A familiar ring

Even with the door wide open, this place smells of old sweat.

There’s no air conditioning and the windows stay shut. Hundreds of old fight posters and photographs of boxers cover the walls, including one of Muhammad Ali showing his daughter, Laila, some moves in the ring here.

The Wild Card Boxing Club in Hollywood is not as ancient nor as gritty as the fictional Hit Pit, where most of the action takes place in the Clint Eastwood-directed movie “Million Dollar Baby.” Yet, they feel much the same with their dreamers who will do almost anything to wear a championship belt and those who dream no more.

At the Wild Card, there are other dreamers too. Those who long for sculpted bodies and are willing to work like boxers.

“This is the quintessential gym. You got the old beat-up bags. The smell is kind of raunchy. Everybody’s always trying to make weight, so we have to keep the windows closed,” says trainer Macka Foley, a former light-heavyweight. He and a cadre of ex-fighters train professional boxers and amateurs alike. Quintessential? Yes. Except for the movie stars, the boxing royalty and the affluent professionals who train at Wild Card. After all, this is Hollywood.

On a recent day, actor Mario Lopez spars with a larger man who has challenged him. All bets are on Lopez.

“Mario trains like a fighter. He trains every day,” the owner, Freddie Roach, says.

A former boxer, Roach steps into the ring to referee as trainers, club members and spectators push close to the ropes. Five sharp bells and a green light signal the start of Round 1.

Lopez goes right for the head.

His opponent, Mike Lin, pounds away with body shots.

They’re punching. Feinting.

Looking for an opening.

The trainers are shouting to Lopez: “Go old school! Go back to your jab! Move your head! Move your feet! Keep your composure! Represent! He asked for it! Give him some more!”

Lin, who boxed regularly five years ago and met Lopez at the gym in the building where each works, is out of shape. He holds his own as a long bell and yellow light signal 30 seconds left in the round.

But soon Lopez knocks him down. Lin rises. Down again. He gets back up. Again. Fight over.

Outside the ring, workouts resume. As a dozen men and a couple of women sweat through their shirts, powerful punches jangle the chains holding heavy bags from the ceiling. The loud thuds provide the bass to the staccato smack smack of speed bags and double-end bags and the light tap, tap of jump-ropes.

Add to that noise Tupac, Usher, Snoop Dogg and other rappers blaring nonstop from the radio, the constant ring of the timing bells and phone.

A boxing lifer

This is the gym that Freddie Roach built. The Boxing Hall of Fame trainer wears big, black glasses except when he’s in the ring, and he looks quite different from the longhaired boxer, shown in posters above the front counter, who turned pro at 18, fought two-time featherweight champion Bobby Chacon, among others, and narrowly missed a shot at the title.

He presides over this club on Vine near Santa Monica, located up a steep flight of stairs above a Laundromat, at the rear of a nondescript mini-mall.

A tough guy from rough and tumble South Boston, Roach began boxing at 6. He grew up in a gym that he says resembles the Hit Pit, in the Oscar-nominated movie that tells the story of a determined young woman (Hilary Swank) who insists on boxing and an aging trainer who reluctantly takes her on.

Henry Bumstead, Eastwood’s longtime production designer, built the large Hit Pit set in a warehouse in South Los Angeles.

“The warehouse had a concrete floor. You can’t have a concrete floor in a gym, so we put a hardwood floor over it. That gave it a marvelous look,” the two-time Oscar winner says in a phone interview after describing the film’s two boxing rings, worn punching bags, trainer’s office overlooking the gym and the space where an ex-boxer lives.

Bumstead, who will turn 90 in March, says he is “a stickler for details and realism. We aged it,” he says, “ ... over half of the picture, or a good part, takes place in that set.”

Seedy gyms like that are around somewhat, Roach says. “But, in Los Angeles today, you have more of a white-collar crowd, for lack of a better word,” like 70% of his members, he says. “My clientele is not always good boxers. So this gym is a little bit cleaner, a little bit neater.”

Six days a week (the gym is closed on Sundays), 125 people, including some of the 40 women who belong, work out between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. Because of their support, Roach says his gym is one of the few boxing clubs that break even financially.

Roach says his favorite role in the movie is Morgan Freeman’s ex-boxer who lives at the Hit Pit.

“I have three fighters living in my gym right now. They pursued boxing, didn’t make it like 99% of us. I’m one of them. They didn’t make it to the big time. They didn’t make the money ... they can never fight again,” he says. “His role was the most realistic thing about the movie because that does happen. You have people who live in the gyms and clean the gyms. That’s the way it goes here. I live in the gym.”

He takes issue with the film’s portrayal of dirty fighting and fixing a broken nose in the ring but found the gym work, footwork and taking lessons from a pro pretty realistic.

