Promoter Jabs His Way Into Hall of Fame

He was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame on Saturday night, the first fighter ever to make it with an 0-5 career record.

0-5?

He wasn’t a great force in the ring, but for more than three decades Don Fraser has certainly been a force in Southland boxing as a promoter-matchmaker-publicist. He even spent a few years as an executive officer with the California State Athletic Commission.

Fraser’s career began at a little-known, long-forgotten site in Los Angeles called the Pico Palace. He currently promotes shows at the Spruce Goose in Long Beach and the Irvine Marriott Hotel. And in between, the Toluca Lake resident has made stops at such varied places as the Valley Music Theatre in Woodland Hills, Devonshire Downs in Northridge, Hollywood Legion Stadium, Long Beach Auditorium, Anaheim Convention Center, Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and, of course, the Olympic Auditorium and the Forum.

And the fighters? Fraser was involved with all the giants of the era in one way or another, from Muhammad Ali to Sugar Ray Robinson to Floyd Patterson.

But his favorite character remains former lightweight and welterweight Art Aragon, Southern California’s “Golden Boy” in the ‘50s.

Fraser, 57, remembers being invited to Aragon’s place more than 30 years ago. The fighter hid the young Fraser in the back with a view of the bedroom while Aragon entertained a famous female movie star of the day.

“I remember Aragon and I were in his car one day,” Fraser says, “when he got into an argument with another driver. Art got out and slapped the guy around and I got sued. I didn’t even touch anybody.”

There were also plenty of laughs.

“One time Aragon showed up for a fight,” Fraser says, “for which he had to weigh 135 pounds. Well, he gets on the scale and he weighs 145. Everybody’s shocked. It looks like the fight is off. Then Aragon laughs, drops his trunks and reveals a weight he’s got strapped around his leg.”

The challenges were different for promoters in those days. The media, far less discriminating than today, would buy the hokiest of stunts. Fraser had his share. He brought a fighter to the Olympic in a helicopter for a press conference, dressed Aragon in everything from Shakespearean costumes to a Vincent van Gogh outfit for prefight shots and even posed a Brazilian fighter with a stripteaser and her pet boa constrictors.

Except Fraser somehow forgot to mention the boa constrictors to the fighter until the last moment.

Once, Fraser was pushing a fight involving a lightweight named Lauro “The Lion” Salas. So Fraser got the idea of posing Salas with a real lion. Fraser, Salas and a photographer went out to a jungle park in Thousand Oaks.

“This lion tamer brings out a ferocious-looking lion,” Fraser recalls, “who starts sniffing around all of us. Salas, wearing boxing gloves, is instructed to stick his left arm into the lion’s face, acting as if he were throwing a jab. The lion takes one look, opens his mouth and tries to take a bite out of Salas’ arm. The only thing that saved him was his reflexes.

“Salas had had enough, but the lion tamer tried to reassure him. ‘He’s not after you,’ the tamer said. ‘He just likes to eat leather.’ ”

Another time, Fraser brought in an African bantamweight named Mensa Kapalongo to fight Carlos Zarate, one of the great bantamweight champions.

“This guy Kapalongo was horrible,” Fraser says, “so I paid a guy $20 to take a dive in a sparring session, hoping that would build up interest.

“It didn’t help. Zarate put him down in three rounds in one of the worst fights I’ve ever seen. It remains my No. 1 embarrassment.”

There were plenty of triumphs as well. Fraser made $3 a week to do publicity and work corners at the Pico Palace when he began. Two decades later, he put together the second fight between Muhammad Ali and Ken Norton. Although neither was heavyweight champion at the time, the bout, staged at the Forum, drew 13,000 along with a gate of nearly half a million dollars, still a state record.

Fraser has no plans to retire, but he admits it’s not as much fun as it used to be.

“Now you’ve got so many champions in every division,” he says, “you get jaded. I’m in the business and I couldn’t tell you all the champions.”

Fraser also apparently doesn’t plan to fully retire from fighting. He put his 0-5 record on the line several years ago at the Forum against Bill Caplan, another Valley publicist.

Actually it wasn’t a scheduled fight. Actually it wasn’t held in the ring. Actually, it wasn’t even a fight. Not if you count the number of blows landed.

Fraser and Caplan are longtime rivals and Fraser was upset at Caplan’s front-row appearance at one of Fraser’s fights.

Words were followed by fisticuffs.

“Here we were, fighting right in front of Peter Falk and Fernando Lamas,” Fraser says with a smile. “It was a largely Mexican crowd and they couldn’t believe these out-of-shape gringos going at it. Security broke it up, though, and there were no real blows thrown.”

Good thing. Fraser might have somehow won and thus ruined an otherwise perfect Hall of Fame record.