TEENY-BOPPERS : Joe Goossen Takes Ruelas Brothers Under His Wing, Grooms Them Into Olympic Hopefuls for Mexico

Gabriel Ruelas was just a 12-year-old selling candy door to door when he first saw the gym.

It didn’t look like a gym. Not from the outside. It looked instead like any of the other homes on the residential North Hollywood cul-de-sac where Ruelas was making his spiel and pushing his chocolates.

It was only upon looking through the sliding glass door that Ruelas saw this house was like no other. There was just one large room--a boxing ring in the middle, posters on the walls and punching bags of various sizes and shapes all around.

It wasn’t a totally foreign environment to Ruelas. His brother Juan had had a couple of professional fights, had even trained at this gym, the Ten Goose gym, for a month.

So on a Saturday afternoon, Gabriel came back, his chocolates left at home, armed only with his courage.

He walked up to trainer Joe Goossen and said, “Can I talk to the coach?”

Goossen, working with Alonzo Strongbow, later to become the North American Boxing Federation flyweight champion, looked down and grinned.

“I’m the coach,” Goossen said. “What do you need?”

Ruelas pulled his tiny frame together and said proudly, “I want to be a fighter.”

Goossen gave him a patronizing look, one of those sure-you-would-and-I’d-like-to-be-Mike Tyson kind of looks.

“So you want to be a fighter, do you?” Goossen said. “Maybe some other time.”

Along with several of his brothers, Goossen was trying to get the Ten Goose Boxing Club off the ground at the time. This was before the days of Michael Nunn and Frankie Duarte and the last thing Goossen wanted was to waste his time on a 12-year-old.

Strongbow, however, interrupted Goossen in mid-brushoff.

“Don’t send him away,” Strongbow whispered. “I like the look in his eyes.”

Goossen protested. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t encourage the kid. I’m trying to get rid of him.”

But Strongbow persisted. Finally Goossen nodded. He knew how to discourage this kid. He found a small pair of gloves and motioned for the youngster to get into the ring.

Goossen told Ruelas to throw a jab. He did--with perfect form. How about a right hand? Again perfect form.

“There was no hesitation on his part,” Goossen recalls. “He was a quick learner. I had him hit me on the hands and he hit hard. Of course, you have to remember this was a 12-year-old kid, but for his size and age, he hit hard.”

Next test: dedication.

“You’re going to have come back every day if you are really serious,” Goossen told Ruelas. “If you miss a day, you’re gone.”

Ruelas came back the next day. And the next. And the next. Six days a week he was there, watching, practicing, trying to learn from the pros.

Then after two months, he approached Goossen.

“Can I bring my little brother in tomorrow?” Ruelas asked.

“How old is he ?” Goossen replied.

“Eleven.”

“Hey,” Goossen protested, “I told you, I’m not into training kids.”

Ruelas was insistent, however, and again Goossen relented.

Enter Rafael.

“This kid had no punch, no power at that age,” Goossen says. “He couldn’t hit hard, but he had tremendous hand-eye coordination. I remember thinking, ‘This kid may be better than his brother.’ ”

Both, as it turns out, might be good enough to qualify for the Mexican Olympic team this summer.

Gabriel and Rafael grew up in Guadalajara, two of 15 Ruelas children. It was Rafael Ruelas Sr., the boys’ father, who first suggested Gabriel try boxing.

It sounded like a good idea. Until Gabriel first put the gloves on at age 10. “I got a headache,” he remembers, “from getting hit. I didn’t like it at all after a while.”

That same year, Gabriel and Rafael, with three of their sisters, came to the United States and settled in North Hollywood.

When Juan heard his two kid brothers were working out at Ten Goose, he was delighted. Not Gabriel. After the initial excitement wore off, the reality of getting hit returned. So did the headaches. Rafael loved it; Gabriel wasn’t so sure.

Juan had the two brothers move in with him and agreed to pay both a salary as long as they continued to go to Ten Goose. Now Gabriel was sure.

“My brother was giving us $60 a week,” Gabriel says, “but if we missed a day at the gym, we wouldn’t get anything. After about three months, I never thought about anything else but fighting.”

After the family moved to Sun Valley, the youngsters continued to come to the gym after school, taking the bus six days a week.

“After watching those pros,” Rafael says, “I started thinking I had a chance to be someone.”

Six years later, the Ruelas brothers are still at Ten Goose. But they are not little children anymore and nobody laughs when they step in the ring.

Winces might be a better word.

Gabriel, who will turn 18 this summer, regularly spars with people like Duarte, who will fight for the World Boxing Assn. bantamweight title next month.

After one such recent sparring session, Duarte, who has been at Ten Goose since 1984 after a layoff from boxing of nearly five years because of drug and alcohol problems, emerged from the ring, looked back at Gabriel, shook his head and told Goossen, “I’m glad I’m not starting my comeback now.”

When Goossen looked around for an opponent for Gabriel, then 13, he settled on the 5-foot-7, 118-pound Duarte.