While Swank trained primarily in a Brooklyn gym, plenty of celebrities come to Wild Card. Like Mira Sorvino. “She’s a pretty good fighter,” Roach says, also naming Denzel Washington, John Travolta, Wesley Snipes, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sylvester Stallone, Mickey Rourke and the singer Pink.

Tyrese Gibson has visited to prepare for the Touchstone Pictures film “Annapolis.” He came in with an attitude, Roach says, but getting hit while learning how to be a fighter humbled him and taught him respect.

No one gets special treatment. “People like that ... no one is treated any better than anyone else. They pay either $50 a month or $5 a day,” Roach says. “They want private lessons they can work on that. They look up to the athletes. They like being around the world champions.”

Like Evander Holyfield, Roy Jones, Shane Mosley and Oscar De La Hoya, who have visited.

Like Muhammad Ali.

“The best day this gym ever had was the day he came to work out,” Roach says of that time a couple of years ago. “He stayed here three or four hours, telling jokes, performing magic, shadowboxing.... “

Foley adds, “We were all like, ‘God is coming into the gym.’ Then his [professional boxer] daughter come in. They get into the ring, and he shows her some moves.”

Champ or novice, at the Wild Card, they wrap their hands with long strips of white, red, blue or black cloth, put on the gloves and attack punching bags patched with duct tape.

And they sweat.

These days, some talk about “Million Dollar Baby.”

Roach and his trainers are especially interested in the film because four of the fighters who face Swank’s character are former professional boxers who came out of Wild Card: Lucia Rijker, an undefeated world champion welterweight whose current passion is acting; Cynthia Prouder; Bridgett “Baby Doll” Riley, who works as a stuntwoman and Danielle Doobenen.

“Lucia is the first woman I trained,” Roach says. “I worked with her on the first day, but I wasn’t sure if I really liked women boxing or even if it was a proper thing to do for girls. But her work ethic was so great that I couldn’t deny her.

“She’s probably my best student ... in my life and I’ve had 17 world champions. I trained Virgil Hill, Mike Tyson, James Toney, Michael Moorer, Vladimir Klitschko, Roberto Duran, Johnny Tapia, Stevie Collins,” he says, going on to list them all.

Rijker rarely stops at the Wild Card, but her photo remains on the door of the ladies’ room, part of a collage of female boxers that also features Cynthia Prouder and Rita Valentini, and frames a large photograph of Marilyn Monroe. The fighters all look feminine, and none has a damaged face or cauliflower ears.

“I’ve had a broken nose a couple of times. Up to this point, I haven’t had any cuts or major contusions,” says Valentini, who won her last bout with a first-round knockout.

Her favorite part in the movie is the relationship between the boxer and her trainer.

Women at work

Valentini knows what that feels like. “I’ve had more attention to my emotional state, mental state and physical health since I’ve come into boxing ... than anyone has [given me] my whole life,” she says.

While she talks, Danielle Mora pounds a heavy bag. She boxes because she manages a professional fighter, featherweight Juan Carlos “El Panda” Martinez, her fiance.

Nearby, Holly Lawson dances around another heavy bag, hitting it, while trainer Eric Brown encourages her.

“Keep your chin down. When you’re up like this,” he says, mimicking her stance, “you look like you’re windmilling your punches like a catfight. You don’t want that. You want to box.”

Lawson, who works at a record store, came to the Wild Card to find a trainer to push her after discovering that she was the best in a boxing class at another gym.

“I love it. I watch boxing tapes. I’m probably my most comfortable when I’m here sweating and surrounded by grunting guys,” she says as sweat plasters her bangs to her forehead.

Her best punch is her right cross, and she hopes to fight her first match, an amateur contest, by the end of this year.

She, too, has seen “Million Dollar Baby.”

“I made the mistake of taking my boyfriend with me, and he was not impressed when her nose was broken,” she says, though he’s very supportive.

“He bought me gloves for Christmas and shoes,” Lawson says, “which is good.”

Very good.

“If you don’t have your own gloves, you have to use one of those,” explains Sammy Stewart, a former world flyweight champion who now works as a trainer.

Pointing to a chest overflowing with red, black and royal blue boxing gloves, he says, “They are very funky. You don’t want to put your hands in other people’s sweat every day.”

The sweat in the gym doesn’t bother Stewart, who is originally from Liberia.

“There’s a saying that goes around,” he explains. “The prettier the gym is, you don’t have that much hunger in it. People are not hungry enough to fight. They go in there to look pretty. When you go to some of these gyms that are all decked out and air-conditioned and everything, there are women with their makeup on because they know there are a bunch of people just hanging around, standing there to see who’s the prettiest girl who walks through the door.”

Not at the Wild Card, where a big red-and-white sign advises: “Sweat + Sacrifice = Success.”