Bruise Brothers : Goossens Making Their Mark on the Fight Game

The star of David is embroidered on their boxing trunks, yet they are Catholic.

Fans call them The Great White Hope, but P.J. Goossen prefers “The California Kid,” and his brother Chuck is known as “Gnarly Charlie” because they are certain that great white hopes go down.

The brothers Goossen grew up in a Valley Village home complete with back-yard swimming pool. They turned to boxing when their aimless San Fernando Valley night lives grew dangerous.

Even though they are unlikely looking pugs, the Goossens still mix sweat and saliva with every thud of glove to face, their cheekbones have swelled into grotesque lumps, and blood has flowed from blows to their temples.

P.J., 23, has thick blond hair, blue eyes and a deep tan. A 5-foot-10, 152-pound first-year pro, he is 9-0 with eight knockouts in the junior middleweight division.

Chuck, 22, began his pro career in March and is 3-0 with two knockouts in the lightweight division. Bespectacled and slightly built (5-10, 135 pounds), he bears a scholarly appearance.

Their middle-class backgrounds and handsome faces initially obscure the aura of bravado that enables them to deliver a punch.

They acquired it from their father, Pat Goossen, whose days in the ring proved more influential than the suburban life style he and wife Mona provided their children, Erik, Todd, P.J., Chuck, Jesse and Elliott.

The toughness Pat passed on impressed Dean Lohius, a rater for the World Boxing Council and North American Boxing Federation who has seen all of P.J. and Chuck’s pro bouts.

“They do show promise, both of them seem very tough,” Lohius said. “You have to (temper) your optimism though because they haven’t been beaten and they haven’t beaten a quality opponent. The jury is still out.”

It wasn’t out for long at Walter Reed Junior High when their swagger and the occasional fist behind it showed their classmates that the scrawny-looking Goossens weren’t pushovers.

“We didn’t want anyone to bully us,” P.J. said. “We stood up for ourselves and people knew after a while that we would stand up for ourselves.”

Erik, 25, took the schoolyard fights into the ring in 1984. But his amateur career lasted only one year. Three weeks after a fight, he suffered successive strokes, leaving him with no peripheral vision in his left eye and no feeling on his left side.

His brothers’ exploits are a source of pride, but a painful reminder of his limitations.

“I miss getting in there,” Erik said. “And showing off.”

Erik’s trying experience did not deny his brothers the opportunity to box for two reasons: It was never proved that boxing caused his strokes, and P.J.and Chuck were entangled in so much trouble on the streets that Pat and Mona figured the ring would be safer.

When P.J. was 15, his powerful fist landed him in jail. Trouble started at a skating rink when a young man thought the Goossens were talking to his girlfriend. He challenged P.J. to a fight. With one punch, P.J. broke his jaw. Then Todd knocked him out.

They were charged, as juveniles, with assault and battery and put on probation. A series of probationary infractions cost P.J. 14 weeks in a juvenile detention center.

“It was like a wake-up call,” he said, although it did not change his attitude about street fights.

“If someone tries to attack me, I’ll still defend myself. Usually you have a right to.”

Even when he wasn’t fighting, P.J. attracted trouble. At a party in Studio City, a man P.J.’s friend was fighting pulled a knife on P.J. and slit his chest, missing his heart by one-quarter of an inch.

Chuck’s offenses were minor, though he served a series of school suspensions for mixing it up.

“We were getting all the bad out,” Chuck said.

Their problems tested their parents’ patience, but the boys still seemed aimless.

“Bad kids do what they do regardless of their parents,” P.J. said.

Eventually, he grew tired of his dead-end life. With Pat volunteering as his trainer, he began to run, skip rope, hit the heavy bag, spar and diet. From the outset, he learned to adhere to a daily training schedule.

“If I go to the gym without running, I get my head beat in,” P.J. said. “If you’re tired, you can’t dance (away from opponents). So I had to start running and getting to bed early.”

Fresh from losing a new job as a clerk, Chuck joined him in 1990.

“Now, we get paid to fight,” Chuck said with a grin. “It’s changed my life. I used to be a wild and crazy kid. I don’t go out anymore.”

And Pat is sleeping easier.

“I go to bed at night knowing that these kids aren’t out drinking, aren’t doing drugs,” he said.

As amateurs, P.J. was 7-3 and Chuck went 8-2 and advanced to the California Golden Gloves finals. But the Goossens’ style did not lend itself to the amateur scoring system. They attempted to knock out their opponents, rather than pile up points with an assortment of punches.

“You never knew how it would be scored if both fighters are standing up at the end,” Pat said.

*

In the late 1930s, Los Angeles Police Officer Al Goossen married Ann Forster and converted from Judaism to Catholicism. They had 10 children, eight of them boys.

