Lesson in Boxing

As he glides around the boxing ring, acting as a referee and coach while barking commands to his young pupils, a sense of deja vu overcomes Paul Gonzales.

“Keep that front hand up,” he tells a boy not old enough to remember Gonzales’ humdrum pro career, let alone recall the glory of the 1984 L.A. Olympics, when Gonzales was on top of the world with his gold medal.

“Pop it like you’re going to stop it,” he says. “Jab, jab, right hand, left hook. That’s it. Tired? Are you tired?”

Gonzales, getting more excited, is breaking into an all-too-familiar sweat between the ropes as he instructs brothers Frankie, 9, and Richie, 7.

Frankie is already a Junior Olympic champion with a record of 16-3. This muggy Wednesday afternoon, though, marks Richie’s first workout at the Hollenbeck Youth Center, and, beneath his oversized headgear, he needs some encouragement.

Gonzales senses this and obliges, pumping up the younger, less experienced brother.

“C’mon, Richie, don’t be afraid,” Gonzales implores. “He’s too ugly to hit you.”

Everyone within earshot of the ring breaks out in laughter.

“Do it,” Gonzales says, “like you’re doing it at home.”

Their sparring session complete, the Gomez brothers join half a dozen other boys for their roadwork, laps around the basketball court.

Ronnie Rivota, a former East L.A. Golden Gloves champion who serves as the gym’s head boxing coach, shakes his head and smiles at his high-profile part-time assistant.

“It’s about helping the kids and giving them dreams,” Rivota says. “I think Paul sees a little bit of himself in each kid. He can relate, being a poor kid coming up from the projects here. We’ve got a lot of these kids who are here every day. We’d rather have them here, developing character, than on the street.”

Gonzales, 5 feet 9 and 160 pounds, takes a deep breath, wipes the sweat from his brow and a satisfied look of accomplishment comes across his countenance. His face may be fuller than the public remembers it and his paunch may hang over his belt a bit. But, in such familiar surroundings, the brash boxer is back.

“I’m just so pretty,” the former 106-pounder says. “In the ring I was poetry in motion. Outside the ring, I was still poetry in motion. Hey, I’m the people’s champion.

“You want to find out what happened to the original Golden Boy, huh? I’m right here, baby. I never left.”

And he begins shadow boxing, throwing combinations at no one in particular, though the punches could very well be aimed at the ghosts of unrealized potential.

Gonzales, 37, has come full circle, coaching youngsters at the same East L.A. gym that fostered him and saved him from a life of gangbanging on the streets. To a degree, he is now playing the part LAPD officer Al Stankie played for him as a trainer-teacher-father figure.

“I grew up here,” Gonzales says. “This is home.”

After racking up an amateur record of 210-5 and becoming the first American to claim gold in the light-flyweight class (106 pounds) while receiving the Val Barker Award as the Olympics’ outstanding boxer among a crowd that included Evander Holyfield, Mark Breland and Pernell Whitaker, Gonzales appeared to have a future filled with championships.

He was supposed to win six titles in six weight classes while breaking barriers as the first Mexican American to win Olympic gold.

It didn’t happen.

Brittle hands, a series of injuries and a falling out with Stankie sabotaged his plans.

“I don’t know if it’s bitterness, but there were a lot of times when I said, ‘God, what am I doing wrong?’ ” Gonzales said as he threw his arms to the sky. “ ‘I didn’t steal from nobody, I didn’t rob nobody, I didn’t do nothing. Why am I getting all this bad luck?’

“My trainer used to say, ‘Son, if it wasn’t for the bad luck, you wouldn’t have no luck at all.’ It got so bad I was going to go to a curandera [a healing lady] so that I could get this curse off me.”

Having kept a constant vigil and gone to confession with his priest during the L.A. Games while asking for and receiving blessings before his fights, Gonzales went to Mass instead.

No amount of prayer, however, would save his pro career.

It wasn’t that he was a flop. Expectations were simply too high.

He did win a fringe world title in his third pro fight, claiming the North American Boxing Federation flyweight belt with a 12-round decision over Alonso Gonzales on Feb. 2, 1986. Three years later, as a bantamweight, he won the World Boxing Assn.’s Intercontinental title with a 12-round decision over Armando Castro.

Gonzales finished with a career record of 18-4 with three knockouts and, while he made decent money along the way, he says he was ripped off by unnamed agents, attorneys and accountants.

