Arleta Girl Steps Into Ring Troubled, Emerges a Champ

Step into the ring with Cindy Zamudio and you step into a storm of pounding, punishing leather.

Her hooks come screaming out of nowhere, her body blows crash down like felled trees across your chest and behind every thundering fist is 300 pounds of firmly planted bulk.

Zamudio, an 18-year-old from Arleta, is one of the top-ranked female super heavyweight boxers in the country. She’s on the road to stardom, her handlers say. And after spending some time slugging it out with her, I wouldn’t suggest getting in her way. (But more on that later.)

She’s swatted around former champions like beach balls and has become the pride of a Los Angeles Police Department boxing program for teens. She’s taken what used to be a problem--her size--and turned it in her favor.

It’s almost a cliche for boxing to save a troubled kid. But for Zamudio, who nearly got kicked out of school and used to hang with what her mom calls the have-a-baby-before-you’re-17 crowd, life really had no point until she stepped into the ring.

“It was the first thing I felt good at,” she said.

For the last five years, Zamudio has been slugging cantaloupe-sized dents into heavy bags and raining sweat on the hardwood floor, shaping her body and her future.

She trains seven days a week at the Athletic Club, a no-frills health club in Northridge with a small boxing gym. She eats no sweets or bread, does sit-ups and push-ups every night and goes to bed on weekends at 10 p.m.

If she wins the national championship in Texas next month, she’ll have a shot at a college scholarship and a chance to go to the 2004 Olympic Games--if women’s boxing is included.

There aren’t many women in the 201 pounds and above category and Zamudio is emerging as one of the more experienced, more skilled super heavyweights, said Tom Eaton, founder of FemBoxer Inc., a South Carolina company that tracks women fighters.

“That Zamudio girl can really hit,” said Eaton, who watched Zamudio pummel a former women’s Golden Gloves champ at a Georgia tourney three years ago.

During a recent after-school sparring session at the Northridge gym, Christian Dominguez, one of those 16-year-old boys whose veins pump with teenage machismo, got the deluxe Zamudio treatment.

“She’s kinda big,” Dominguez said, as he crossed himself moments before stepping into the ring. “But I’ll be cool.”

The two slipped in their slobbery mouth guards and touched gloves center ring. Dominguez unleashed some quick combos. For a moment, he looked bold. But Zamudio protects herself well and Dominguez couldn’t lay a clean glove on her. Then it was Zamudio’s turn.

“Keep your gloves up! Tuck your chin!” John Hardin warned Dominguez. Hardin, an LAPD officer and Vietnam vet, is the program’s boxing coach and even at 54 looks like he could still do some damage.

Zamudio backed Dominguez into a corner. Her small dark eyes drilled holes into his head. Siss! Siss! she exhaled as she peppered him with fists, knocking his headgear crooked. Then the hard rain really began to fall, and Zamudio was tagging Dominguez with unchallenged lefts, rights, hooks and uppercuts.

He tried to cover up, but he couldn’t. The machismo was being beaten out of him blow by blow.

“OK, man, come on out,” Hardin told Dominguez.

“He got scared,” Hardin told the other boys who had squeezed around the ropes to watch. But because Zamudio is bigger and has more training than almost anyone else, there’s no shame to get beaten by her.

Zamudio gave the shaken fighter a hug and an encouraging grunt.

Zamudio knows what it’s like to be humiliated. If you’re bigger than everybody else in school--and a girl--you get teased for it.

“They used to call me gordita,” she said.

When she was 13 years old, she weighed 250 pounds, and at times, she’s pushed 330. Recently she learned she was born with a thyroid problem that keeps her metabolism at a hibernation-level low.

That’s why she used to act out, she says, flunking classes and fighting. She almost got kicked out of junior high for lighting a toilet on fire with hair spray.

“Someone snitched,” she said.

It was that sort of behavior that brought her to the Jeopardy program, a sports camp and alternative education service run by the LAPD for troubled kids. When she arrived in the spring of 1995, Zamudio had little self-esteem and was angry at the world, Hardin said. It didn’t help that when she asked to box with the boys, she was told girls don’t do that and she was too fat anyway. Eventually, her mom persuaded coaches to let her daughter box.

A big, tattooed kid named Sergio was Zamudio’s first victim. It was supposed to be a friendly sparring match. He knocked her around a bit. Then she slugged him back. It felt good.

In the spring of 1996, she won her first tournament fight, in Pico Rivera. She began training daily with Hardin at the Athletic Club, which donates space to the police boxing program.

Zamudio now fights five or six tournaments a year and her success in the ring has spawned success in school. She’s a senior at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills and a few weeks back was accepted to Cal State Northridge, though she may hold out for UCLA or a boxing scholarship to the University of Michigan or Ohio State.

Gloves off, Zamudio is like a lot of teenage girls: giggly when asked personal questions, talkative about school stuff, interested in malls and movies and a shameless fan of Mariah Carey.

Zamudio’s parents say boxing has been good to their daughter. They love watching her fight, especially when she humbles young men.

Having boxed in college, I was persuaded to go a couple rounds with the champ. So a few days ago I laced up a pair of 12-ounce gloves, popped in a rubber mouth guard that soon tasted like a clay plate and climbed through the ropes.

Problem was, my skills were rusty at best. Zamudio’s coach even had to remind me how to make a proper fist. Oops.

*

The first round went OK. I’m about half Zamudio’s weight, so I’m supposed to be quicker. We’re about the same height at 5-foot-9, so reach wasn’t an issue. I popped her with a few wild jabs, thumped her once or twice with a lucky right and ducked a couple of huge hooks that, if they had found their mark, probably would have interfered with my writing this article in intelligible English. The fact Zamudio was a woman didn’t cross my mind.

The second two-minute round was ugly--for me. I was on the run. I stopped to throw a few body shots, but her stomach swallowed up my fists like an amoeba engulfing a hapless cell.

My energy vanished. My face turned scarlet. What little offense I had was downsized to a save-your-butt defense. She trapped me in a corner and I nearly kissed the ropes as she began to pummel me with body blows. A sound has never been so sweet as that bell going off.

Later that night, I crowded around the TV with the Zamudio family in their tidy Arleta home to show them the video of my two-round drubbing.

Her mom, Suzy, cheered, “Go, Cindy, go!” just like she had during the real fight. Her dad, Ismael, laughed as I got clobbered. Zamudio analyzed my defense and told me that I had been ducking the wrong way.

“But you punch pretty hard,” she said.

My face lit up as if a teacher had just given me a gold star.

Punch hard? Really?

“Yeah,” she said. “But man, did you get tired quick.”