On Boxing’s Brutal Stage, He Is Civilization

Lou Moret, an old pol, sits in his office, behind his glass wall, behind his tidy desk, behind his donkeys (an Eeyore here, a burro there--the old pol is a Democrat). It’s quiet and he describes his worst nightmare, which is noise.

He’s on a stage, in the middle of a large hall filled with thousands of people screaming. The roar is deafening. There is no scream like a fight crowd’s scream; it’s a rough, obliterating noise. It has blood on it.

The old pol, when he isn’t being an old pol, referees boxing matches. Saturday night, the biggest fight night in recent California history, he’ll be the third man in the Staples Center ring with welterweights Oscar De La Hoya and Sugar Shane Mosley.

You’ll have no trouble picking Moret out of the three. He’ll be the one with the sloping shoulders, no neck, the narrow, neighborhood eyes and a ragged cigar scrape of a voice. He’ll be the one who looks like he’s been stuffed into the long-sleeved blue shirt and kept there by a natty little black bow tie.

He’ll be the one in charge and his worst nightmare is this:

Something happens and he misses it. He didn’t see the punch, a shot to the groin, a low blow. If, as the referee, you don’t see something, you rely on your ears, hearing it, especially a low blow. Fighters wear protective padding under their trunks and when they get hit below the belt it sounds different.

In the nightmare, Moret doesn’t hear the glove hit the pads because of the noise and the man goes down and Moret counts him out and the wrong man has won and that roar turns toward him, the man who, if everything had gone well, nobody would have known he was there. Suddenly, the invisible man is the center of many bad intentions.

Nothing quite like this ever happens at Moret’s day job, chief operating officer of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, a bureaucracy that operates almost invisibly out of offices on Figueroa Street.

SCAG couldn’t be further removed from the bright lights and great noise of a world championship fight. It’s an agency of planning and coordination and not much involved in doing.

But in a fundamental way, Moret’s political career and his refereeing share one basic quality. A good bureaucrat is a sort of referee. He brings order to things, parses the rules and eases the process along.

Moret has been a specific kind of bureaucrat for half of his 55 years. He’s a career No. 2. His resume is littered with vice president of this, deputy director of that. He’s an East Los Angeles native and started out in politics in the first state legislative campaign of Richard Alatorre, a boyhood friend. He was Alatorre’s top staff guy in the state Legislature, then Art Torres’. Then he went to Washington as the deputy director of a Commerce Department program. He was never the policy expert, never the public face, but the guy behind the guy, the one just out of the spotlight, the guy whose job it was to get things done.

“I was a strategist and fund-raiser so I never cared what legislation they introduced. That’s their job,” Moret said. “My job was to think, ‘Is this going to interfere with the election?’ Politics is a club. That’s why they’re called members. And you’re not in it.

“Boxing’s the same way. There’s only one winner. The fighters have a lot at stake, future paydays. It’s their livelihood.”

Moret is regarded as a referee who takes charge, who lets the fighters know what they can and can’t do. This will be his 65th championship bout and, he said, the most momentous. The $25 million or so generated by the fight will make it, by far, the biggest in state history. It is, as they say, a big show. The selection of the referee was regarded by state officials, who would like to have many more big shows, as an important decision.

Moret was chosen, said Dean Lohuis, chief inspector for the State Athletic Commission, because he is consistently evaluated as one of the best referees in California. He was recently ranked by a Las Vegas newspaper as among the 10 best in the world.

Keeping, Not Taking, Control

With his close-cut, silvery hair, angled ears and weathered face, Moret looks like a bartender out of a Eugene O’Neill play. His demeanor--especially the graveled voice and the sharp eyes--command attention. Don’t even think about it, they seem to say.

“He gets in there. He’s vociferous, does a lot of talking. He’s certainly not laid back,” Lohuis said. “The key to any official is judgment. Mr. Moret consistently has excellent judgment.”

A referee’s judgment is exercised mostly in knowing how to keep control without taking control, to keep the fight moving, to, as Moret said, “dictate the fight without being a part of it.” More profoundly, a referee’s judgment is exercised in protecting fighters from grievous injury.

He never fought himself, wasn’t even much of a fight fan. He became interested in officiating when his kids played sports.

“You either coach or officiate. You’re one or the other,” he said. “I had more of the official’s mentality. I like rules.”

He liked it because he could be part of games. And, as a guy working his way through college as a bail bondsman, he could pick up extra cash. When he started umpiring Little League baseball in the late 1960s, he made $5 a game.

“You’d do four, five, six games a weekend. If you made 30 bucks a week, it was something,” he said. “My house payment then with taxes was $194 a month.”

He moved from baseball to football and finally, out of curiosity, to boxing. He now works about 25 fights a year all over the world. The State Athletic Commission chooses referees for all bouts in California, grades them after each fight and sets pay. Tomorrow, Moret will get paid $1,600.

Moret works in close, close enough to be sprayed with the sweat and spittle sent flying by a clean head shot, close enough to hear a jaw being broken, a reminder, if any were needed, that boxing is a civilized barbarism.

The Boxing Act of the state of California--yes, there is one--specifies with excruciating precision some of the civilizing details. The ring shall be built out of 1 1/4-inch plywood. It shall be covered by a 1 3/8-inch pad “consisting of closed cellular foam in combination with high-density polyvinyl chloride.”

The state specifies the number and qualifications of judges, the height of rope around the ring, even the wardrobe of the referee, not to mention the referee himself.

All of this to facilitate what amounts to 36 minutes of mayhem, in which men try as hard as they are able to injure one another. The referee is the civilizing element, the person who, as Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “makes boxing possible. The referee is our intermediary in the fight. He is our moral conscience extracted from us as spectators so that, for the duration of the fight, conscience need not be a factor in our experience; nor need it be a factor in the boxers’ behavior.”

The referee, in other words, has as his chief responsibility keeping the fighters from killing one another.

Moret recognizes the honor and responsibility of being named to do this fight and is a little bit nervous. He has spent the past few days calling around to other referees, asking them what they’d look for from these two fighters. Tomorrow, he’ll get to the arena early, before the undercard starts. He’ll inspect the ring, go to the dressing rooms and give final instructions to Mosley and De La Hoya, then sit in the referees room and wait.

When it comes time, the fighters will enter with their colored capes and theme songs and entourages, and Moret will follow, alone. The bell will ring, the match will start, and Moret will circle the fighters, back and forth, skipping, walking, staying in control and out of the way.

If all goes well on the biggest night of his boxing life, he’ll find the rhythm of the fight and, as quickly as he can, disappear.