Pat, the third-oldest child, put on the gloves shortly after graduating from Van Nuys High. At 23, he made his boxing debut. A back injury ended his career at 29.

To support his growing family, Pat worked as a clerk, bouncer, and night club manager until 1982 when he and his brother, Dan, started Ten Goose Boxing, a boxing management and training company. Eventually, all the Goossen siblings worked for Ten Goose, which gained acclaim through its association with former middleweight champion Michael Nunn.

Eager to strike out on his own, Pat left Ten Goose in 1986 to become the trainer/manager of kickboxer Don Wilson.

Now he trains, manages and promotes his sons with the financial assistance of co-manager Arnie Geffner. Unlike most boxing stables, the Goossens do not have a name, although Pat jokingly calls their collaboration “mayhem.”

As their father and trainer, Pat sees his roles blur, except when his sons are in the ring.

“I click off the father thing,” Pat said. “It’s like I am watching an athlete perform.”

Yet, he believes fatherhood makes him a better trainer.

“I don’t think anyone could train them as well as I can,” Pat said. “I know all their weaknesses and I know how to get a great effort out of them. I get on them. I’ll be the boogie man for a while and they’ll thank me for it later.”

With a laugh, P.J. and Chuck admit that they don’t always agree with Dad, especially when he trims their 60-second breaks between sparring rounds. They don’t cross him, however. They know he is trying to give them the guidance he lacked as a boxer.

“My trainer was a drunk who worked at Sears as a janitor,” Pat said. “I wasn’t really taught. I went through it blindly.”

P.J. and Chuck are closely monitored, from their four-mile runs on six-minute pace to the low-fat meals Pat prepares.

The brothers pack a more powerful punch than their father.

*

In setting up his knockout of Adolfo Gasca two months ago, P.J. used a dynamic array of consecutive jabs, a right-hand power punch and a left-handed cross.

“He is becoming more of a pro,” Lohius said. “He wasn’t just looking for a knockdown. He can slug when he has to and the right hand that dropped Gasca was a pretty punch.”

Lohius is more cautious in assessing Chuck’s ability because of his inexperience, although he was impressed when Chuck rebounded from a first-round beating to defeat Rudy Cruz.

“Rudy wobbled Chuck,” Lohius said. “He hurt him. And Chuck showed a lot of fortitude to dig in and come back.”

Pat calls P.J.’s next few bouts acid tests because of the difficulty attracting opponents. Although P.J. fought Thursday in Irvine, knocking out Jerry Ward in the second round, he was denied a fight last month at Tony Longval’s Country Club in Reseda because the matchmaker could not sign an opponent.

Foes who succumb to his knockout punch must sit out 45 days as a medical precaution imposed by state law.

“Only people that think they are going to beat him are going to fight him,” Pat said. “For $600 ($100 per round) you take a chance. If P.J. knocks a guy out, he serves a 45-day suspension and he and his manager are out of work during that time.”

By the end of the year, Pat plans to move P.J. up to 10-round fights that have a larger pool of opponents. Chuck will fight six-round bouts by then.

In the meantime, P.J. and Chuck lead a regimented life.

*

On a typical day, they get up and walk two blocks from their apartment to their parents’ house. If sparring partners have been secured (no easy feat), they go to the gym. If not, they train in a makeshift gym in their father’s garage. After a long break, they run, eat dinner, and get to bed before 11 p.m.

They push each other to run fast and eat wisely, but they are no good for each other inside the ring. Pat’s plan to use them against each other as occasional sparring partners met with disaster.

“It was like watching paint dry,” he said.

Neither brother would lay a glove on the other.

“It’s just not something you want to do to your brother,” P.J. said.

The bonds are tight throughout the family.

On weekends, Jesse, 11, Elliott, 8, the two youngest children of Pat and Mona, and Bianca, Erik’s 3-year-old daughter, sleep at the apartment Chuck shares with P.J. and his wife, Kim.

Elliott is eager to experience the family rite of passage, allowing Erik to tattoo a dollar sign on his left pectoral, identical to the symbol sported by his four brothers.

He also wants to become a boxer. Pat has a different vision--”I hope he is a bookworm and a nerd,” he said.

When P.J. and Chuck fight, Todd works the corner while Pat and the rest of the Goossens fill a row of seats. Jesse doesn’t like boxing and Mona vicariously absorbs each punch with her sons.

“I go absolutely numb,” she said. “It’s horrible. It kills me.”

Yet her sons are clearly suited for the brutality of boxing.

As he runs his finger over a welt above his left eye, Chuck said gleefully: “It probably enhances my looks. It adds more character, more stories to tell.”