Teen Fights Back : Pummeled by Life, He Turns to Boxing

Ernesto (E.T.) Tobias, a 139-pound super-lightweight, bobs and weaves across the Spartan locker room of the Forum. His dark almond eyes glare above his boxing gloves. He shuffles quickly toward the big red mitts--targets--that cover the hands of his manager, Al Stankie.

Punches echo in the concrete room: Wham! Wham! Wham!

Half a dozen men--other fighters and a few trainers with lined, haggard faces--scrutinize the warm-up drill. When it ends, Tobias, 19, will take the ring for the biggest professional fight of his life, an eight-rounder against 22-year-old Angelo Nunez, another young comer in his division.

It is the beginning, Tobias hopes, of a climb toward the lightweight title. But also, it is another step along the road of escape from the barrios of East Los Angeles.

Fate, so far, has pummeled Tobias with a fury. Four of the eight members of his family are dead. His father and brother were gunned down in separate incidents by gang bullets. His mother, who spent time in jail on drug charges, died of a heart attack while trying to kick a heroin habit.

And now, an older sister who ran away from home is also dead--the victim, Tobias suspects, of a drug overdose.

Growing up in the gang-infested Aliso Village housing project, Tobias took other blows as well. A pair of dime-sized scars--one inches below his heart, another just above the belt of his boxing shorts--are reminders of a brawl in which he was shot twice and stabbed. He was in and out of Juvenile Hall.

For a time after his mother’s death, Tobias was homeless, staying with friends, sleeping at bus stops and under bridges. He was on the ropes. His plan one night, he said, was to jump from the 4th Street bridge--until friends talked him out of it.

“I was about to kill myself. . . . I felt like giving up on life,” Tobias said. “My friends stopped me. They said, ‘It’s not right, it’s not right.’

“Sometimes I’m asking God, ‘Why did all this happen to me? Why me? Why take my family from me?’ I never did anything so bad. I have a temper--I have a limit I can be pushed to--but even when people be bad to me, I be good to them.”

Today, with managers providing his room and board, Tobias nurtures the dream of championship glory. His pro record, entering the fight against Nunez, is five wins, two losses. Good humor fills him. He banters in the locker room, cracks jokes. He is a solid 5-feet-6, with black hair combed straight back and a tiny earring. When he grins, his dark eyes sparkle.

“I just want to get to the top--to become undisputed world champion,” Tobias said. “When all this started happening to me--my mom, my father, my brother and sister passing away, and I was alone--I would go in the restroom and I would cry. I would just look in the mirror and see myself there . . . and I would go, ‘Lightweight champion of the world!’ . . . and just look at myself and cry, and feel like it was my destiny to have all that.”

Memories haunt him even before fights or during his grueling dawn training runs up the hillsides of Griffith Park.

“Sometimes I run with tears coming out of my eyes,” he said. “I’ll get all that anger, and I’ll take it out on the heavy bag. I fight, I spar, and I take it out. When I fight, I think about my family. I pray: ‘This is for my mom. This is for my dad.’ ”

Even so, the professional knock against Tobias is cockiness. He “hot-dogged it versus (Tony) West and, even though he came on late, it cost him,” one Forum promoter said of Tobias’ March 1 loss on points in Palm Springs. “He’s been too cocky and macho for his own good.”

The task of harnessing the young fighter’s emotions, of toning down the machismo and turning up the discipline, has fallen to two managers who form an unlikely partnership. One is Joe (Handsome) Hernandez, 46, a nattily dressed aficionado who made his fortune in Los Angeles’ Garment District. The other, Al Stankie, is a former Los Angeles street cop who, at 49, sports a goatee, a dangling earring and a ponytail.

Hernandez, the strategist and money man, provides Tobias an allowance from the fighter’s so-far meager purses--$100 a round in the most recent bout--and a room at Hernandez’s home in Glendale. Stankie is the man in Tobias’ corner when the bell rings. He also oversees the training regimen at Dame Boxing Club in an aging high-rise near the Harbor and Santa Monica freeways.

A tough-talking maverick, Stankie is cut of rough cloth himself. He is missing a tooth, the result of a flying bottle. He has been hardened by barroom brawls. He led one barrio youngster, Paul Gonzalez, to the 1984 Olympic gold medal in the 106-pound light-flyweight division and envisions similar success in the professional ranks for Tobias.

“He’s a very, very talented athlete,” Stankie said. “And he’s got guts. In the barrios . . . he had to fight for his existence. He learned that well.

“I’ve always said he’ll be a survivor. I’ve always said, ‘If he doesn’t get killed in the street . . . stealing drugs, beating up people, going to jail.’ ” Stankie’s eyes become wild, then he pauses. “ ‘Then I could make him a champion.’ ”

Tobias has clashed often with the strong-willed manager, but he talks gratefully of the chance he is being given by Stankie and Hernandez.

“I owe everything to them,” Tobias said.

Tobias has been working with Stankie since age 10, when he first happened upon Stankie’s East L.A. youth boxing program. Stankie noticed him in the ring, scratching, throwing knees, throwing elbows.

