Hitting Them With Reality : Coach Puts Good Citizenship Ahead of Championships for His Young Boxers

Fabela Chavez is not expecting the next Oscar de la Hoya to come through his boxing gym--and that suits him just fine.

Chavez ponders this for a moment in his Carson gym office, a shrine to his long career from the 1940s and ‘50s when, as a featherweight named “Fabulous Fab,” he drew sellout crowds to Los Angeles arenas.

If a kid makes it, as de la Hoya did last summer by winning an Olympic gold medal, so be it. But the lessons in life that kids pick up in his gym far outweigh the opportunity to make it big in boxing.

“I am not here to train professionals,” he explains. “If they want to do that, I refer them to another coach or something. My goal is for kids to be good citizens. That is it. To teach them to be more respectful. That is what I do not see so much these days.”

Chavez directs the Fabela Chavez Boxing and Weightlifting Center, a city recreation department

program, and an underfunded one at that, staffers and volunteers say.

Kids come in dreaming of becoming championship boxers, reaping millions just like Sugar Ray Leonard or Riddick Bowe or Julio Cesar Chavez, the undefeated middleweight who is the star of the moment in boxing circles.

“And then they get in the ring and get hit in the nose and they make a U-turn out of here,” Chavez says.

That is because boxing is not as easy as it looks, something that Chavez and his instructors try to impress on the hopefuls.

They are mostly in their teens and 20s and reflect Carson’s ethnic diversity--black, Latino, Anglo and Pacific Islander. Here, Chavez and his staff boast, they work together.

Many are tough kids for whom trouble would seem as natural a nickname as “Fabulous” was for Fab Chavez.

“A lot of kids come in here with their pants sagging low and throwing gang signs and whatnot,” says James Wightman, assistant director of the center. The rules, including no loud swearing and gang clothes, are laid down quick. Disobey and you’re out, he says.

They learn the finer points of weightlifting and boxing in a rented, corrugated metal warehouse tucked behind Carlos’ Market and a car repair shop off Carson Street. Inside, the chipped walls are faded blue. There is one ring, weights everywhere. The air is cool and smells like wet sneakers. Top-40 hits blare from a radio somewhere, almost drowning out the pumphs of boxing gloves hitting headgear and leather punching bags.

His instructors, one paid and a few volunteers, do much of the hands-on coaching these days. But Chavez, 63, is a sage with a steady presence.

Bespectacled, with trim silver hair parted to the side and a slight paunch, he enters the gym. But he does not step too close to the ring. He is a sentinel off to the side, his arms folded, scanning the graceless dance in the ring as two kids spar.

What is he thinking?

“Look at the boy’s footwork,” Chavez says, motioning to one of the fighters. “Now his footwork is getting tired. He is getting tired, so he’s starting to slack off.”

The boy throws a halfhearted windmill punch easily dodged by his opponent.

“See. He’s getting wilder now,” Chavez says, then tells one of his assistants to end the bout.

He can relate to the boy’s frustration, to a degree. He had humble beginnings of his own, but at least this boy is getting some practice before he fights. That wasn’t the case with Chavez.

A newspaper boy fascinated by the boxing pictures in the sports section, Chavez hung out in a downtown Los Angeles malt shop not far from a Main Street boxing gym. One day a man approached Chavez and his buddies and asked if they wanted to earn $3.

“I said, ‘What do we have to do?’ ” Chavez recalls. “He said, ‘Box.’ I fought that night and won.” He was 12 years old.

Four rounds, two minutes each, with a burly, hairy sailor whose name is lost to time.

“When the (opening) bell rang I almost fell over. He took off his robe and he was hairy and had tattoos all over and was really well built. I just stuck him and ran,” Chavez says.

He fought 298 amateur bouts and lost seven. He fought 129 professional fights and lost 21, along the way earning the nickname “Fabulous” for his prowess and ability to fill local arenas, mainly the Olympic Auditorium and Hollywood Legion Stadium. But he also fought in big places--Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden and Boston’s Fenway Park, to name a few.

He awed sportswriters with his quick and relentless jabs.