“They didn’t know how to market and promote Mexican Americans, Chicanos, a bilingual person at that time,” Gonzales said of lost opportunities. “Now, it’s like everybody and their mother.”

By the time he retired on Aug. 11, 1994, 10 years to the day after winning gold and nine years to the day after his pro debut, Gonzales had become an afterthought to another rising East L.A. boxer who had won Olympic gold--Oscar De La Hoya.

Gonzales said he went to LAX to greet De La Hoya after he became the lone American to win gold at Barcelona in 1992 to remind him of his responsibilities to the East L.A. community.

A rivalry and war of words began shortly thereafter when De La Hoya, in so many words, criticized Gonzales for proclaiming himself an American first and a Mexican second.

Gonzales said he went to De La Hoya’s house and knocked on the door.

“I said, ‘Look, either we’re going to get along or get it on. What do you want to do?’ ” Gonzales said. “He said no, so I squashed it, whatever. Then I read in another paper he was talking bad about me again.”

Gonzales said he left an open challenge for De La Hoya in 1994 and, to add a little local flavor, wanted the proposed fight to go down at East Los Angeles College.

These days De La Hoya is in Las Vegas, preparing for Saturday’s title fight with Javier Castillejo for the Spaniard’s World Boxing Council junior-middleweight belt. It would be De La Hoya’s fifth title in five weight classes, one fewer than predicted for Gonzales.

“He’s done good, he’s made a lot of money in the game, and that’s great,” Gonzales said of De La Hoya. “I’m happy for him. The only thing is the guy has to give back to these kids, in a sense, by giving them a message . . . something positive. But also, don’t forget where you come from because then your own people are going to forget about you.”

Gonzales knows his measured comments can be seen as envious.

“Jealous? Envy? No,” he said. “Because I’m a trailblazer. . . . It’s always the first guy that never gets the glory. It’s always those who follow after who get it, and that includes the money or whatever else. I made a good living in the game, took care of my family and I’m still working with kids.”

And he’s still going to school, prompting Stankie to call his former charge “a professional student.”

Gonzales is taking classes at East L.A. College and planning to transfer to USC with a double major in political science and English. He sees himself running for L.A. City Council in the not-too-distant future.

Stankie and Gonzales’ relationship cooled for a few years with the pressure and injuries and after Stankie reportedly showed up drunk for one of Gonzales’ fights in 1989. Stankie has undergone alcohol rehabilitation and both say they are closer than ever, closer than when they took ballet classes together to help the boxer’s footwork.

“That’s Pop, he’s a character,” Gonzales said. “When Al Stankie was down and out, it was the kid who had to take the cop in. Back in the day, it was the cop who took the kid in.”

Said Stankie: “You can take the kid out of the projects, but you can’t take the projects out of the kid.

“As a ghetto coach and trainer, that’s what your job is, to get these kids to grow straight up in a straight line. As a ghetto cop, it’s to get them on the right path with the four ‘Ds’--desire, determination, drive and discipline. He’s got them all, and that’s what’s gotten him where he’s at.

“I don’t like him, I love him.”

Gonzales finds himself still using Stankie’s sayings in his everyday life. It’s a life that includes organizing events for senior citizens at the Hollenbeck Center and helping found the Inner City Games, writing articles on the need for a union and a pension plan for boxers, hosting a cable talk show focusing on former fighters and working as a motivational speaker.

But most of all, Gonzales says, it’s about his 17-year-old son, whose name he guards intensely--saying only that he’s a rising senior at an East L.A. high school--and it’s about the kids in the neighborhood.

Frankie Gomez has already said he wants to become the second boxer from Hollenbeck to win Olympic gold, following in Gonzales’ footsteps. He knows what the Olympian’s presence means.

“It means he cares about us,” Gomez says softly through his mouthpiece with “LAPD” stamped on the front.

“Between Paul and Oscar, those guys are inspiration,” Rivota says. “You’re talking about two fighters within [an eight-year] period capturing two gold medals from the same town.”

Gonzales revels in the responsibility.

“All over the world, I’ve given people, and the kids, hopefully, an opportunity to dream,” he said. “But not only dream, but to know that it’s possible to succeed.

“An old saying in Spanish is, ‘Si, se puede.’ That’s the way it is, ‘Si, se puede.’ Yes, you can do it.”