“I grabbed him and booted him out of the gym,” Stankie remembered. “He’d come back because he was a tough little . . . ghetto boy. I threw him out of the gym 18 times! I’d say to him, ‘One day you’ll be a great fighter, if you learn to live by the rules.’ ”

Tobias, already hardened by the separation of his parents, was not easy to tame. His teen-age years became increasingly angry, beginning at 13 or 14 with the death of his father, who was killed after taking Tobias to a movie. The two of them were walking toward the father’s apartment when gunfire rang out, seemingly from nowhere, Tobias remembered.

“I heard two gunshots, but I didn’t see my father fall,” he said. “I just seen the blood coming out of his head.”

Two bullets had found him. Crumpling onto the street, his father whispered, “I love you, son. Make it. Be good,” the fighter remembered.

“My father died in my arms. When my dad passed away, I talked to nobody. It spooked me for years. I didn’t see where the bullets came from. I’d just wonder, ‘Why would they want to kill my father?’ ”

That unsolved tragedy--blamed on gang youths--was followed by another, also unsolved, three years later. This time, Tobias and his older brother, Paul, were walking on 1st Street near Aliso Village. A car came in their direction, its occupants flashing gang signs, and his brother waved, Tobias recalled.

Spinning a U-turn, the car approached from behind and someone leveled a shotgun. His brother was blasted to the sidewalk and Tobias ran for his life. When he returned, he said, his brother was dead.

Tobias was then 16, belligerent, hanging out with gang members, and grappling with a worsening home life. His oldest sister, Myra, ran away; no word of her would reach Tobias until authorities called more than two years later to say that she was dead. Tobias’ mother, Molly, who kept food on the table with her welfare check, slipped deeply into heroin abuse.

She would disappear for days at a time, Tobias remembered, leaving the young boxer--the household’s oldest male--to look after his two sisters and younger brother. She ultimately was arrested on a drug charge and sentenced to six months in jail.

During her absence, Tobias faced the first of his own legal problems. One night, his teen-age sister, Regina, was followed home by a boyfriend. As Tobias tells it, his sister was high and the boyfriend was known to be a drug dealer. Tobias said he became enraged and locked his sister in a bedroom. He treated the boyfriend to a lesson in the sweet science.

“I beat him up real bad,” Tobias said.

Tobias was arrested and spent three weeks in Los Angeles County’s Northeast Juvenile Justice Center before being sent home on probation.

“The judge said the boy was guilty of being left with too much responsibility,” recalled probation officer Mennette Bragg, who developed a liking for Tobias. “He was always good-hearted. He is very special to me. I cared so deeply for the boy because he was overcoming the most tremendous odds.”

For a time after returning home, Tobias’ life improved. His mother left jail and was given a job at Juvenile Hall. Tobias fell in love. His girlfriend gave him an ultimatum--his gang friends or her--and he drifted away from the thugs in the project.

He worked part-time jobs and eventually helped his mother move from Aliso Village to an apartment in Alhambra. Then one day in 1988, Tobias arrived home to find his mother dead of a heart attack.

“I felt it before it happened,” Tobias said. “I felt that somebody was going to die. I told my girlfriend, ‘I feel my Mom (or) somebody in my family is going to die.’ She said, ‘No, nothing’s going to happen.’ ”

The death began a dark period in his life. Tobias was placed with his godfather, but they clashed and he ended up on his own.

“I would eat and then go sleep under a bridge, or ride the buses all night,” Tobias said. Once another teen-ager, unaware of the death, made taunts about Tobias’ mother. “Ernesto turned loose on him and knocked the kid’s teeth out,” Bragg said. Tobias was arrested again.

“I remember him being really depressed . . . and we talked,” Bragg recalled. “He said he wanted to get out (of Juvenile Hall) and go to the cemetery. I remember telling him, ‘Your mother isn’t there. What do you want to go there for? Wherever she is, she’s probably listening to our conversation right now.’ ”

“What,” Tobias was asked, “would your mother say to you?”

Tobias smiled, the probation officer recalled, then said, “She’d probably say, ‘Why don’t you get off your ass and go on with your life? Get a job, go to school or something.’ ”

Stankie visited him in Juvenile Hall, grabbing him by the collar and telling him to straighten up.

Tobias returned to training, but there were more problems to come: In yet another street fight, he was shot twice and stabbed. After several months, he came back to win the 1989 Southern California Golden Gloves title in his novice class, and he gave the trophy to Bragg.

In the fight at the Forum against the older, taller Nunez, Tobias was clearly the aggressor against a fighter with six professional wins, three draws and a single defeat. Round after round, Tobias pursued Nunez around the ring, with Nunez deftly slipping punches and counterattacking.

The crowd--several thousand on a Monday night--booed the split-decision victory for Nunez. Tobias talked unhappily of filing a protest. But as he dressed and hurried to meet several friends from the barrios who had come to see him fight, Tobias’ mood lifted. He passed an usher guarding the entrance to the locker room.

“Hey, man,” Tobias said, grinning. “You were supposed to come out there and help me beat that guy up.”