Olympians Coming to L.A. Again : LAPD Officer Will Box in Olympics for Argentina

He ran 5 miles every morning. He pounded the heavy bag every night. And in between, when he wasn’t working undercover narcotics or patrolling the barrio, Los Angeles Police Officer George Lopez was sparring, doing sit-ups or skipping rope.

Now, after four years of sweating and dreaming, Lopez, 28, is going to the Olympic Games in South Korea next month. He has made the boxing team--the boxing team from Argentina, that is.

The Argentine-born Lopez, who moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 3 1/2 and holds dual citizenship, tried to make the American boxing team but lost in the elimination rounds. It didn’t really matter.

“My heart is with the United States,” he said Wednesday, “but I’m also proud to represent where I’m from originally. Either way, I’m going to the Olympics.”

A light middleweight (156 pounds) with a record of 23 wins and four losses, Lopez will be one of three fighters competing for Argentina in the Seoul Games. His trip is being sponsored by a Los Angeles police benevolent organization and the Hollenbeck Youth Center, where Lopez teaches kids to box as part of his job as youth services officer.

The fact that Lopez is fighting for Argentina is of little concern to Police Department officials.

“We’d be just proud and tickled to death if he medaled for Argentina . . . ,” said Patrick E. McMinkley, Lopez’s former captain. “He’s still a Los Angeles police officer and we’re awfully proud of him.”

Lopez’s Olympic adventure began as a quirk of fate during the Los Angeles Games in 1984. Taking a break from his assigned post at UCLA, he stopped in at a convenience store and overheard someone speaking Spanish with an Argentine accent. It was the coach of Argentina’s boxing team.

Lopez already had taken up boxing--”It was one sport where they couldn’t tell me I was too small”--and had recorded impressive wins against other officers in police tournaments. The Argentine coach gave Lopez his business card and asked him to keep in touch.

Lopez never lost the card.

As his experience grew in the ring over the next four years, so did the number of gold medals he won in amateur competition. His potent left hook produced 18 victories by knockout.

On the job, the soft-spoken, square-jawed Lopez was no less impressive, according to his supervisors. After joining the Police Department in 1981, he was chosen for a number of prestigious, undercover narcotics assignments before being posted to the Hollenbeck station in East Los Angeles.

The station and the youth center next door already were rich in boxing lore. It was there that another Hollenbeck officer, Al Stankie, taught a skinny, one-time gang member named Paul Gonzales to fight by the rules of the ring. Gonzales won a gold medal in the light flyweight division during the Los Angeles Games, the only Latino in the history of Olympic competition to attain such glory.

After Stankie left the department two years ago, Lopez took over his job at the youth center.

Last November, Lopez found a trainer in Mike Salas, a friend who runs a boxing program for youths at the Baldwin Park Community Center.

When Lopez went to Argentina to compete in the Olympic trials, he fought and beat that country’s No.1-rated light-middleweight boxer. No one was more impressed than Salas.

“He’s a tough kid,” Salas said of his student. “I think his chances of making it to the medal round are excellent.”

Lopez isn’t thinking of winning gold, silver or bronze just yet.

He plans to be married Sept. 4 and to fly to Seoul, alone, a little more than a week later. The Games begin on Sept. 17.

If he does well, he said, he may ultimately ask to take a leave of absence from the Police Department to pursue a professional boxing career. Meantime, he runs in the hills above the Los Angeles Police Academy each morning before work and pounds the heavy bag each night before going home.

“All I know is that I’m training as hard as I can,” Lopez said. “You don’t get an opportunity like this too often.”