The Painful Truth : Here’s Some Expert Advice for Every Prospective Boxing Champion: Try Another Sport

A gonizingly arm-weary from what had seemed an eternity of adrenaline-laced combat inside the boxing ring--less than three minutes to be precise--a reporter relaxed for a moment and dropped his hands.

The fist, neatly packaged inside a hard, black leather glove, landed almost instantly then, a quick right flush on his face.

Electricity coursed through his head and down into his legs. He felt as though he had just been hit by the heavyweight champion of the world, which was, of course, ridiculous. He had only been belted in the face by the middleweight champion of the world.

No sport is tougher than boxing. No sport is more brutal. No sport requires a participant to accept and ultimately grow accustomed to such stunning pain. Boxers die. They suffer major injuries, such as detached retinas and other eye injuries, and debilitating injuries to the brain, with alarming regularity.

And yet they come in swarms, the would-be boxers. They puff up their chests and suck in their stomachs and stride menacingly into hundreds of boxing gyms around the nation and announce to anyone who will listen that they intend to become professional fighters. They have watched boxing on television, maybe even seen it in person a few times, and have concluded that it is not very tough.

Usually, they are turned away, told in strong terms to rid such ideas from their heads. Occasionally, though, they persist. And then, as the real boxers smirk in the dim light of the sweaty gym, the novices are fitted into gloves and ushered into the ring, there to show their talents against real boxers.

Usually, they are pounded and humiliated for a few minutes before realizing they have made a terrible mistake and head quickly for the door.

Often, they are knocked senseless.

Marvin Gaye strode purposefully into the 108th Street Gym in Los Angeles many years ago. The late singer boasted to all that he had boxed, and it wasn’t so difficult. He wanted to box again.

So Walt Tyler, a boxing trainer, obliged, quickly arranging a sparring match between Gaye and S. T. Gordon, a talented, professional, 190-pound cruiserweight. Gaye, his entourage of bodyguards and friends watching, pounded his gloves together in the corner.

The bell rang.

Gordon, who didn’t much care if the man staring at him from across the ring was Marvin Gaye or then-middleweight champion Marvin Hagler, took three long steps across the mat and threw one punch. It landed flush on Gaye’s chin, and the singer fell like a chain-sawed tree.

He was unconscious for about 30 seconds, according to Tyler. Gaye finally got to his feet, Tyler recalled and, as he was being half-dragged out by his friends, he was engaged in a question-and-answer session with them. The topics included the singer’s name and what city he was in.

“The man was out cold,” Tyler said. “And S. T. Gordon is still in the ring, pacing around like a bull waiting for the next guy.”

Boxing appears easy. Anyone can make a fist. And most people can throw some sort of a punch. It doesn’t look as difficult as, say, hitting a golf ball, which requires fairly elaborate movement. Boxing seems to require only a clenched hand being propelled forward by the arm. What could be easier?

The middleweight champion of the world, Michael Nunn, was circling the reporter now in a Van Nuys gym, flicking out right jabs from his southpaw stance. In one dizzying 15-second stretch , he threw seven lightning-quick punches. Six landed flush on the reporter’s face.

The reporter blocked the other with his glove, although the force of the blow slammed that glove back into the bewildered man’s face. He had just, in essence, punched himself in the nose. Pain and frustration, present since the opening seconds of the bout, now had to move over to make room for humiliation.

“Guys sit around watching boxing on TV and they say to each other, ‘I could do that,’ ” said Joe Goossen, Nunn’s trainer. “Pro boxers make it look easy. But nothing is further from the truth. Nothing in sports is even close to being as difficult and as exhausting as boxing.”

Dan Goossen, Nunn’s manager and the president of the Ten Goose Boxing Club in Van Nuys, said he receives as many as 25 calls a month from men who want to chuck their regular jobs and become boxers. The number of calls increases dramatically, he said, immediately after a major fight, such as the Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas bout in February.

“Always, it’s, ‘I wanna be the champ,’ ” Goossen said. “The most calls come after a big fight. The day after the Tyson-Douglas fight, I got four calls from guys who insisted they could be the heavyweight champion of the world.

“None of them had ever boxed. In those cases, I refer them to the state boxing commission. I tell them the state commission will be able to help them. Basically, I don’t want to be impolite to anybody, but I don’t want these guys calling me.”

