CITY TIMES COVER STORY : ...

THE DREAM:

A Latino teen-ager wants to help support his impoverished family. He believes he can earn money quickly with his fists.

He walks into a gym in East Los Angeles to pursue fame and fortune that others from his neighborhood have found: Paul Gonzales, Genaro (Chicanito) Hernandez and Oscar De La Hoya.

He has been a successful street fighter. Now he learns to box. “You’ll have to work very, very hard if you want to win,” he is told, over and over. His confidence grows as he trains for his first fight. He thinks he is ready.

The reality:

In his first bout, the teen-ager is getting badly beaten, but refuses to lie down. By the third round, his face turns cherry, his knees buckle and he drops his hands to his sides when the referee stops the bout.

“Why did they stop the fight?’ ” he asks his trainer, who wipes blood from the boy’s face.

“Because you were not punching back,” says the trainer.

“You didn’t train hard enough. Come back and try again.”

*

Dreams do come true--at a cost--in East Los Angeles, home to some of the best fighters in the world and where boxing has become a way of life for thousands, regardless of professional aspirations.

East Los Angeles has earned a deserved reputation as a producer of top-flight boxing talent. Many of the nation’s most talented amateurs come from there, which has also produced two Olympic gold medalists and a handful of world professional champions.

Since the days of lightweight contender Art Aragon in the 1940s and ‘50s, boxing has been a force in the Latino community of East Los Angeles, where longtime residents still speak of the rough-and-tumble tradition of street fights going back to the ‘20s and ‘30s. Beyond tradition, its appeal owes to a variety of reasons, including economics: gloves, protective gear and a place to train are minimal requirements for a sport and usually available on a loan basis. And with boxing’s many divisions, an athlete of average or even less than average height and weight can become a champion, whereas other sports demand great size or bulk. At 5-foot-1 and 108 pounds, Humberto (Chiquita) Gonzalez is one such champion.

“For kids in East L.A., boxing is still the last frontier to get out of the barrio,” said Andy Stanke, boxing trainer at Hollenbeck Youth Center.

Helping to perpetuate the dream are professionals such as Chicanito Hernandez, the World Boxing Assn. junior lightweight champion who trains at Brooklyn Gym in East Los Angeles.

Youths seeking inspiration from a local hero also get it from the walls themselves. At the Sheriff’s Department East Los Angeles Community Center, the image of Gonzalez gazes steadily toward the ring from a portrait painted as part of a mural. Gonzalez, the International Boxing Federation and World Boxing Council light-flyweight champion, trains at the center before he fights at the Forum.

Beyond the fame and fortune, boxing is a popular, entrenched form of recreation. Whatever the odds of making it as a champion, boxing has taken on a larger purpose. In East Los Angeles, boxing gyms are a refuge for troubled youths.

“You see the aggression in them, the way they hit the bags,” said Ray Morales, 33, a postal worker and a former Golden Gloves champion, as he pointed to a boxer hitting the heavy bag. “They have troubles at school or they don’t have a father at home to be a role model.”

From Hollenbeck Youth Center and Los Angeles Youth Athletic Club in Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights Youth Club, Eddie Heredia Boxing Club and East Los Angeles Community Center in East Los Angeles, dedicated youths train up to five hours a day, five days a week even when temperatures soar above 90 degrees.

Two other gyms--Cache Boxing in Vernon and Resurrection Boxing Club in East Los Angeles--train a mixture of amateurs and professionals, while Brooklyn Gym, also in East Los Angeles, is strictly for professionals.

There are 1,291 amateur boxers formally registered with the Southern California branch of USA Boxing, according to Melanie Ley, Junior Olympic chairwoman. Of those, 85% have Latino surnames, including about 15% who live in the East Los Angeles. Thousands more box or follow the sport avidly. And many in the community are pleased that they do.

