A Fighter Gives In to His 7-Year Itch : North Hollywood’s Shields Returns to Ring--and Joe Goossen’s Camp

Nineteen years ago, a tough kid from Grant High, a senior on the football team who in his 18 years had not found many other kids that he could not beat up, went looking for a fight. His quest took him all the way to North Hollywood High, where he roamed the campus and the halls for three days.

Finally, Joe Goossen found his man. Well, his kid.

He found Randy Shields, a 15-year-old sophomore who weighed 115 pounds. Goossen had heard the kid was tough. He wanted to see just how tough. A few hours later, in a boxing ring at Shields’ house, he found out. Despite a 35-pound weight advantage, Goossen was not much of a match for the skinny kid. After three rounds, he had taken bunches of punches and thought it might be nice to rest for a while.

Goossen need not have felt badly about the fight. Just two years later, the same Randy Shields would travel to Boston and soundly outbox a young man who later would gain a measure of fame in the ring--Sugar Ray Leonard. Shields battered Leonard in 1973 to win the national Amateur Athletic Union championship.

Under normal circumstances, exchanging punches to the face is not the best way to form a friendship. But after their fight, Goossen and Shields became best of friends.

Goossen went on to a career as a boxing trainer. His successes include International Boxing Federation middleweight champion Michael Nunn. Shields went on to a career as a boxer, a career in which he piled up a 41-9-1 pro record and fought the best welterweights in the world, including Leonard, Thomas Hearns and Pipino Cuevas of Mexico.

His career appeared to have ended in 1983, after Shields suffered nasty cuts over his eyes in the eighth round of a bout against Johnny Bumphus in Las Vegas.

But Tuesday night, at the Country Club in Reseda, Shields will bid to shake the cobwebs of his seven-year hiatus when he begins a comeback at 34. And stepping into the ring with him will be none other than Joe Goossen, who will, however, step back out of the ring when the fighting starts.

Goossen is now Shields’ trainer. And obviously quite a bit wiser than he was 19 years ago.

“He first approached me in June and hinted that he wanted to fight again,” Goossen said outside his Ten Goose Gym in Van Nuys where he has supervised Shields’ training. “I told him back then that if he ever got back into a ring, I would be in his corner. I never asked him to reconsider. Seven years is a long time, but Randy Shields is not an average fighter. He never was. He has great skills and he has taken great care of his body. I wouldn’t discourage him at all in a comeback. I’m happy to be with him.”

Boxers who have made comebacks in recent years have become as common as mouthpieces in what likely is the most brutal of all sports. Leonard has been successful in his, as has George Foreman. But for every fighter who does return successfully from a long layoff, there are dozens of fighters like Aaron Pryor, the former junior welterweight world champion whose life has been riddled with drug abuse and who now is pathetically attempting to regain a flicker of the light that once shone on him. Not that he could see the light very clearly anyway, with a detached retina in one eye that he claims is no big deal.

Or former heavyweight contender Jerry Quarry, now past the age of 40 and trying desperately to obtain a boxing license from any state that will listen. Or Henry Tillman, the Olympic champion who returned to boxing just in time to be nearly decapitated by Mike Tyson.

And few in boxing will ever forget the sad memory of perhaps the greatest fighter ever, Muhammad Ali, as he came out of retirement a decade ago and was humiliated by champion Larry Holmes. Or Gerry Cooney, who returned to the ring a year ago and was left face down in the middle of the ring by Foreman.

They all claimed they were different, that time could not possibly have taken anything from them.

And so does Randy Shields.

This time, however, it might be wise to watch. For Shields was never an ordinary fighter, in or out of the ring. A marvelous defensive fighter, he took relatively few crushing punches. He was knocked down only once and that was in his first pro fight in 1974. His losses all came because of cuts.

And even at the height of his career, Shields was never really high on celebrations. He claims he has never had a drink of alcohol in his life and as for the drugs that have dragged down many a pro athlete’s career, well, Shields is a firm believer that dope is indeed for dopes.

