Take a Gander at Ten Goose Now : Goossens’ Family-Run Van Nuys Boxing Club Prospers After Humble Start

Contrary to previous reports, the two world championship fights to be held June 1 on a tennis court in Palm Springs will not mark the first time promoter Dan Goossen has staged an outdoor boxing event.

It will, however, be the first time he’s done it without having to personally sweep leaves from the ring.

And this time, Goossen will not have to use discarded garden hoses to keep the fighters from tumbling from the ring. This time, he gets to use real rope to encircle the ring.

The Goossen-promoted card will feature World Boxing Assn. welterweight champion Meldrick Taylor against unbeaten Luis Garcia and World Boxing Council super welterweight champion Terry Norris against veteran Donald Curry.

It will mark a serious plunge into the world of big-time boxing promotions for Goossen and his Van Nuys-based Ten Goose Boxing Club, an organization that was born a poor and homeless child in a North Hollywood parking lot virtually underneath the Ventura Freeway in 1982.

Goossen, 41, has brought his business a long way in nine years, from the outdoor bouts he staged in that first ring under a tree to the June 1 multimillion-dollar event to be held under the twinkling stars of a Palm Springs night at the posh Radisson Resort.

How low was the Ten Goose club in its childhood?

“I used all of our business cash to buy a pair of real boxing trunks and some gauze hand wraps for our first fighter,” Goossen said. “And the first time he fights, right in the middle of a round he quits, climbs through the garden hoses, gets in his car and drives away. With the trunks and hand wraps.

“We had to start from scratch the next morning.”

Joe Goossen, 37, is the club’s trainer who guided the career of Michael Nunn from an amateur to International Boxing Federation middleweight champion. Nunn eventually bolted from the Goossens with not much more fanfare than the guy who drove off into the night with their trunks and hand wraps.

Joe Goossen puts the status of the early Ten Goose more succinctly.

“You’ve heard of starting at the bottom?” he asked. “We practically started underground.”

Dozens and dozens of boxing management and promoting outfits spring up each year across the country, just as the Goossens’ did. Nearly all of them don’t survive the first year in a business that . . . well, let former Dallas Cowboys star and briefly a boxer Ed (Too Tall) Jones say it:

“I have never met so many crummy people in my life,” Jones said several years ago, explaining why he gave up boxing and returned to the Cowboys.

But all those other boxing clubs don’t have what Ten Goose has.

Ten Goossens.

With apologies to Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, who are these guys?

At the top is Dan, the president of Ten Goose. A salesman extraordinaire. While some people sit on the bank and wonder where the river goes, Dan sits on the bank and wonders how to most efficiently sell sandbags to residents of nearby low-lying villages.

After graduating from Notre Dame High, he spent more than a decade selling clothing--in the early ‘70s he says he peddled mostly those really neat bell-bottom pants that not only covered the wearer’s shoes but also the shoes of anyone standing close to him--and pens and pencils. He talks of how he didn’t want to spend his life selling pens and pencils, conjuring up an image of a man sitting on a sidewalk with a tin cup.

What Dan Goossen only grudgingly acknowledges is that he sold so many pens and pencils and other office supplies for American Data Products, Inc., that he was pulling down more than $100,000 a year. His cup was not of tin.

And if Dan Goossen might try to capitalize financially on the flow of a river, brother Joe would be the type to heave one of his boxers into the swiftest current of the river to ascertain whether swimming frantically and gasping for breath could become a training technique.

A former linebacker at Grant High, Joe Goossen readily admits that his life revolves around sports. And if you ever see Joe Goossen back away from a fight, you should get your eyes checked.

“I was playing a pickup basketball game when I was 17 and guarding this big, hairy biker guy, about 28 years old,” Joe Goossen said. “Someone called, ‘Hey, Goossen,’ and this biker guy walks over and slaps me in the face as hard as he could. I take a step toward him and slapped him right back, only harder. And he says, ‘Geez, you are a Goossen.’

“The Goossens had a certain reputation and it wasn’t about to end with me.”

Sister Ellorie also works for Ten Goose. And her husband, Denny Buffo, is the head of the Ten Goose promotional company. Brother Pat Goossen, the only Goossen to box professionally, is now a stuntman in Hollywood. Mike and Larry Goossen, twins, have not strayed far from the family. Mike is an attorney for Ten Goose. Larry runs a boxing camp in Big Bear. Brother Tom is a high school football coach and Sandra, the youngest sister, also works in the Ten Goose office. Her husband is Tom Brown, the Ten Goose matchmaker.

The Goossens’ mother, Anna May, also works in the Ten Goose office. Often, she tries to pay for office supplies and other business-related items out of her own purse, even though Dan insists that the company has money and she doesn’t have to buy things for little Danny anymore.

