Late Puncher : At 41, Boxer Has Defied Odds, Achieved Dream of Pro Debut

For John O’Brien, 41, it’s never too late to fulfill a dream, even if that dream is to become a professional boxer.

As he puts it, “Age is an attitude.”

O’Brien’s first professional fight is Thursday at the Irvine Marriott. Ask him why he is doing it, and you get a simple answer: “Because I still can.”

“Professional boxing is one achievement I just had to accomplish,” he said. “I knew if I didn’t, I would regret this the rest of my life.”

O’Brien, an amateur boxer as a teen-ager, said that like every young fighter, he always wanted to turn pro someday.

“Boxing is the most exhilarating, engaging sport I have ever participated in. It makes you tough,” O’Brien said. “It’s a game of hitting hard and hurting your opponent, of strategy and movement, of endurance and strength.”

At 5 feet 8 and 147 pounds, O’Brien will fight as a welterweight against Eliseo Torres, who is also old for a boxer at 33. It also will be Torres’ first professional match.

“People sometimes get into this game pretty late,” O’Brien said. “It’s still entertainment, even at the bottom.”

O’Brien has had more than his share of doubters. One was Rob Lynch, assistant chief inspector for the California State Athletic Commission.

When O’Brien called about getting a license, “I thought, ‘Naw, he’s 41. It’s a pipe dream,’ ” Lynch said. “It’s basically a young man’s sport.”

But after seeing a tape of O’Brien sparring with Mike Walsh, 21, a top professional boxer from Orange County, Lynch gave his OK.

“He doesn’t look like a 41-year-old,” Lynch said.

O’Brien’s road to the ring has involved a rigorous daily ritual for the past two years. Every day he has climbed out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to run five miles, work out in a gym for two hours in the afternoon, and train with weights for another hour at night. In between, he rests and earns his living as a fitness trainer in Costa Mesa.

“If you don’t run every morning, you pay the price by getting hurt in the ring,” O’Brien said. “It develops a great deal of discipline in your life. . . .

“Getting hit is not fun,” he said. “It is pain.”

O’Brien also is finishing a nutritional cooking video to be released in May called “The Boxer’s Diet,” full of low-fat, low-salt recipes he has gathered or developed over the years. Boxing and training, he said, are his two real passions in life.

“I tell my clients that God has issued them only one body, so they better take care of it,” he said. “I never feel like I’m going to work. I feel like I’m coming into the gym to work out.”

Besides, he said, boxing is a lot more fun than running on a treadmill, and O’Brien often uses boxing techniques in his clients’ workouts.

“I put a pair of boxing gloves on them and they love it,” he said. “Boxing training is fun as long as you’re not getting hit.”

O’Brien, a Lakewood native, first fell in love with the sport in 1968, when he went to his first boxing match with his best friend. In the ring was the famous fighter Danny (Little Red) Lopez.

On the way home from the match, O’Brien, then 14, said to his friend’s father, “I think I could do this. . . . “

“I could see it was more than standing in front of a guy and swinging your arms,” he said.

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As an amateur fighter in his teens, O’Brien trained wherever he could. A gym where he practiced in Stanton doubled as a church on Sundays.

“They would put the altar in the ring, and the priest would give the sermon from the ring,” he said.

O’Brien always has had to motivate himself, especially since his father was far from happy about the sport.

“My father didn’t want me to have any part of it,” O’Brien said. “He kept telling me I was going to get a brain tumor.”

After he turned 20, O’Brien stopped boxing, he said, to become “responsible.” He married at 22, graduated from Cerritos College and began working as a pharmaceutical salesman. He and his wife divorced seven years later.

During his long absence from the sport, O’Brien used running and weight-training to remain in shape, though “not necessarily at the level I’m doing now.”

O’Brien returned to boxing at 35, for fitness and fun as much as anything else, and again became hooked. Two years ago, he hired Jesse Reid, the trainer of 12 world champions, including Roger Mayweather and Orlando Canizales.

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It was Reid who brought O’Brien back into the ring, and about 18 months ago the two began preparing for O’Brien’s first professional fight.

That fight was first scheduled for January, 1994, but O’Brien was severely injured twice during his training, pushing the date back more than a year.

“It was kind of a joke around the gym that I didn’t really want to fight,” O’Brien said of his injuries. “Nothing could have been further from the truth.”

Reid said his 41-year-old student fights as if he’s 29.

“I think he could’ve been a top-notch athlete,” he said, but added that the real test will come Thursday.

“Physically, he’s in tremendous condition and I think he’s real strong,” Reid said. “Can he absorb a hit? We don’t know.”

Reid, whom O’Brien described as one of the top 10 professional trainers in the world, said they have the same goal: showing “that age is just a number.”

“I’m looking forward to it because it’s a fight that most would have said couldn’t happen,” Reid said.