“Lorenzo Safora could not have been hit more often had he been boxing an octopus,” Knockout magazine crowed in 1947.

Chavez came close to fighting for the featherweight belt in the mid-’50s, but lost the match that would have given him a shot at the title.

Nevertheless, the soft-spoken Chavez has no regrets, or at least he does not voice them.

He is content at having been California featherweight champion for three years. He is satisfied and slightly befuddled that boxing gave an uneducated kid from the barrio a shot at fame and a ticket to travel the world.

“Boxing was a whole new world for me,” Chavez says. “How else would I go and be recognized by celebrities and sit with them?”

He keeps his yellowing clips in a desk drawer. But his fame beckons from snapshots on the walls of the gym office taken when he was a star and after he left the sport in 1957. Fab and Jack Dempsey in a publicity shot. Fab and Bo Derek. Fab and Ricardo Montalban. Fab and Anthony Quinn.

Fame, he learned, has its drawbacks. Up to seven years after he retired, he says, sportswriters and fans dogged him seemingly everywhere he went.

“I wanted to be humble like anyone else,” Chavez says almost plaintively. “You get tired of it all. You are not comfortable. In L.A. I could not walk the street without getting mobbed,” Chavez says.

After retiring, he settled in Downey. Boxing did not make him rich. He took home a percentage of the gate, usually a few thousand dollars. So to support his wife and four children, he ran his own meat company for a while, worked in a factory and held other jobs before Carson called on him 13 years ago to run the boxing program.

He said yes for the kids, hoping to teach them discipline and respect.

These days his accolades don’t come in the form of a championship belt or high ranking. They come from mothers asking him, with awe and gratitude, how he inspired their sons to do something, anything.

Peachy Thomas is one of those mothers. Boxing has roped in her and her son, 13-year-old Jason Thomas. He had a few scrapes in school, which worried his parents. Now he yearns to be in the Olympics.

“For a little kid who had no coordination, to see him in a fight is amazing,” says Thomas, who on some days bounces an 11-pound medicine ball off her son’s stomach to strengthen it. “He used to have low self-esteem, but now his confidence is completely up.”

Some of the kids say the dream of boxing as a career keeps them coming to the gym.

“It’s bringing out the best in me,” says Raul Casian, 20, a high school dropout who is convinced he would be out on the streets were it not for the gym. “It’s letting me know I can do something with myself.”

He wants to box professionally, and he has heard from Chavez and instructor Jimmy Hays, an old pro from Chavez’s era, just how hard it is.

“I think I have the potential,” Casian says.

The potential. They have heard this from many kids, but they do not crush dreams. Everyone gets a chance. Only a few have shown promise in the amateur boxing circuit and professional rankings. Jeremy Williams, a light-heavyweight, is seen as an up-and-comer back East. Ricky Romero was a state bantamweight champion last year.

Just fine, Chavez says, but he knows the boxing future is bleak for the vast majority of the kids who come through the gym.

The best he and his assistants can do is too keep a kid out of trouble at least for a while, and teach him respect while they’re at it. Maybe the lessons they learn in the gym will guide them in later life.

“You can tell a young guy what to do but, no matter what, his mind is going to tell him what to do. They are going to do their own thing anyway,” Chavez says. He and his assistants can only hope that each kid’s “thing,” whether it’s boxing or something else, brings a good future.

On occasion, the gym’s future itself has been shaky.

Every now and then the city, in financial straits over the past few years, threatens to cut back the program, which costs $148,000 a year to run. Last year, for the first time, it began charging people to take part, $15 a month for adults (there is a senior boxercise program in addition to the boxing and weightlifting), $13 for kids.

Scot Yotsuya, the deputy city administrator in charge of the recreation department, could not rule out a cutback when the city drafts a budget this year. But he says for now the program is not in jeopardy.

Just another headache, Chavez says.

At the end of a long day, Chavez sits in his office poring over match-ups for an amateur bout tonight. It is frustrating. Kids drop out. Others don’t stick to their weight class. He is getting a headache.

A couple more years is all he figures on putting into the job. But he plods on.

“It’s a challenge every day,” he says with a sigh.