A Fighting Chance : De La Hoya Refurbishing Gym to Help Youngsters, Neighborhood

An hour before their hero arrived, the midget boxers were already hard at work, elementary school boys and girls jumping rope and practicing uppercuts, filling the 72-year-old gym with the sound of their punches and their tiny grunts.

Eight-year-old Mario tried hitting a punching bag twice his size.

“Ow, that hurts,” he said, dropping his arms and stopping. But when the champion, Oscar De La Hoya showed up, Mario began dancing in place and hitting the bag like a miniature Muhammad Ali as De La Hoya urged him to hit harder, con ganas, with more spirit.

It is a scene repeated often at the old Resurrection Gym in Boyle Heights, once destined to be closed but now rescued and reborn as the Oscar De La Hoya Youth Boxing Center. The East L.A.-born boxing hero has purchased the gym and plans to invest $250,000 in refurbishing it.

“It’s a good feeling, to get back to the community,” said De La Hoya, a gold medalist in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and current World Boxing Council super lightweight champion. “It’s a good program we have for the kids.”

Returning to the gym is also an encounter with the past for the 23-year-old Latino icon. He trained at the Resurrection Gym as a youngster, sparring in the same ring with the sagging ropes where children practice today. He trained there from the age of 10 and as a teenager, until the day he left for the Olympics.

“When I was a kid, [the ring] was huge. Now it looks tiny,” De La Hoya said.

The champion plans to refurbish the gym while keeping its quaint, “Requiem for a Heavyweight” appearance, including the old wooden beams that hold up the pitched roof. He plans to buy new equipment and install air conditioning and coed lockers and showers.

The old gym, a former church stripped of its pews, was owned for years by former Rep. Edward Roybal and was in danger of shutting down when De La Hoya bought it this year.

“We were afraid they were going to close the place,” said Margie Carmona of Fontana. She brings her 15-year-old son, Marshall Martinez, winner of a junior Golden Gloves title, to train at the gym every day.

“We were wondering where we were going to go. Then Oscar bought it. He did it for the kids. People ought to give him credit and stop booing him.”

De La Hoya has been the target of scattered insults at recent public appearances from fans still upset over his knockout of Julio Cesar Chavez of Mexico.

Those fans were nowhere in sight this week as De La Hoya signed autographs at the gym for young fighters and their beaming parents.

At least one parent, Jose Giron, credited De La Hoya and the gym with helping to reform his son. Giron said his 8-year-old boy, Adrian, was hyperactive before he started coming to the gym to work out after school.

“We had problems with him doing his homework,” Giron said. “Now, when he gets home, he’s very calm. He’s paying more attention to things.”

With his thick glasses and thin arms, Adrian seemed, at first glance, an unlikely boxer.

But he is among the more polished of the young pugilists at the gym, and his determined, fierce style has attracted the attention of at least one veteran trainer who works at the gym, Jorge Payan.

“You can see that he’s starting to like it,” said Payan, who also trained De La Hoya as a boy. “He’s coming along real good.”

Payan held a large round glove while Adrian practiced throwing quick but graceful uppercuts. He waved his hand over Adrian’s head and the boy ducked, a gesture he repeated again and again.

Payan and the other trainers--including Manuel Montiel, who trained De La Hoya as a teenager, and De La Hoya’s uncle, Vicente--have all known each other for decades, helping to create a family feel at the gym.

Vicente said he hopes to pass on a family-style concern to the 75 young people who train at the gym every day.

“With the training, the coaches teach them discipline, the value of hard work,” he said.

After an hour at the gym during which he posed with fans for at least a dozen pictures, De La Hoya left. The parents put their cameras away and the young boxers got back to work, jumping rope, hitting bags and jogging in circles inside the ring.