Fellowship OF THE Ring : More Than Just a Well-Respected Gym, La Colonia Helps Oxnard Barrio Youths to Build a Camaraderie and Character

Eduardo Garcia and Mario Uribe arrive at the strawberry fields at 6 a.m., toil under the sun for the next 10 hours and then, instead of going for a cold drink or a cooling dip in the ocean, they head to the last place on Earth you want to be if you’re hot and sticky.

A boxing gym.

From 4:15 p.m. to 7 Monday through Friday, Garcia and Uribe train 35 to 50 youngsters at La Colonia Boxing Club. Like most dedicated, devoted and unpaid boxing trainers, they dream about one of their fighters winning a world title so they can quit their day jobs, get paid as full-time trainers and put their little gym in the national limelight.

“This place could be like the Kronk Gym,” says Garcia, referring to a Detroit gym famous for such fighters as five-time world champion Thomas Hearns.

Can it happen for Garcia and Uribe? Or is it strawberry fields forever?

Although dreams as big as these usually wind up only dreams, Garcia and Uribe might be on to something. In amateur boxing on the West Coast, “Colonia is an illustrious club,” says Joe Rodriguez, a former national Golden Gloves champion who manages the Ventura Gold Coast Boxing Club.

“I was just at a tournament,” Rodriguez adds, “and heard (the trainer) of another club call Colonia ‘the Cuba of Southern California.’ ”

Promoter Dan Goossen of Ten Goose Boxing in Van Nuys calls Colonia “one of the best amateur programs in California.”

In this summer’s Southern California Junior Golden Gloves competition, Colonia entered seven fighters and won six titles plus the best-boxer award for 9-year-old Roger Romo, who fought in the 70-pound class. “Colonia is respected by everybody,” says club member Fernando Vargas, 14, a 1991 regional Junior Olympic champion.

Turning out local, regional and even national champions--Uribe’s 11-year-old son, Omar, is the 1992 Silver Gloves champion at 65 pounds--Garcia and Uribe are now setting their sights on producing the club’s first world champion.

Their candidate is Garcia’s 17-year-old son, Robert, a promising featherweight who was a finalist in this summer’s Olympic Western regional. Too young to turn pro in this country, Garcia fights professionally in Japan. Now 2-0, he is expected to make his Forum debut in February shortly after turning 18. His father predicts, “He’s going to be the world champion in less than three years.”

While the purpose of Garcia, a stocky 48-year-old former Mexican middleweight, and Uribe, 42, is to develop fighters, the club itself has a far loftier goal: developing character. The majority of kids come from Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio, a rough neighborhood notorious for gangs, drugs and crime. Boxing takes the boys off the streets and “offers them a different route,” says Manuel Herrera, president of La Colonia Youth Boxing Assn., a booster organization for the club.

Herrera and others say that Colonia boxers usually stay away from gangs. “I’d rather be doing this,” Vargas says. “You can get payoffs in boxing. On the street you can go to jail or do stupid things.”

Supported by city funds and run by the Oxnard Department of Parks and Recreation, the club has been in existence for about 30 years, occupying an abandoned firehouse in the heart of La Colonia. But two years ago, the city decided the structure was dangerous and stopped funding the boxing program. But thanks to the efforts of the boosters, the city provided temporary quarters for the club and secured a $275,000 federal grant to renovate the firehouse.

Until the repairs are completed--probably not for another year--the club has set up its ring at the Oxnard Boys and Girls Club, which will now run the boxing program. Because the city no longer funds the boxing club, the boosters have to raise about $30,000 a year to cover operating expenses.

Housed in a gray brick building on the outskirts of La Colonia, the Boys and Girls Club is the kind of place a kid would want to hang out, even if it does have rules (no gang attire) and adult supervision. Besides pool tables and a full-size indoor basketball court, the club also offers its 900 members help with homework and sound-booth training as a disc jockey.

The boxing club’s new quarters are in a small room off the gym. The ring dominates half the space. The other half is taken up by a broken Universal Gym and several punching bags of all shapes. The walls are decorated with mirrors, slightly askew boxing posters and action fight photos. The spit bucket sits precariously near boxers who are skipping rope.

Little boys, some as young as 8, look like miniature boxers, floating like a butterfly and stinging like a tiny bee. Synchronized to the rhythm of a boxing match, a buzzer dictates the pace of life in the gym. The kids train for three minutes, rest for one. Despite apparent chaos when the buzzer sounds--35 kids stop training and start fooling around, or vice versa--there is a disciplined structure to the workouts.

After the boys arrive, they tape their hands and stretch. The oldest boys spar first. After that, they work on hand movement with Garcia and Uribe, followed by workouts on the bags. The boxers also run outdoors and finish their routine with more stretching. They’re advised to eat healthy foods, avoiding sugar, grease and salt.

“You can’t go out every night and pig out at McDonald’s,” says Earle (Fergie) Ferguson, the club’s volunteer physical trainer.

Garcia and Uribe, who is officially listed as assistant trainer, spend time studying the fighters and fine-tuning boxing techniques. Their conversations with the boys, all of who are Hispanic, are conducted in Spanish. Serious and all business, the trainers don’t tolerate tomfoolery. A while back, Ferguson says, “some good fighters were kicked out” for playing with water jugs in the gym, flooding the floor.

“The best thing about the gym are the trainers,” Vargas says. “They really put in a lot of time helping us.”

Ferguson, a retired union representative from Thousand Oaks, credits the success of Garcia and Uribe to their ability to lead. Both trainers are foremen in the fields and “they know how to communicate with hard-working people,” Ferguson says.

Because of Colonia’s boxing renown, the esprit de corps is high, giving the boys a positive sense of identity and pride. “These are not the richest kids,” Ferguson says, “but you can’t buy what they get from this club.”

The club is now providing something else for the boys: action photos. Until Herrera became booster club president last year and began photographing the fighters at tournaments, “Some of these kids never had a boxing picture of themselves,” Herrera says.

Herrera is typical of the dedicated volunteers at the club. The Oxnard resident expects to lose his aerospace job soon, but he’s looking at the bright side. “I’ll be able to spend more time at the gym,” he says.

The boxing program needs an additional $20,000 in funds this year. Herrera hopes to hold about three or four fund-raisers, including a barbecue in late November featuring Olympic gold medalist Oscar De La Hoya. He also is expecting Boys and Girls Club director Abe Oliveras to help him obtain grants for the boxing club.

“The club has been around so long and endured so much,” Herrera says. “It would be a shame to let it just fade away.”