Getting Back on Track : Out of Prison Now, Lopez Is Trying to Recover Boxing’s Most Important Commodity: Time

He’s almost 25 now, and a man’s musculature has redefined the boy who went to prison in 1989.

“Everyone says I look much bigger now, but I’m walking around at 142 or 143 pounds, not much more than when I went away,” said Hector Lopez, once Southern California’s greatest young fighter.

His lean, rugged face even appears to be broader. He seemed wispy before, but now he is a presence. He says with a knowing smile that the 28 months taken from the prime of his career have made him a wiser fighter, as well.

“Prison gave me time to focus on what I really want in my life,” he said recently. “I should be working on my third world championship by now. I know how important that time was to me.”

Conceivably, Lopez’s prison term may have cost him more than $1 million in lost purses.

Until his life jumped the track more than three years ago, Hector Lopez’s future seemed assured. Boxing’s big time was only two or three fights away. His name in lights . . . pay-per-view purses . . . the toast of the Las Vegas Strip--and maybe Atlantic City’s Boardwalk, too.

He was only 21, with a 17-1 record, ranked as the No. 1 featherweight in the world and regarded by nearly everyone as one of boxing’s brightest young prospects. The jab was a jolt, he went to the body, he could take you out with either hand, he could block punches. And he fought with courage and style.

It was fun being Hector Lopez.

Then, on Oct. 9, 1988, his life changed.

After a days-long argument with his girlfriend, he surrendered to Glendale police, who arrested him on suspicion of kidnaping her at gunpoint.

The kidnaping charge was dropped, but Lopez was convicted of breaking into the home of his girlfriend’s father, assaulting him and beating another guest with a gun butt.

Lopez, a silver medalist for Mexico at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, served three months in the L.A. County Jail while awaiting trial, then 25 months in the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi.

It would have been months less, but for a fighter of Lopez’s reputation, prison means challenges.

“One time I was walking along by myself and this big guy--and I mean a heavyweight--blind-sided me from around a corner. He hit me right on the jaw, but I didn’t go down. So I gave him a big smile for a couple seconds--then I decked him.

“That cost me about 10 days in solitary and added time to my sentence.”

Now, Lopez is back. Released from prison on Oct. 8, he’s training down to the lightweight class, 135 pounds, and already has a comeback fight under his belt. Last Dec. 17, at 142 pounds, he beat Jaime Castillo in a 10-round decision at Reseda, his first bout in 29 months.

He next fights Juan Parra of Tijuana Saturday at the Country Club in Reseda.

Lopez, who turns 25 Feb. 1, seemed to have retained all his skills in his first comeback fight, but some observers thought he looked tired at the finish.

“No, the truth is I felt great,” he said. “But psychologically, I had a little fear about how much I’d have left in a distance fight, having been out so long.

“I used to kick up the pace in the last three rounds of my fights, but I was a little afraid of doing it against Castillo. Then, in the middle of the 10th round, it occurred to me I had a lot left and should have picked up the pace.”

Lopez emerged from prison as a puffed-up middleweight.

“I was 160 the day I got out, but I was in good shape,” he said. “I was skipping lunch and running six miles a day, doing 200 sit-ups and pushups every day. The extra weight was from the starchy prison diet.

“I went into the gym six days after I got out, and I haven’t missed a day since. I lost about 15 pounds almost immediately, and I’ve gone steadily down ever since. My next fight will be at 138. I won’t have any trouble making 135.”

Lopez, who trains daily at the Jet Center Gym and the Ten Goose Gym, both in Van Nuys, wants his third comeback fight to be against a prominent lightweight.

“I want to bust back into the ratings with that third fight,” he said. “I’d like to fight a guy like Juan LaPorte, Tony Lopez or Jorge Paez.

“I want to get to a championship as soon as I can. When I turned pro, my plan was to first be the featherweight champion, then super-featherweight and then lightweight.”

His longtime trainer, Gordon Wheeler, said he gave Lopez more than a passing grade on his first comeback bout.

“That first one was a psychological breakthrough for him,” said Wheeler, who first spotted Lopez as a 10-year-old in a Glendale gym.

“He mixed aggressiveness well with his excellent boxing skills; he showed me he hasn’t lost anything. . . . The object is to hit and not get hit, and he can still do that.”

Hector Lopez fashioned one of the best-remembered stories from the boxing tournament in the ’84 Los Angeles Olympics.

At 17, in the summer between his junior and senior years at Glendale Hoover High School, he won a silver medal in the bantamweight class--for Mexico.

“I’d lived in Glendale since I was 5, but because I wasn’t a U.S. citizen (and still isn’t), I had to make Mexico’s Olympic team,” he said.

Actually, he had to make it twice. He won one qualifying tournament in Mexico City, then was called back to Mexico and told he had to defeat another Mexican bantamweight a second time, which he did.

“I wasn’t really a Mexican--I don’t even speak Spanish very well--so there was some resentment,” he said later. “But the guys on the team came to accept me OK, I guess.”

In Los Angeles, Lopez lost a 4-1 decision to Italy’s Maurizio Stecca in the gold-medal bout.

Lopez, born in Mexico City, was a toddler when his mother brought him and his three brothers to Glendale in 1970 to live with an aunt.

Lucinda Lopez, his mother, is the real fighter in the family, Hector Lopez has often said.

“My mom is quite a lady,” he said. “She raised all of us. For years, she took any job she could get and made sure all of us went to school. She went to nursing school at nights, and now she’s a private nurse.”

Today, Lopez’s mother lives in Palmdale, where she is a nurse. One son is the manager of a supermarket meat department in Los Angeles, another works for the Los Angeles Convention Center and another is a cook in a Palmdale restaurant.

Hector Lopez, who lives in a Tarzana apartment, has rekindled dreams of being a boxing champion and says there was some well-spent time during his incarceration.

“I started reading a lot of books and newspapers in the prison library,” he said.

“I read all of Harold Robbins’ books, plus some others by Sidney Sheldon, Dean Koontz and Jackie Collins. Sometime, I’d like to write about ‘the Big Lie’ in the neighborhoods where I grew up (Glendale’s Atwater Village district).”

And what’s the lie?

“That you’ll never get anywhere unless you’re in a gang, fighting each other.”

He merely shrugged when asked if he expects to be treated differently now, with a prison background. Of course, prison notations are not uncommon entries in boxing dossiers.

Nor was it unusual to go to jail in Lopez’s boyhood neighborhoods. He says he believes “about 70%” of his boyhood friends went to jail at least once.

“I’m just concentrating on my boxing career. I’m very focused on just that,” he said. “As for the rest of it, I just want to be treated fair. I made a mistake once, but it’s behind me now.

“I have a really good guy for my parole officer, Frank Aviles. He treats me fairly, and that’s all I want.”