A New Round for Lives on the Ropes

On a sweltering afternoon in an aging Oceanside neighborhood, 17-year-old Tony Saez danced about a dusty back-yard arena, throwing gut-wrenching punches into the torso of a thick-skinned sparring bag.

There were jabs, uppercuts, combination blows--all rendered in a fierce, measured rhythm that would have dropped any ordinary man within seconds. Fists clenched in bright red boxing gloves. Arms like brown steel pistons, shifting gears.

Nearby, in the shade of a drooping tree, a gaunt-looking man perched on an old office swivel chair, watches the teen-ager with coldly educated eyes, his left hand gripping the handle of a metal walking cane.

“Move it around, Tony,” he told the young fighter in more of a croak than human voice. “Don’t let it come to its senses. Keep those hands moving.”

For a moment, a dozen other youths in the crowded yard left their barbells and shadowboxing, stopped their sit-ups and rope-skipping--all to look and listen to the stiffened figure with the signature corduroy golf cap on his head and religious cross around his neck.

When Saez was finally through, he looked over at the man with the cane whom he and the others call “Coach.” Breathing hard, sweat gushing from his taut, powerful body, he searched for some sign of approval.

That’s when Mike Adame winked. That’s when he reached out with his one good hand to pat the boy on the hip. “You done good, Tony,” Adame whispered. And the boy smiled.

Each weekday afternoon, the 46-year-old former professional boxer and trainer--now crippled by a rare spinal disease--comes to a gang-ridden North County neighborhood to teach 2 dozen underprivileged Latino teens about boxing. And about life.

That’s no small order for someone whose entire right side is paralyzed, a man who doctors just five years ago predicted would be confined to a wheelchair and never talk again.

Although his condition has improved, Adame is still involved in the fight of his life, enduring the debilitating blasts of pain that punch down his spine and through his good limbs. Several times a month, his aches send him to a local hospital for new painkiller injections.

But, since learning that the fledging Mission Valley Boxing Club needed a trainer, the angular Texan has mustered a gritty determination to return to the sport at which he once excelled, the arena that once almost earned him a spot on the U.S. Olympic team.

“There was a time when I thought I never wanted to do this again,” said Adame, who also once founded and worked as a trainer at a boxing club that served Vista, Oceanside and Carlsbad.

“I spent my days watching television, dying a slow death of boredom. But these boys have given me inspiration. I was a cripple. But when I came here, they accepted me.”

But there were some serious moments of doubt for the youths, many of whom are former gang members--young men with police records and narrow attitudes of what it takes to be a man.

The first day that Adame’s wife dropped him off at boxing club headquarters--a friend’s house in Oceanside’s troubled Mesa Margarita neighborhood--the youths watched silently as Adame, cane in hand, slowly made his way to the rickety swivel chair that was soon to become his back-yard throne.

By the next day--after their first dose of Adame’s sage insights and advice about boxing, schoolwork and the daily struggles of being Latino--the boys had opened their eyes to an unlikely new mentor, someone to help guide them through the sometimes awkward transition from boyhood to manhood.

This time when Adame’s car arrived, they were there at the corner to carry him into the yard on their shoulders like a returning hero--a practice they still continue.

Such respect, Adame says, has resurrected his once-feisty spirit.

“At first I was embarrassed when they carried me,” he recalled. “I said ‘Boys, you don’t have to do this.’ But I know now that many of these boys look to me for strength, and they didn’t want to see me struggling like that.

“And now, every day, they carry me to and from the car like a baby, like a rag doll. That’s how much they look up to me. And I love them for that.”

The emotions run both ways.

“Mike teaches us how to think,” said Saez, a former gang member who grew up in Brooklyn. “And we listen to him. I mean, I was tough before I met Mike. But he’s shown me something else--discipline.”

Adame’s return to boxing has come as a result of the efforts of three Mesa Margarita neighbors who one day decided they were sick of scrubbing the graffiti from the area walls and buildings.

And so last November, Tony Bribriesca, Luis Villegas and Javier Flores started a boxing club to give neighborhood teen-agers something to do besides hang out on street corners.

So what if none of them knew how to box? They consulted a San Diego trainer for a few hours one Saturday morning. They sent away to a mail-order company for a starter set that included two pairs of boxing gloves.

Then, after rounding up a cadre of willing neighborhood youths, they started meeting each afternoon in Villegas’ dirt-covered back yard. They built wooden frames for their secondhand speed- and power-punching bags. They even erected a makeshift boxing ring with wooden pallets and sheets of plywood.

They worked hard, these youths--some too young to grow beards, others old enough to have wives and young children of their own. They did sit-ups, push-ups, lifted weights and staged sparring matches throughout the winter.

But the club organizers, Villegas recalled, quickly realized that their lack of boxing experience was severely limiting the youths’ progress. Attendance started to trail off.

Two months ago, their Mission Valley Boxing Club was down for the count, members say. Then something happened--even though they didn’t know it yet, the boys got lucky.

Mike Adame read a newspaper story about the new boxing group. He was sitting in front of the television set--as he had done for much of the five years since contracting a form of spinal meningitis that left him partially paralyzed.

Adame had become ill in 1984 after coming in contact with pigeon droppings while working as a sewage treatment operator at Camp Pendleton. He spent an entire year in the hospital, where doctors told him he would never walk or talk again.

Over the next five years, through continued physical therapy, Adame was able to wrest his right arm from his chest even though it had at first seemed almost frozen to his body. He learned to walk with a cane and to talk again.