“He was the smallest guy I had,” Goossen says. “But Gabriel was never scared going against Frankie. Even though it was a man against a child, the one thing I noticed about Gabriel was his tenacity. He wanted to win, even in the sparring sessions. Of course, he couldn’t win against Frankie, but he didn’t stop trying.

“Frankie naturally laid back and went easy, but I’ll tell you something, it’s not fun being hit by a 13-year-old with power.”

When Gabriel turned 15, Duarte decided it was time to stop serving as his personal punching bag.

“I’m going to have to open up to protect myself,” Duarte told Goossen.

Replied Goossen: “What took you so long?”

Gabriel had not won any matches from Duarte, but he had won a fan.

“I’ve been in boxing for 18 years,” Duarte says. “I’ve seen many, many future champions, but I’ve never seen anyone as exceptional as these kids. After just a couple of months of watching them, I saw something special there. You’ve heard of someone born to fight? They seem to be.”

You might expect Duarte to talk like that. After all, he’s part of the same boxing stable as the Ruelas brothers.

No such loyalty, though, need be expected from Hector Lopez, ranked No. 2 among featherweights by the World Boxing Council. Yet Lopez, preparing for a big fight against Oscar Bejines, has chosen to get ready by using Gabriel and Rafael as his sparring mates.

No argument from Goossen.

“One way to get rid of anybody who can’t cut it,” Goossen says, “is to make them work hard. But these are the most determined kids I’ve ever had. I put them under the same regimen I give the pros and they’ve never faltered. They never give me any resistance. Michael Nunn and these kids are the ones I’ve had the easiest time training. And not necessarily in that order.

“They were raised on a farm and started working in the fields when they were 5 and 6, so they are no strangers to hard work. “In Mexico, the reality of life was hard work. They were not raised on video games. They were not raised in the middle-class life. They were not raised on Ozzie and Harriet.”

The first chance Gabriel had to beat somebody came at age 13. His opponent in his first amateur fight, John Adams, lasted less than a round.

Two months later, Goossen entered Gabriel in the Police Athletic League Blue and Gold national amateur tournament at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. In the final, Gabriel faced Jesse Gonzalez, a youngster with a 99-1 amateur mark. When Gabriel won by decision, Gonzalez broke down and cried.

Rafael, competing in the same tournament in another division, finished second.

“I knew then what I had,” Goossen says. “I knew these kids were going to be champs. Others might have thought I had simply fallen in love with these kids, but I’m a realist. I’ve cut others loose.”

Rafael won the local Junior Olympic tournament as an 85-pound fighter three years ago, then finished second the following year.

In 1987, Gabriel, then a 16-year-old bantamweight, won the American Boxing Federation state championship and got as far as the national semifinals in the Golden Gloves tournament before losing a decision in Tennessee to Juan Baldwin, ranked fifth nationally.

This year Gabriel and Rafael found themselves knocked out of national amateur competition.

The reason? It’s an Olympic year and the Golden Gloves tournament leads to the U. S. Olympic Trials. Since the Ruelases are not U. S. citizens, they are not eligible for those trials.

So Goossen has steered them south to their homeland. The two are entered in the Turneo Municipal in Tijuana, an amateur event that sends winners to a Baja California tournament next month. The winners there qualify for a Mexican national tournament later in the summer and the national winners will have a shot at that country’s Olympic trials.

Gabriel, entered in the featherweight division, has won his first two Tijuana matches, stopping Ricardo Franco last week with a left hook 20 seconds into the first round of the second fight. Rafael, fighting as a bantamweight, has won his only bout on a decision.

Gabriel is 31-2 with 16 knockouts; Rafael is 28-3 with 10 knockouts. But along with the ecstasy, there has been agony. And Gabriel and Rafael, despite their relative youth, have the scarred bodies to show for it.

Gabriel snapped a shoulder muscle in the ring at 14 and required a full year to recuperate. He has also torn a tendon in a knuckle. When he fought Baldwin in the nationals, he had a broken foot. In the past, Rafael has broken a wrist, bones in both hands and suffered from back problems for years.

But the wear and tear notwithstanding, Goossen has carefully regulated the workload of the two brothers.

“Only 30 some odd fights in six years? That’s not a lot,” he says. “I wanted them to learn in the gym around pros rather than in a lot of amateur fights.”

The story of how these brothers first came to the Ten Goose gym is told and retold every time a new visitor notices them sparring, nudges another bystander and asks who they are.

But for Goossen, it’s getter more and more difficult to connect that little boy selling chocolate with the man before him in the ring.

“Sometimes I just find a corner and stare at the kids,” Goossen says. “They’ve grown up in front of my eyes. And God willing, I’ll be around to see them crowned champs of the world.

“The whole thing was just a stroke of luck. Gabriel was just walking by selling candy. What are the chances he would even find this place, tucked away in a cul-de-sac? Normally kids like this would seek out a place that already had a reputation.

“There’s a reason for all this. I really believe that.”