For two months, Goossen had been getting phone calls from a man identifying himself only as Sampson. He said he was a former member of the Bloods street gang and he wanted a chance to show off his boxing skills. Goossen politely put him off, only to get another call from Sampson a few days later.

Laker owner Jerry Buss, who presents numerous boxing shows at the Forum, offered that he knew Sampson, and that the man might be worth watching.

Finally, late in February, Goossen gave in. Sampson was told to show up at the gym, which he did in a big way.

“He came rolling in here with his fiancee on his arm, both of them wearing fur coats,” Joe Goossen recalled. “After he got the coat off, we took a look at him, and it was impressive. He was 6-foot-2 and weighed 250 pounds and it was rock-hard muscle.”

Off in one corner of the gym, John Bray banged away at a punching bag. Bray weighs about 190 pounds. He is just 19 years old. But at the time he also was the national amateur heavyweight champion.

After a few moments of boasting about his strength, Sampson’s massive hands were stuffed into a pair of boxing gloves and the ring shook as the mass of muscle climbed through the ropes, awaiting his chance to knock someone out into the street with one punch.

Bray stepped through the ropes on the other side of the ring. The bell rang, and Sampson lunged wildly across the ring at Bray, throwing powerful punches that likely would have knocked out a rhino, had they hit the rhino.

Twenty seconds after the action began, it was over. Sampson, who had not landed a single punch in the flurry that he threw at Bray, stumbled crazily across the ring, his legs having been turned into cooked spaghetti by the crisp, accurate punches of the man 60 pounds lighter. “It was obvious this guy had seen some fights on TV and said to himself, ‘I can beat those guys,’ ” Bray said. “He had these huge, bulging arms and I’m sure he was as strong as any heavyweight in history. But boxing is strength of spirit, strength of heart. It is not strength of arms.

“Before we fought, this guy is standing in front of the mirrors flexing his arms and looking at himself. Then he started looking at me, looking like he was going to kill me. Staring at me. It was pretty funny.”

Bray easily sidestepped Sampson’s initial charge. Then, for the next 10 seconds, he simply tied the giant man in knots. As Sampson struggled to get free of Bray’s arms, his energy level dropped quickly.

“After about 20 seconds, I started hitting him,” Bray said. “And I mean just tapping him on the chin. Tap, tap, tap. Then one right hand, and believe me, it was an easy right hand, that landed on his chin. And this guy went down in a heap and that was that.

“The man didn’t realize that he was in my office . This is where I work. This is what I do, and I’ve been doing it very seriously for 10 years, since I was 9.”

Nunn leaned his taut, 160-pound body against the ropes and, with a wave of his flashing left hand, invited the reporter into the corner for some close-in combat.

The reporter obliged, moving in and throwing a sorry left, followed by a pitiful right. A few more punches bounced off Nunn’s shoulders, and then a left found Nunn’s midsection and a right barely glanced off the champion’s chin. Nunn responded with five frighteningly fast punches, the last of which thudded solidly into the reporter’s exposed right side.

Pain streaked upward and his right arm fell limply to his side. It was quickly followed by the rest of the reporter’s body, which toppled hard to the canvas.

Gabriel and Rafael Ruelas, 18 and 19 and with the faces of children, have boxed since they were children. They walked into the Ten Goose gym as elementary school students from Arleta and told the Goossens they wanted to be boxers. They were told to take a hike.

But Alonzo Strongbow, a veteran pro boxer who was working out in the gym that day, watched the two kids pleading their case with Dan Goossen and persuaded Goossen to let the kids work out.

“Alonzo told us he saw something in their eyes,” Goossen said. “He said they had the look.”

The Ruelas brothers, fortunately, were allowed to stay. They have fought nearly 35 professional bouts. And they have yet to be beaten. Their boxing skills have put them on a track to become perhaps the rarest thing in the sport: successful.

“Nothing is easy about it,” said Gabriel, the older brother. “The training is so hard you can’t imagine it. And the fighting is much harder than that. We spar in the ring every day and you get punched in the face every day. Every single day. Bang! Right on the nose. And it hurts every time.”

Said Rafael: “You get that first bang in the face and you feel pain and your eyes water. You try not to think about the pain, about the sting, but you can’t help it. You have to think about it.”