Still, this is not how the scrappy fighter--who won several state Golden Gloves awards, was an All-Marine boxer and who almost made the Olympic team in the early 1960s--wanted to spend his life: sitting in front of a television set.

When Adame read that newspaper story, something clicked inside of him. Within several days, the bantamweight fighter who had compiled a record of 39-4 as a professional arrived in Luis Villegas’ back yard to begin what he calls the biggest boxing challenge of his career.

What he found wasn’t pretty. Young boxers flailing away at each other, with no more finesse than drunks. He found aged equipment and still only one good set of gloves for a club of two dozen members.

He saw bloody noses and youths who would cry in frustration. So he started over. From his swivel chair, he taught the boys the right way to do sit-ups, the more painful way to move their slender torsos down slowly, so that after a year, “a freight train could run over their stomachs.”

He taught them not to guzzle water during training no matter how thirsty they became. Because in fights, he told the boys, too much water brings on cramps, a condition that can beat a fighter before the other boxer ever lays a glove on him.

And he taught the youths how to deliver a powerful punch, how to move their heads in the ring, how to jab and throw combinations.

“They only know five punches,” he says of the club, which includes his own teen-age son. “But they throw them right. And in combinations. And they don’t cry any more. They know how to take punches. And to give them.”

But, for Adame, teaching the boys to become good boxers isn’t really the goal. It’s a means to another end.

“The main thing is to teach them about life,” he says, his hands clenching the curved question-mark handle of his cane, his bad leg shaking involuntarily. Boxing is just a hook to get them interested in something to keep them out of gangs and out of trouble, he says.

“Just because you’re Mexican, you don’t have to be a stereotype. You can go to college. You can get off the streets. One day, they’re going to wake up and realize they don’t need boxing, that they can walk away from the ring and still be a man. That’s when I’ll know I’ve been a success.”

He begins and ends each practice with a prayer, even those boys who aren’t religious lowering their heads in silence. Sometimes there are rap sessions in which the boys can spout off about their problems at home or at school.

But there have been relapses. The team’s most accomplished boxer recently quit. Other youths--after learning some nifty new boxing moves--talk about returning to the streets with their new weapon. That’s when Adame takes his young fighters aside.

“I tell them that I’m trying to teach them to walk away from a fight, not start them,” he says. “I tell them, ‘Anybody can fight. If you want tough, get a wife and a family, earn a living. It’s easy to be a hoodlum. What you’re doing isn’t tough. Good boxers with bad attitudes are a dime a dozen. I’ve seen too many of them.’ ”

Under Adame’s tutelage, things have changed at the Mission Valley Boxing Club. He’s been on the phone with boxing contacts. And, next month, his young team is scheduled to compete in two tournaments in Arizona and Texas.

With little time for preparation, Adame has shifted his training schedule into high gear. Recently, he told the team that to acquire the endurance of a fighter, they would have to begin running each morning--starting at 5 a.m.

“Nobody liked that idea at first,” 36-year-old Villegas recalled. “The coaches had to wake the kids up every morning. But Mike told them that, if they weren’t prepared to run every morning, he was going to give up on the team and quit. That woke them up all right.”

Now the youths run each day before the sun rises. Adame shows up each morning with oranges for each of the boys. Then he watches them from the front seat of his car as they do laps at a local high school track.

The regimen has already started paying dividends. The youths can now run several miles with little sign of fatigue--while revealing a different type of spunk and desire.

“Thirteen-year-old Pauline Rivera has a morning paper route, and he often gets up at 3 a.m. to deliver his papers so he can join the runners on time,” Adame says. “Another takes the bus every day from Fallbrook. And, with that kind of desire, I’m not going to continue showing up? You’ve got to be crazy.”

And there have been improvements outside the ring. Adhering to club rules that outlaw gang membership and make school attendance a must, one young boxer has decided to return to classes after several weeks of hanging out on the streets.

Team captain Lupe Camacho and his 15-year-old brother, Adrian, go home after school these days to help their mother clean up the house before reporting to boxing practice, where Adrian has lost more than 10 pounds.

“If I wasn’t here, I’d probably just be driving around in my car, doing nothing,” 17-year-old Lupe said. “My mom is real pleased with the change in us. She knows we listen to what Mike says. So she’s letting us go out of town to these boxing matches.”

Despite all the moral victories, Adame knows he needs equipment to make his boys successful fighters. He needs uniforms for them to wear at competitions. He needs more sets of gloves so that more than two young boxers can spar at a time.

But, on the salaries they get from their daytime jobs, the club’s three founders have not earned enough to buy the often costly boxing gear. And, despite a recent carwash in which they raised several hundred dollars, the group is still far shy of the money needed to take a dozen boxers on the road.

“They’ve got the desire, and it breaks your heart when you can’t do anything for them, to give them a better place to train so they can blossom with their talents,” Adame said.

“If I had the money, I’d pay for it all myself. When I win the lottery, that’s just what I’m going to do. Because I’ve let them know from the get-go that I’m just a man, and a crippled one at that. But, if I can, I’ll move mountains to help them.”

But the boys know that Mike Adame doesn’t need to win the lottery to make a difference in their lives. He’s already done that.

“Sometimes, when I don’t show up for the morning run because I have to go to the hospital for pain medication, they call me. They say, ‘Hey Mike, we missed you today. Are you all right?’

“They worry about me. And that’s something you can’t buy. It’s something that’s beautiful.”