Back on His Feet : With His Career in the Ring Over, Johnny Chavez Is Given a Chance as a Trainer

Nine o’clock on a recent Saturday morning. The half-dozen boxers and trainers standing or seated on the sidewalk outside the Azusa Youth Boxing Club are scowling.

Big problem here: No one can find the key that opens the half-pound padlock on the door.

Drivers are rolling through nearby neighborhoods, ringing doorbells of Azusa boxing people, trying to find the guy with the key.

Of those waiting outside the little gym, heavyweight Joe Falzone is wearing the meanest scowl.

“I haven’t got time for this,” he mutters. “I’ve got my own business and I’ve got to get this workout in before I go to work.”

Then, Falzone’s trainer, Johnny Chavez, drives up.

Yep, that Johnny Chavez. The little featherweight who suffered torn retinas in both eyes during a fight last November.

Chavez, who has had four operations on his eyes since, has been fitted with new glasses and now sees well enough to drive . . . and to train a 26-year-old heavyweight preparing for a second chance.

Two guys with new hopes, new goals.

“Anybody find the key?” Chavez asks.

“Nope,” is the response.

More scowls.

Soon, another key-searcher pulls up and, with a wide grin, displays the key to the crowd at the door. Cheers all around.

Inside the clean little one-ring gym, the 220-pound Falzone begins doing pushups on a battered, creaky massage table.

Then, while Chavez straps on his headgear and tapes his hands for a sparring session, Falzone talks about his one-bout career. He retired at 24 with an 0-1 record.

“I turned pro two years ago at the Forum, in a four-rounder,” he says.

“I thought I was in great shape, well-prepared. But I was a little too cocky. A guy caught me with a good shot and knocked me out. It was embarrassing.

“I mean, 30 minutes before the fight, these two little kids came up and asked me for my autograph. So when the fight was over, that’s all I could think of--those two little kids.

“I was so embarrassed I didn’t want to have anything more to do with boxing. But in the past couple of years I’ve built up a good business as a house painter, and since that’s kept me in decent shape, I decided to give it another try.”

Falzone figures if he can just equal his trainer’s record as a pro, 17-1-1, he’ll land in big-money bouts.

“I should be there now,” he says. “I spent two years crying over that Forum fight instead of doing something about it. I believe it will happen. There’s a lot of work involved--I just have to do it, that’s all.”

Landing Chavez as his trainer was a bonus, he says.

Chavez and Falzone are longtime friends, varsity football teammates at Azusa Gladstone High in the mid-1980s. In fact, on this morning, Chavez is wearing his tattered old red-and-black football jersey, No. 22.

“I was thinking about trying to fight again about the time Johnny got hurt,” Falzone says.

Chavez says: “We’ve been together about a month. I couldn’t see much at all when he came by to see how I was. I mean, I was walking into walls.

“Then after I kind of got some vision back, I got a terrible case of the flu.

“So we’re just getting started, really. Joe’s a tough guy and he can do well. He just has to concentrate in there and cure some bad habits--like letting his left jab drop.

“He only had two or three amateur bouts before that first pro fight, so he doesn’t have a lot of experience. It’s like he’s just getting started in the amateurs.”

And it’s tough to accumulate experience when you can’t find sparring partners--a common problem for heavyweights.

“There probably aren’t a hundred heavyweights in all of Southern California,” Falzone says.

“Johnny’s on the phone all the time, trying to find some. We’ll probably wind up doing some sparring at the Broadway Gym--there are a lot more fighters there.”

The sparring partner this time is Fernando Apodaca, a slightly undersized heavyweight at 185 pounds but one with heavily muscled biceps.

They spar for three rounds, and the little wooden gym creaks and groans as the two big fighters lunge about, throwing big punches at each other. Falzone has the better of it, but he is rocked several times by Apodaca’s counters.

Between rounds, Chavez repeatedly tells his fighter to stop dropping his jab and leaving himself vulnerable to a right-hand counterpunch.

When the session ends, Chavez pronounces his prospect on track.

“He’s doing better all the time,” Chavez says. “I’d like to get him a fight at either the Forum or in Irvine in a month or so.”

In the first weeks and months after Chavez’s injury, there was more heartbreak than hope associated with the Johnny Chavez story.

“Everything’s a little cloudy,” he had said a few weeks later, after two operations.

He was injured in a Nov. 6, 1992 Forum fight. Last June 6, the Helping Hand Club of Azusa held a benefit that raised $25,000 to help pay off Chavez’s medical bills, which were then nearing $70,000.

He has had four eye operations and faces one more cataract surgery.

“My vision isn’t what it was, but it’s pretty close,” says Chavez, who has returned to his job at City of Hope in Duarte, where he transports patients and does some heavy lifting in the warehouse.

Once, he was a skilled fighter . . . until his vision began to fail as he walked across the Forum parking lot after his final fight.

He was a fast-moving, nimble boxer whose best weapons were stinging counterpunches. At the end, he’d had one $4,000 purse and thought he was on his way to big-money fights when his world clouded over.

Yet, here he is, back on his feet and teaching a heavyweight who wants to work hard and learn.

Trainers commonly receive about 10% of a fighter’s purse. Kevin Rooney, onetime trainer of Mike Tyson, earned more than $2 million from Tyson’s 1988 fight against Michael Spinks.

Four-round fighters, even heavyweights, are lucky to earn $500 per match when they are starting out. So, 10% of $500 is . . . well, everyone has to start someplace.

“This is like a first, small step back for me,” Chavez says. “Joe did me a big favor, asking me to train him. He’s the one who got me out of the house and away from feeling sorry for myself. He kick-started my motor.”

Chavez’s fighter, too, is making that same first, small step--toward a future he dares not yet even dream of. The road is long, but the rewards are great.

“I feel like I’ve got the tools, the talent to do well,” Falzone says. “I know I can make a lot of money if I work hard and prepare well. I have a lot of faith in Johnny. I trust him.

“He learned a lot in his boxing career. I just want him to teach me what he knows. He was a winner, and I like the idea of having a winner in my corner.”