“It’s a way to keep them off the streets,” said Morales, head boxing coach at the Sheriff’s Department community center. “Most of my kids box for recreational purposes. Right now we’re fortunate to have a De La Hoya because kids look at him as a role model. They want to be the next De La Hoya because they come from poverty-stricken areas.”

Councilman Mike Hernandez, who represents District 1, points out that Latinos have always been part of boxing history.

“It’s not like baseball, where we’ve recently become part of the tradition, or football, where we struggle to get Hispanics recruited by even college teams,” Hernandez said. “Latinos have been part of boxing history since the Golden Boy days of Art Aragon,” a lightweight contender during the 1940s and ‘50s.

When he was 4, Hernandez watched his father, Paul, train boxers in a gym in Tijuana.

“I’ve always seen boxing as a very positive sport,” Hernandez said. “It’s a clean sport with rules. It’s not street fighting. And there is a certain status that comes with being a boxer.”

From a boxing promoter’s standpoint, Latino fight fans are “the backbone of the boxing industry,” according to Olympic Auditorium promoter Dan Goossen.

“It’s been proven at the pay-per-view level that they are the biggest boxing fans,” said Goossen, who is also a vice president of the Top Rank boxing promotion company. “They’re loyal, devoted and knowledgeable about the sport. It’s also a very heavily populated area to find fighters. We don’t get too many fighters, if any, from the Westside.”

One of Top Rank’s biggest drawing cards is former East Los Angeles resident De La Hoya, a gold medal winner in the 1992 Olympics. De La Hoya, the World Boxing Organization lightweight champion, was the headliner during the reopening of the Olympic Auditorium in March.

“If you want to become an Olympic champion, if you want to become a professional champion, you’ve got to dedicate yourself and really train hard,” De La Hoya said. “When I go to schools and talk to kids, I tell them you’ve got to work hard. Nobody can stop you but yourself.”

Still, even the hardest-working boxers fail to achieve De La Hoya’s Golden Boy status.

Paul Gonzales became a hero in the community and in the United States when he won the Olympic gold medal in 1984--the first Mexican American to win any Olympic medal. But though he achieved tremendous international fame as an amateur, his professional career was beset by false starts and injuries. He recently retired from boxing 10 years after winning his gold medal.

Morales estimates the odds to be “one in a thousand” that one of his boxers will become a world titleholder. But, he says, they will still come away with a valuable lesson.

“We teach them how to box, but we also stress education,” he says. “If they don’t have the grades, they don’t box.”

Boxers are required to present their report cards on a quarterly basis. If they fail to meet the grade, they cannot compete, according to Morales. Those that show improvement or have outstanding grades are awarded gym bags and T-shirts.

“Few make it to the top without worrying about getting an education first,” Stanke said. Boxing itself is an education in which athletes learn discipline and motivation that they apply to their classroom studies.

At Eddie Heredia Gym, director Chuck Rios shouts instructions to 12-year-old Mario Miranda of Montebello, who is sparring with Mike Anchondo of Norwalk. Anchondo, also 12, has fought 80 more fights than his opponent and his experience is evident in the ring.

“What are you waiting for, Mario?” Rios said. “Throw more punches. You will connect. You’re as strong as him.”

Heredia Gym specializes in training junior boxers, ages 8 to 15.

“We’re here to keep kids off drugs and away from the gangs,” Rios said. “These kids are tougher than gang members because they know how to train. The hardest part of boxing is training and that’s what drives away the gangbangers.”

Miranda shows promise as a boxer, but it’s in the classroom where he has started to excel. He said he had a straight-A report card during the past two quarters at Montebello Intermediate School.

“My grades were OK until I started boxing,” Miranda said. Now “I don’t go outside and play. I go to school and I train. That’s all I have time for.”

Like many Latino youths, Miranda became indoctrinated into boxing through Spanish-language newspapers such as La Opinion, which covers boxing with the same fervor that the English-language press devotes to the Super Bowl.

“I learned about boxing by reading the papers and watching old videos,” he said.

