FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT

Mando Ramos, eating lunch in a waterfront restaurant, turns to watch a tug push some barges across the cold gray waters of the San Pedro channel.

The conversation is about his early boxing days, the late 1960s, when he was just about the hottest young fighter Los Angeles had ever seen.

“Who knows how good I could have been?” he says.

“I never really trained, not for a single fight. Oh, I went to the gym every day. But I drank every night. Fighters never beat me. But drugs and alcohol, they gave me a real ass-kicking.

“I really think I could have been the greatest fighter of all time--except for this.”

And with his index finger, he taps his temple.

You look at the Mando Ramos highlight video, at his epic knockouts of Jose Barrera, Len Kesey, Joey Aguilar, Beau Jaynes, Teo Cruz and Raul Rojas, and the idea that he was high on alcohol and drugs in those years rests crazily on the mind.

“I was having fun, it was so easy--I drank and used all the drugs I wanted,” he says.

“Life was easy. I had talent, so I was knocking over those guys and getting 10 grand a fight. I thought it would go on forever. See, when you’re 20, 21, time doesn’t pass by. Later, it’s over in a hurry.

“It started long before I was a pro fighter. I started drinking wine when I was 11. There was a liquor store in Long Beach at the corner of Alameda and Anaheim. Another kid and I would get rotgut wine in there, go across the street to a park, and drink it all.

“I remember thinking I wanted to feel high like that the rest of my life. In fact, I remember praying to God to help me feel like that forever.”

Once the world’s greatest 135-pound fighter, Mando Ramos now totes two thirty-five. He’s 51, but if you ask him how old he is, he might say 17, the number of years since his last drink.

He’s jowly now, but can still light up a room with the smile that 30 years ago made you want to like him, made you hope he would be a champion.

And he became one, at 20, when he stopped Cruz on Feb. 18, 1969, before 14,183 at the Sports Arena. He was history’s youngest lightweight champion.

Look closely at the video, at the crowd at Ramos’ fight with Hiroshi Kobayashi in 1968. As Ramos tries late in the fight to knock out Kobayashi, ringsiders are leaping about, waving their arms, screaming.

With apologies to Oscar De La Hoya, no other Southland fighter of the last 50 years has generated that level of excitement.

In a twinkling, of course, it was over. There were losses to Ismael Laguna in 1970, and to Chango Carmona in ’72. Ramos was through at 26.

One day in 1975, his accountant told Ramos he was broke.

“My accountant was a longshoreman, who was a loan shark,” Ramos says.

“I sold out the Olympic Auditorium in my ninth fight. Money was everywhere. I made $100,000 for the Laguna fight, $83,000 for Carmona. ‘Don’t worry, we’re taking care of your money,’ they told me. I was 19, 20. What did I know?

“By 1974, I was sleeping in cars.”

It’s a sad boxing story, to be sure, but shed no tears for Armando Ramos. For most of the last 30 years, he has been a longshoreman and there have been years when he earned $90,000. His son, Mando Jr., 25, also is a longshoreman.

Lately, however, Ramos and his wife of 25 years, Sylvia, have been living on disability payments. He is experiencing a long recovery from 1998 back surgery. He plans to return to the docks soon, he says, “for light duty.”

*

This is where the old champion fights his battles now. At 328 Avalon Blvd., in Wilmington, there’s a new boxing gym. There are spatters of white paint everywhere on the concrete floor and the smell of wet plaster in the air.

Two boxers spar. A man on a ladder paints a boxing mural. Ramos runs a foundation called BAAD--Boxing Against Alcohol and Drugs.

“I get kids sent to me from the police, kids who’re headed toward gang activity, kids who maybe have a drug problem,” he says.

“All that gang violence out there, that’s just ignorance. If you just sit down and talk to these kids, it makes a difference. A kid with a drug problem, I tell him to think of drugs as an emotional cancer.

“When I go back to work, I’m going to work night shifts, so I can be here in the afternoons, when the kids come in.”

David Villegas, 29, has been in Ramos’ program for 16 years.

“Mando taught me how to stand up to bullies, and he taught me self-esteem,” he says.

*

This is where the old champion used to fight.

At noon, Ramos enters the Foc’sle bar, in Wilmington at the corner of Avalon and D streets, looking for a cup of coffee with a friend. No one is there, the place dark and smelling of last night’s spilled beer.

“There’s been a lot of brawls in this place and I know, because I was in ‘em,” Ramos says.

He walks to a table and taps it with his hand. “Right at this table, three or four guys jumped me, about 30 years ago,” he says.

“I was like a gunslinger then. A lot of tough guys wanted a piece of me. Well, I beat the hell out of all of them. There was broken furniture and bottles flying everywhere. But I didn’t get out of here before the cops came and spent the night in jail.

“Funny part is, one of the guys I beat up that night, I see him at AA meetings now.”

*

This is where the old champion started fighting.

It’s the Local 13 Longshoreman’s Dispatch Hall, just around the corner from Ramos’ gym.

It’s an old, hangar-like building with a red concrete floor. About 20 men await mid-day calls from the docks.

“I fought here when I was 11, in little amateur shows,” Ramos says.

“If you’re a union member and you come down here, there’s a 99% chance you’ll get work. That’s why you pay $106 a month in dues. The last call for the night shift is 5 p.m. They call your number, you get a ticket telling you what dock to go to.

“I’ve always felt boxers needed a union, like longshoremen have--someone to look after their interests, particularly young guys. My manager in those days was Jackie McCoy, and he was a good man. I did very well by him. It was all the other people around me who were ripping me off.”

*

Back at his gym, Ramos is asked about memories.

“The thing I remember most? The sound of those big crowds at the Olympic Auditorium,” he says.

“It was really exciting, the roar of the crowd, cheering. I’ll never forget that. I can hear it right now.”