Ex-Boxer Duarte Fights to Shape Lives

Frankie Duarte, former world championship contender, gang member, alcoholic and drug addict, was in the boxing ring again. His hands were up deflecting punches--dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, dat.

“Keep those hands up,” Duarte told his sparring partner, a youth who ducked under a deliberately slow right.

Just seven months after his last title shot, the 35-year-old Duarte is living one of his dreams. He is head coach of the Huntington Park Athletic Club, a boxing program set up by the city to keep the area’s predominantly poor, Latino youths off the streets and out of gangs.

“I have a job here not just to make fighters but to be an example, to pass on what I’ve learned through the good and bad times in life,” said Duarte, who was known in boxing circles as a relentless brawler with a chin of stone. “I have a lot to teach these kids, and it’s not just boxing.”

Duarte, 35, is surprisingly open about the good and bad times.

There was the heroin overdose in 1983, when other addicts tried to revive him with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and by putting ice in his pants and burning the bottom of his feet with cigarettes.

Duarte regained consciousness the next morning. The scared addicts did not dare to call an ambulance, he said. “I couldn’t believe I almost died,” Duarte said.

Then there was his comeback and the magical year of 1987, when the world championship was in Duarte’s grasp, when he enjoyed the celebrity and glitter heaped on boxing’s elite. He especially loved it when the crowd chanted “Frankie, Frankie, Frankie” as he prepared for battle.

“I was on heroin, a bum,” Duarte said. “Then here I was on TV. It was a high no drug could ever match. It was like something out of the movies.”

Now Duarte is out of the limelight again. He spends his afternoons and Saturdays in an old brick building on Rugby Avenue, home of the Huntington Park Athletic Club.

Duarte was one of four children born to a barber and a housewife. He has lived most of his life in a modest stucco home in the Mar Vista neighborhood near Venice.

“When I was 13 years old I was already getting into sniffing glue,” Duarte said.

Duarte soon graduated to hard drugs as he partied with Latino gangs. When Duarte was 15, his desperate father offered to get him into a boxing program if he stayed clean.

The teen-ager had been a boxing fan and decided to give it a whirl. He rode the bus almost daily to the Teamsters Boys Club in Los Angeles. He showed promise, winning Golden Gloves titles.

But Duarte was losing big outside the ring. The drug use continued, and Duarte began drinking when he was 17, the year before he turned professional.

“I just wanted to be one of the guys,” Duarte said. “I kept saying when I turn professional I’ll quit doing it all.”

Then in 1977, he lost a bout that would have put him in line for a championship fight.

Duarte said he had been drinking and smoking PCP up to two weeks before the fight. He was overweight and had to take water pills to reduce. In the fight, Duarte took a beating. The referee stopped it in the fifth round.

“I really went on a low point,” Duarte said.

Duarte had some more wins; he held the California featherweight title in 1978. But he was haunted by his past.

“No matter how successful I was, when I was outside of boxing I was afraid to talk to people; would they think I was stupid?” Duarte said. “I’d rather be back in the barrio partying with the home boys.”

The first stage of Duarte’s career came to an end after a 1979 loss to Rolando Navarette, who later became the World Boxing Council’s junior lightweight champion.

“I decided to pursue my partying life,” Duarte said. “I realized I couldn’t quit.”

Duarte had become a hard-core heroin addict by 1982. He held odd jobs, but nothing solid. A turning point came two years later when he was kicked out of his parents’ house and went to live with an aunt. There he read the Bible. He returned to the gym in 1984 and gave up drugs and booze.

Duarte made a comeback. In July, 1986, he won $50,000 and the North American Boxing Federation bantamweight championship in a bout against a Hawaiian fighter named Jesus Salud. Duarte was being invited to celebrity parties. There were television interviews. On the surface, life was sweet.

The media played up Duarte’s tragic history before his 1987 title fight with Bernardo Pinango, the World Boxing Assn.’s bantamweight champ. Duarte knocked down Pinango in the 12th round but ended up losing a bloody, controversial 15-round decision.

“I figured I got robbed,” Duarte said. “After that fight I was never the same.”

Duarte said he stayed sober for two years as he trained for another title fight.

Last August, Duarte lost a one-sided bout to WBC super-bantamweight champion Daniel Zaragoza of Mexico City. The referee stopped the fight in the 10th round after Duarte caught more punches than he wishes to remember.

In an interview in the ring after the fight, Duarte bade his farewell: “I’m getting too old for this.” He finished his career with a record of 45-8-1.

And after years of being clean, Duarte again turned to alcohol and drugs.

“I’m an addict and alcoholic,” Duarte said. “When you go back, you go back big.”

Duarte considers it a godsend that a friend told him about the coaching job in Huntington Park. He was hired last November as an assistant coach and has since been promoted to head coach. Duarte said he has stayed clean of alcohol and drugs since he started. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

To get the job, Duarte had to agree to random drug and alcohol testing, said Police Capt. Frank Sullivan, one of the organizers of the boxing program.

Duarte’s history of drug and alcohol abuse “was a big issue,” Sullivan said. “We kicked it around a lot.” Sullivan said Duarte is an excellent coach and has not had a relapse.

Back in the gym, the young boxers seem to like the fact that their new coach was a contender.

“We pay more attention to what he says,” said Angel Magana, 18. “He’s a real good trainer.”

Duarte says he is careful to be a friend and to try to boost the self-esteem of his young charges. He has a gentle way of working with the youths, moving their bodies this way and that, so they will be in proper position. He will take some punches and give a few during sparring.

“No one gets kicked out of this gym,” Duarte said. “I don’t care if they loaf on the heavy bag. That’s one day of their life they’re off the streets and in a safe environment.”