But why, after seven years of not being punched in the head, would Shields decide to punish his body again?

“Because I started wondering a year ago what it would be like to fight when I really felt good and was really healthy,” said Shields, a North Hollywood resident. “During my career, I seldom went into a big fight without something wrong.”

Indeed, Shields was not a fortunate boxer. His career seemed to be one of fighting his way to a championship bout only to enter it injured or sick.

When he fought Thomas Hearns for the World Boxing Assn. welterweight title in 1981, he did it essentially with one arm, having torn the rotator cuff muscle in his left shoulder during training a week or so before the fight.

“By the third round, my arm hurt so bad I didn’t even know where I was,” Shields said.

And yet he was beating Hearns on the cards of all three judges until the late rounds, when the pain became overwhelming. Hearns stopped him on cuts in the 12th round.

Two nights before a major fight in 1982 against Milton McCrory in Detroit--in January--a window in Shields’ room at the Book Cadillac Hotel broke. Rather than running from the North Pole-like winds that were whistling across his bed and demanding another room, Shields patched the damage as best he could with a blanket and went back to sleep. The next day he was very sick. He stepped into the ring a day later with McCrory with a fever and was stopped in the eighth round on cuts.

In 1979, five months after losing a narrow decision to Cuevas, the Mexican welterweight sensation who took so many punches from Shields that he had to be carried to his dressing room by two handlers after the decision was announced, Shields was preparing for a rematch with Cuevas when Shields fought Mauricio Aldana at the Los Angeles Sports Arena.

Shields won the fight, but as he tried to leave the ring was attacked by a wave of fans chanting Cuevas’ name. A metal chair crashed onto Shields’ head, opening a huge gash, and seconds later a man crashed a cupped hand against Shields’ right ear, rupturing his ear drum.

His rematch with Cuevas was canceled. Replacing him against the Mexican champion was Hearns, who scored a stunning, crushing knockout to win the WBA title.

In his last bout, the loss to Bumphus in 1983, Shields took the match on a three-weeks’ notice and was forced to lose 28 pounds in 21 days.

“I felt like I was fighting in slow motion,” Shields said. “I couldn’t move my hands I was so weak.”

And so, thoroughly discouraged, he retired.

“I was so sick of working hard and winning fights and getting to the big fights and then falling apart,” he said. “The agony of getting to the title fights and having to go into them with something wrong, a torn shoulder muscle or a fever . . . it just seemed that it was always something.”

Shields, who had done some acting earlier, turned to Hollywood after his retirement from boxing. He appeared on a few TV shows and made some commercials, and then he began writing. During his seven-year retirement, he turned out 18 original stories, six as screenplays, and also wrote poetry.

And it was during the writing of three screenplays about boxing in the past few years that Shields began to contemplate a comeback. The stories he was writing seemed to be his own, of boxers plagued with injury and illness. And as he wrote, he wondered what it would have been like in his career without the nagging problems.

And in March, Shields, who had continued to work out just to stay in shape, intensified his workouts.

“I didn’t tell anybody,” he said. “Not my mom or my dad. Nobody. If anyone asked, I told them I just wanted to be in shape because there was a part in a movie coming up. And secretly, I began to work myself back into boxing shape.”

Tuesday night, he will take the first step toward finding out whether there is boxing shape for a 34-year-old who has not fought in seven years. He will fight Stewart Baynes of Los Angeles, who is 9-11, in a scheduled 10-round bout before perhaps 1,000 people.

Shields has not sought a lot of publicity for his comeback.

“At the height of my career, I don’t think I had much of an ego,” Shields said. “I have always been humble about my boxing. I’m not doing this for the fame or the glamour. I never needed that.

“If I can do it, I’ll do it. If I can’t, I can’t. I’m not doing this to attract attention or make friends. Everybody I need to know I already know. I have my friends.

“And I don’t want anybody to put me down for trying this, because this is just for me.”