxing trainer, manager and referee. “It’s a new generation and Mexican kids don’t want to be fighters any more. They’d rather be in some other sport.”

Ramos says because of its history he would miss the Olympic if it were torn down and he had to go elsewhere to see fights. So would many fans. “I think it’s like your house,” said Abraham Rangel, a Los Angeles jeweler who has held ringside seats for Olympic fights since 1946. “Sometimes you can buy a better house (elsewhere), but you like your own neighborhood.”

Magana would also be reluctant to leave his home away from home. A few weeks ago after the last Olympic event, a wrestling match, he hauled his desk from the auditorium to his garage and refinished it. The desk now sits in the dark garage along with his old standard typewriter, framed drawings of boxers and “pictures and pictures and pictures” of main-event Los Angeles fighters.

Magana will miss the crowds and the action at the Olympic, but he will also miss the boxers, especially the Mexican warriors.

“In the years that I worked there I have seen young fighters walk through those doors loaded with dreams and plans and illusions and I’ve seen them walk out as idols, as world champions,” he said.