Giving Youths a Fighting Chance : Boxer Tries to Lure Teens From Gangs

Ernesto Tobias knows the streets firsthand.

“You know the guy holding up a sign asking for change on the corner?” asks Tobias, sitting back on a leather couch in his small Santa Ana apartment. “That used to be me.”

Talk to the sometime professional boxer from Los Angeles’ tough Boyle Heights neighborhood, and he will tell you that he has come a long way from his hopeless childhood, when he lost his father and brother to fatal gang shootings and his sister to drugs. It has been a long battle for Tobias, once a homeless teen-ager who used to bathe in the restrooms of McDonald’s restaurants after boxing workouts in East Los Angeles.

Tobias, 21, now reaches out to teen-agers in danger of falling into gangs in his Santa Ana community by teaching them what he knows best: boxing. And Tobias--known as “Baby”--does it in his garage, his back yard, a parking lot or anywhere else a teen will listen.

“Pick up your front foot,” he tells Bismarck Oregon, a 16-year-old protege who drops his black-gloved hands and smiles sheepishly as the pair spar outside Tobias’ apartment. “Come on, pick it up!”

Oregon, a dark-haired, lanky Century High School 10th-grader, complies. Tobias sends him flying backward with a barehanded shove. Oregon laughs.

“See, you’re off balance. Keep your feet on the ground,” says Tobias, sweat glistening on his neck below his closely cropped hair. He paces in an almost hyperactive manner on a patch of grass, avoiding a patio table, and beckons his next pupil.

Luis Peralta, 16, is a wispy 115-pounder--his skinny knees hidden under a pair of white jeans and knobby shoulders hunched over a thin undershirt. But Peralta comes out gunning for Tobias with quick, sharp jabs.

“Always try to hit under the arm,” Tobias instructs him, fighting off a punch. “It hurts.”

Even younger kids from the neighborhood, like 11-year-old Morgan Gordon, want to get into the act in Tobias’ dark garage, which functions as a makeshift gym. Gordon--”the next Sugar Ray Leonard,” Tobias brags--punches a tan canvas bag about three times his weight with repetitive thuds.

Five youths bob, weave and punch in the dusty three-car garage, and Tobias urges them on. Oregon, wearing a Georgetown Hoyas T-shirt, steps back on a few squares of orange carpeting and jabs at a jury-rigged punching bag--a target that is really a discarded futon wrapped around a post and secured with yards of electrical tape.

“It’s a lot of work, and you don’t get to rest,” says Oregon, as sun glints off the thin gold chain around his neck. “But I guess it pays off when you get in a fight.”

Peralta, meanwhile, shows Gordon how to swivel his hips and really smack the bag. Gordon rears back and lets it rip, reminding Peralta of the other benefits of training.

“If you go to school and some teacher makes you mad, you can come here and take it out on the bags,” Peralta said. “Then you can go home and do your homework.”

Gordon says the allure of boxing is self-explanatory. “You get paid for knocking people out,” he says.

The youths, according to Tobias, have too much time on their hands. Many are former gang members or teens who socialize with gang members. So he plays games with them, goes swimming at a friend’s pool or takes them out for ice cream.

Peralta said he got the boxing bug when he met Tobias at a pizza place. “I kept asking him, when am I going to come over and train?” he said.

Because he now trains every day, Peralta, who has endured his share of fistfights on the street, has no time to hang out with the gangbangers in his Heninger Park neighborhood, he said.

Hoping to lure more kids away from gangs, Tobias and John Raya, a former trustee of the Rancho Santiago Community College Board, are negotiating with the city of Santa Ana to open a nonprofit boxing club for youths at risk of becoming involved in gangs. Already dubbed “T.K.O.”--Taking Kids On--the center is intended to provide boxing training, self-defense classes, counseling and tutoring.

“There are potential boxing champions in every division but heavyweights in Santa Ana,” said Raya, who added that organizers have also received the cooperation of the United States Amateur Boxing Assn.

“Living in a tough neighborhood puts that fighting instinct in you,” Tobias said.

City officials have allocated $25,000 for the project, and Tobias and Raya recently toured a vacant city-owned church on Bristol Street near Edinger Avenue that will become their recreation center. They must now wait for city permits before moving in.

Under the city’s Youth Alternative Plan, enacted a year ago to combat gangs, Santa Ana officials resolved to provide more recreational facilities such as a boxing program and gym for youths. But plans for a gymnasium fell apart when gang leaders and the city could not come to terms on a facility.

T.K.O could be considered a part of that gang plan, “but it’s not the intent at the present time,” said Allen Doby, executive director of the city’s Recreation and Community Services department. “This is going to be for kids who are interested (in boxing), whether they be involved in gangs or not.”

The center will re-create a place that was a safe haven for Tobias during his tumultuous adolescence: the gym.

Although he was born in New York, Tobias grew up in Boyle Heights’ gang-infested Aliso Village housing project. He began boxing at the age of 9, when he discovered a youth boxing program in East Los Angeles, he said.

But the difficulties of his early life sent him careening back and forth between the safety of the gym and trouble in the streets. Hardened by his parents’ separation, he started down the road toward rebellion at age 10 when his father was killed.

Tobias and his father were walking from a movie theater when gunfire erupted around them, Tobias said. His father was felled by two bullets in the unsolved slaying blamed on gangsters, but Tobias was untouched.

Three years later, Tobias and his 17-year-old brother were walking back from a doughnut shop near Aliso Village when they were approached by a car full of youths flashing gang signs. The car spun around and someone blasted the pair with a shotgun.

Tobias ran, but when he returned, his brother was dead.

By age 16, Tobias was more than a problem child. He belonged to a gang and sold drugs. His mother became a heroin addict who fed the family with a welfare check, and his sister had died of a drug overdose. He made repeated trips to Juvenile Hall.

His mother would disappear for days on end, Tobias recalled. Ultimately, she was arrested for a narcotics violation and sentenced to six months in jail, leaving Tobias to look after the household. In 1988, she died of a heart attack.

“Every person I loved in this world died,” Tobias said. “I thought I was contagious.”

Tobias was homeless for a time, sleeping under bridges and in buses. But amid the problems, Tobias found time to train at the gym to pursue his dream of being a fighter. He was taken in by his then-trainer, Al Stankie, and a boxing strategist, Joe Hernandez.

But Tobias’ hopes have not yielded success in the ring. He has a professional record of five wins and nine losses. His up-and-down boxing career and the deaths of his family members led to a depression that lasted until January, a year after he married longtime girlfriend Olivia Perez, 23, Tobias said.

Although Tobias still boxes, he is studying criminal justice at Rancho Santiago College in the hope of becoming a probation officer. “I don’t want to keep fighting and get beat up for the money,” he said, as he played with his 9-month-old son Santino.

Tobias hopes that his turnaround will inspire youngsters to overcome adversity, even if they do not reach the Olympics or become professionals.

“The discipline of training is what matters,” Tobias said. “These kids just need to know that if they put their mind on something and focus, they can do anything.”