Boxing / Earl Gustkey : Sentencing Due in July for No. 1 Featherweight

Hector Lopez, the No. 1-ranked featherweight boxer from Glendale, had it all. Now he’s about to lose it.

Lopez is expected to serve about one year seven months in state prison on a first-degree burglary-gun charge, according to his attorney.

Lopez will be sentenced July 26 in Pasadena Superior Court. Plea bargaining involving his attorney, Ralph Bencangey, and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, has been completed.

Last October, Lopez surrendered himself to Glendale police, who were seeking him on a charge of kidnaping his former girlfriend, Norma Gomez. In an altercation at Gomez’s home, police later charged, Lopez beat Gomez’s father and another guest, then forced Gomez at gunpoint from her house.

Lopez, 22, released her two days later, police said, with a bump on her head and an arm bruise.

Lopez, then 17 and competing for Mexico, won a silver medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games while still a junior at Glendale Hoover High School. As a pro, he is 18-1, ranked No. 1 by the World Boxing Council and considered one of America’s top young boxing prospects.

But in late July, he will begin serving what is expected to be a four-year sentence.

“With time already served (two months) and good behavior, Hector is looking at something like a year and seven months,” Bencangey said.

“Some charges were dropped, and Hector got the best disposition possible. His problem is, entering an occupied dwelling with intent to commit a felony within is mandatory two years and so is use of a gun. Also, there was anger involved, and a lot of witnesses.”

Will he be able to recapture it all, after a prison term?

“It’s hard to say,” said Gordon Wheeler, his former trainer.

“Hector’s a highly motivated kid. He’ll stay in shape in prison. And he’ll come out bigger and stronger. But his timing and all . . . who can say?”

Marty Weill, stepson of the late Al Weill, one-time manager of Rocky Marciano, the late heavyweight champion, takes exception to recent remarks about his father by former middleweight Joey Giambra.

In a Times story about his recollections of the late 1940s boxing scene in New York City, Giambra said that Al Weill, then matchmaker at Madison Square Garden, routinely took under-the-table payments from fighters when given Garden matches.

Giambra also said he was a close friend of Marciano in the 1950s and that Marciano often complained of being short-changed in personal appearance fees by Weill.

Of his stepfather, Marty Weill writes: “As a matchmaker, he packed arenas when the box office provided the only income. He was a strong man with wild kids in a very tough business. Those who listened he made champions out of, or at least main-event fighters. Those who wouldn’t listen were given back their contracts and sent on their way.”

Some final thoughts on Sugar Ray Robinson:

--Boxing scholars will remember him as possibly the greatest welterweight of the century, not as the middleweight who was 10-6-1 in middleweight championship bouts.

As a welterweight, in the years immediately preceding television’s first years, Robinson was magnificent. Oddly, though, his remarkable middleweight victories over Gene Fullmer and Bobo Olson are his best remembered bouts--simply because they were televised.

It’s difficult to determine what his welterweight record was by reading the Ring record book, because Robinson was a featherweight when he turned pro in 1940. But it is a fact that he never lost as a welterweight.

His record does show that from the time he won the welterweight title in 1946 until he won his first middleweight crown in 1950, he was 30-0. He was 5-0 in welterweight championship bouts.

Films from his welterweight period show an American original. Sugar Ray was style. He was a slender, graceful dancer with explosive power. His movement around a ring was so smooth, his feet so soft, it sometimes seems as if you’re dreaming about him, not watching him on a videotape.

--He may also have been the greatest performer with a jump rope, too. Old timers say no fighter could make a rope sing the way Robinson could.

--He could play Ping-Pong as well as he could fight. In training, he’d beat everyone in camp, even when taking a 360-degree spin after every shot.

--In his final years, lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s disease, he might have grasped for one final time, even for a second or two, the memory of a fond farewell.

It was Dec. 10, 1965. There were 20,000 in Madison Square Garden that night for a retirement party. There was no unseemly parade of ostentatious gifts. It was simply human warmth, an outpouring of affection.

Robinson was introduced, and he came down an aisle, climbing into the ring in his boxing trunks, shoes and a robe. The ovation lasted for long minutes. Then, one by one, four gnarly old middleweight opponents were also introduced--Fullmer, Olson, Carmen Basilio and Randy Turpin.

They went to the four corners, then came to center ring, where each hugged Robinson.

And the ovation began again.

Boxing Notes

An outdoor boxing show is scheduled May 6 for Santa Ana Stadium, with top Mexican lightweight Mauricio Aceves fighting Colombian Amancio Castro in the main event. Two other Mexican stars will box in companion 10-rounders, Rodolfo Gonzalez and Genaro Leon. . . . Legislation intended to require California boxing gym operators to log boxers’ sparring sessions has passed the State Senate’s Business and Professions Committee by a 7-0 vote.

Featherweight Tracy Patterson, adopted son of former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson and ranked No. 9 by the International Boxing Federation, meets former world champion Steve Cruz of Ft. Worth in Atlantic City May 14 on NBC. . . . Bob Arum’s Samoan bomber, junior-middleweight Karama Leota, meets Jesse Flores in an ESPN bout from Lake Tahoe on May 2.

George Foreman, when recently asked to comment on reports that Japanese promoters wanted him to fight Mike Tyson in Tokyo, said: “That fight should be in Madison Square Garden. Do we have to let the Japanese have everything?”