And then there is Greg Goossen. He was the catcher for the most woeful New York Mets teams in history. His manager, Casey Stengel, introduced his new catcher to the New York media with this line: “This is Goossen. He’s 19 years old and in 10 years he’s got a chance to be 29.”

Well, it is 26 years later, and Greg is 45.

He assists Joe in training boxers and also works as an actor. He has been Gene Hackman’s double in several films, portraying the famous actor in scenes deemed too dangerous for Hackman. Nothing, it seems, is too dangerous for someone who was the catcher for the 1965 New York Mets.

And reigning over the entire flock of Goossens was Al, the father. He was a 16-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, spending several years as a celebrated homicide detective--he worked on the famous Black Dahlia murder case in the 1940s, the Caryl Chessman gas chamber case of the 1950s and numerous organized-crime cases.

Al Goossen died in 1985 at the age of 69 after not nearly enough years of encouraging his boys to play sports, of not nearly enough evenings of clearing the furniture out of the family’s living room and teaching his boys how to box. He never, however, allowed any of them to box against him.

“He would always tell us, ‘I am not your buddy. I am your father,’ ” Joe Goossen recalled, more than a trace of sadness in his voice as he remembered. “He was both, though.”

In 1979, the embryo of Ten Goose was formed. Dan, weary of selling pens and pencils, called the brothers together and asked what they thought about starting a boxing club. Joe was the most excited about the idea. He had briefly worked in the same pen and pencil office with Dan and the thought of getting out of there thrilled him greatly. His experience as a trainer consisted of being a corner man for welterweight contender Randy Shields--a guy Goossen had picked a fight with in high school just because he had been told Shields was a tough kid.

It was more than two years later when the first feathers of Ten Goose Boxing finally emerged. And in the parking lot of broken glass and weeds, on the diamond where a thousand Goossen whiffle ball games had taken place, a boxing ring rose from the dirt, rubber garden hoses and all. It stood for seven years. Eventually, the Goossens erected a building around the ring. It was their first gym.

“For the first year, we’d sit against the ring and wait for boxers to show up,” Dan Goossen said. “Joe and I would sit there and every time a car drove by one of us would say, ‘I wonder if that guy’s a fighter?’ ”

“One morning,” Joe Goossen said, “a guy came out of his house in his bathrobe to get his newspaper in the driveway. I looked up quickly and thought it was a boxer coming over to the gym.”

And months later, when they actually had their first fighter, the guy just quit in mid-round, taking the only pair of Ten Goose boxing shorts with him.

“That was a real disappointment,” Dan Goossen said. “We thought we had a champion.”

There would be other, greater disappointments. Nunn’s bizarre, no-reason-given departure devastated Ten Goose, both financially and emotionally.

But they have risen from the ashes, guiding the careers of Rafael and Gabriel Ruelas, brothers who came to the old Goossen gym as pre-teen-agers and now stand on the verge of titles and major paydays. And as the Goossens’ reputation recovered, other fighters sought them out. Most recently, Frank Liles, a talented, left-handed middleweight came from the famed Kronk Gym in Detroit.

And now, Dan Goossen has under his wing Terry Norris, the slick-fighting super welterweight champion who thrashed Sugar Ray Leonard earlier this year and could become one of boxing’s top attractions over the next few years. Even a fight against Nunn is being contemplated.

The Goossens’ link to Norris came through Norris’ manager, Joe Sayatovich, a rural Texan who tired of dealing with the two reigning monarchs of boxing promotions, Don King and Bob Arum. When Terry’s brother, heavyweight Orlin Norris, was having trouble finding bouts after a major knee injury, Dan Goossen stepped forth and offered Orlin the Country Club in Reseda, the nightclub where Ten Goose has held monthly boxing shows for several years.

The favor was appreciated. For the June 1 fight in Palm Springs, Sayatovich and Goossen have no contract. None was needed, both parties said. The deal for Terry Norris to defend his title was made on a handshake.

That, in today’s world of boxing in which he who dies with the fewest lawsuits pending against him wins, is remarkable.

“The Goossens are bulletproof guys, honest guys,” Sayatovich said. “And believe me, that’s very unusual in this business. The problem with most people in boxing is that money rules. It’s the only thing that matters. But in my world, in my life, money is not first. These guys are the same as me.

“I’m not a crook. I’ll fight you before I’d cheat you out of a dollar. The Goossens have struck me as the same kind of people. When Dan and I shook hands on this fight, that was it. He told me what he would take and told me what Terry would take, and that’s all I needed. And I know that no one will be cheated.”

That reputation is the main reason for the success of Ten Goose.

“I remember standing in that parking lot nine years ago,” Dan Goossen said. “I remember leaning against the ring under the tree and telling my brother Joe, ‘Let’s do this right. Let’s not make any mistakes and let’s do things the right way, no matter what happens.’ I think we have done that.”