Joe Morales of East Los Angeles, the father of 9-year-old boxer Ricardo, said he takes his two sons to the Forum twice a month to watch boxing. He also collects newspaper articles about boxing and shows them to his sons.

“I feel good to have my son out of the streets doing something fun,” said Morales, who also has another son. “I like my children to be professionals, but that will be their decision when the time comes.”

Salvador Garcia Jr., 15, of East Los Angeles is the nation’s top-ranked Junior Olympic amateur in the 90-pound weight class for 15- and 16-year-olds. He took the gold medal in the Elite Junior Olympic program box-offs Aug. 5 in Colorado Springs, Colo., and was scheduled to compete Friday and Saturday in the USA-Ireland Junior Olympic duals in Dublin, Ireland. Garcia’s grandfather was an amateur fighter in Mexico and his father fought professionally in Tijuana.

“My father was a professional boxer for four months,” Garcia said. “And my mother likes the sport too. She pushes me because she knows I have a chance to be a champion.”

Said Irma Garcia, Salvador’s mother: “I like boxing because I feel something inside. When I see my son box, I get excited because it’s in my blood.”

Salvador, a sophomore at Roosevelt High, said he struggled in school until he took up boxing 1 1/2 years ago. Now he has a 3.5 grade-point average.

“Before I used to hang out in the streets with my friends,” Garcia said. “Now it’s boxing, homework and that’s it.”

Ley, of the Junior Olympics program, said that parents for the most part support their children in boxing. “You will hardly ever find a mother who covers her eyes when Junior is boxing,” Ley said. “There have been some mothers who object to boxing, but not recently and I can’t think of anybody from East L.A.”

Death is a fact of life, though, in a violent sport, no matter how skilled the participants. Critics point to the recent ring death of Wangila Napunyi, who died after suffering major head injuries during a welterweight fight with David Gonzalez in Las Vegas.

Dr. Robert O. Voy, USA Boxing Sports Medicine Committee chairman, countered that youths have a greater chance of getting killed in a car accident than in a boxing ring. In his 1992 article “ ‘Boxing Bashers’ on the Bandwagon . . . Again,” Voy estimated the odds of a youth dying in a ring to be 1 in 100,000 while his chances of getting killed by a car are 6 in 100,000.

Still, getting knocked down is a painful experience. During his workout at the community center, Garcia’s neighbor, 10-year-old Bobby Dominguez, took a hard shot to the chin. Dominguez, who said he has been knocked down in three fights, said he gave up karate to become a boxer after watching Julio Cesar Chavez of Mexico fight Pernell Whitaker to draw in a World Boxing Council welterweight title fight last year.

“I want to be a world champion like Chavez,” Dominguez said.

Hernandez said East L.A. youth centers that provide boxing have already paid dividends.

“We’re seeing teen-agers who were once gang members coming into the gyms to settle their differences,” Hernandez said. Some former gang members have become Explorer Scouts with law enforcement agencies after boxing at East L.A. police divisions.

“We’re also seeing fighters like Paul Gonzales and Oscar De La Hoya becoming bigger role models because they once fought in these gyms,” he said.

As part of the Hollenbeck boxing program, Stanke helps his prized pupils get part-time jobs with local businesses while they train.

“We believe it’s important that kids touch hands with community leaders,” Stanke said. “Some continue working with the same business years after they quit boxing.

“Although boxing is a tool, we utilize this tool to turn kids into good citizens. Boxing is a hard game and only a select few make it to the top.”

Times staff writer David Avila contributed to this report.

On the Cover

Boxing instructor David Aguayo spars with Jamie Cuevas, 11, at the Sheriff’s Department East Los Angeles Community Center. For more than 50 years, boxing has been a cultural phenomenon in East Los Angeles, producing top-ranked contenders and champions and teaching youths about discipline and commitment.

“In East L.A., you learn to fight before you learn to cry,” said Eddie (The Animal) Lopez, a former heavyweight contender.