The difference between the Ruelas brothers and most prospective boxers, according to them and Joe Goossen, is that they are willing to accept a blow to the face as part of the game.

“When I first started sparring with Gabriel, he would hit me real hard,” Rafael said. “He would hurt me with punches, but even then, I liked it. I liked knowing that I could take it. And as the weeks went by and you started learning how to avoid some of the punches, and then learned how to punch back, it became real exciting.

“Today, when I can beat up on a guy in the ring who has a lot of experience, and he sees me as just a little kid, that’s a great feeling.”

As a young professional, a boxer can expect to be paid roughly $100 for each scheduled round. A scheduled four-round bout will bring him about $400 and, perhaps, a swollen and bleeding face. That is the level at which most boxers stay. They take enormous punishment for a few thousand dollars a year.

Several dozen of the tens of thousands of people who try boxing make very good money, with paydays in the $50,000-$100,000 range.

Only a few--Tyson, Nunn, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns and Roberto Duran in recent years--ever make that final step to mega-money, to the land of million-dollar fights.

Nunn, the International Boxing Federation champion, began boxing when he was 11. From the start, he was good. He won the Golden Gloves tournament in his home state of Iowa and barely missed a berth on the 1984 U.S. Olympic team. But even with his enormous talent, it has taken him 17 years of excruciatingly hard work to achieve his success and the big paychecks.

“When I was an amateur, I used to fight giant guys in the ring during sparring,” Nunn said. “Giant guys. Three hundred-pound guys. They’d come in the gym and think they were really tough and my trainer would call me over and we’d get in the ring.

“I must have knocked out a half a dozen guys back then who weighed 100, 150 pounds more than me. It taught me that size and strength mean nothing in boxing. It’s all technique.”

And even though he has reached the top of his sport, Nunn said he would never encourage anyone to try it.

“It’s simply too tough,” he said. “So few people ever make any money from it. I never try to encourage anyone to start boxing. To be honest, I wouldn’t wish boxing upon my worst enemy.”

Pete Olker of Sylmar was a boxer. He trained at the Frankie Goodman Gym in Van Nuys and the Main Street Gym in Los Angeles during the early ‘60s and fought four times. He took two terrible beatings. And then, wisely, he quit.

“I thought I was so ready,” said Olker, 58. “I had no amateur experience, but I felt good in the gym and because I was a heavyweight, it was hard to find sparring partners. So I never really knew if I was any good.

“I found out in my first pro fight. I fought some guy who had something like a 12-10 record, and I figured he must be a bum. He knocked me out in two minutes.”

Olker tried again a month later. He was knocked out in the second round.

“No one can tell you how hard boxing is,” Olker said. “It cannot be explained. But the exhaustion you feel when someone is trying to smash you in the face and you’re trying to escape and find a way to hit him back . . . you just can’t imagine what that feels like.”

The reporter stupidly got up . His hands felt as though they had bowling balls on them. His legs felt as heavy as Christmas fruit cakes.

Nunn moved in and began whistling lefts and rights from 10 different angles. Fortunately, none of them landed on the now wheezing and sagging reporter. Luckily, Nunn had decided that enough was enough and was now intentionally missing his opponent. Perhaps his knuckles ached from the beating they had been given by the reporter’s forehead.

The “fight” was over. TKO at 2:50 of the first round.

The door of the Ten Goose gym swings open and the light in the doorway is briefly blocked out as 6-foot-7, 280-pound Andre Phillips strolls through.

Phillips played football briefly at USC and then played for two years at Central State in Ohio. For the last few months he has been employed at a Valley nightclub as a bouncer. He is 23. He wants to be a boxer.

“I watched the Tyson-Douglas fight,” he says. “I think that influenced me. It showed me that anyone can get beat, even a guy like Tyson. I see a guy like Buster Douglas and I don’t see anything special. I watched that fight and I thought, ‘Maybe I can beat somebody, too.’ ”

A few feet away, in a corner of the gym, the steady pounding of the heavy bag stops for a moment and John Bray, who has seen this movie before, peeks out from behind the bag, stealing a glance at the newcomer. A second later, Bray returns to his workout. He glances again at the giant man who wants to be a boxer.

A huge grin lights up Bray’s face, but his hands continue to pound out a thudding, steady and sometimes deadly rhythm against the heavy leather bag.