Boxing Is on Ballroom’s Dance Card

The luxurious ballroom at the Irvine Marriott is typically a place of trade conventions, consumer expos, fashion shows and wedding receptions.

In that same ballroom Thursday, a ponytailed man in silk shorts took a vicious right uppercut to the jaw, slumped against some ropes and collapsed to a sweat-stained canvas. He finally collected himself enough to stumble out of the ring, dazed.

Quaffing beers and sipping margaritas, hundreds of rowdy fans grew impatient for the next bout.

And so it goes inside the Marriott ballroom, as it has on Thursday nights for much of the last 21 years -- drawing the likes of attorneys in suits and waiters in jeans, business owners and construction workers, looking for sweaty and sometimes bloody action in a most unlikely place.

Across California, boxing events are staged at arenas large and small, Indian casinos, bullrings and fairgrounds.

But in carpeted ballrooms with chandeliers?

“Hotels are in the business to sell sleeping rooms, not sell boxing shows,” said Roy Englebrecht, the Marriott boxing show’s promoter. “But somehow, we’ve been able to coexist.”

Hotel officials did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.

These days, boxing at the Irvine hotel isn’t just surviving, but thriving.

“Battle in the Ballroom” events are every other month. Last Thursday’s sold out its 1,425 seats three weeks before the event -- the earliest sellout ever-- and brought in a $42,033 gate, the largest ever.

“This is a little surreal,” said Englebrecht, the show’s second promoter who has bought and sold the event since acquiring it from Don Fraser in 1992.

He attributes some of the success to timing. Boxing’s already tarnished image worsened when federal investigators last year uncovered evidence that thousands of professional bouts may have been rigged. But boxing’s popularity has rebounded, thanks in part to Hollywood’s sudden love affair with pugilists.

“Million Dollar Baby” was a box-office hit and won Academy Awards for best picture and best director; NBC’s boxing-reality series, “The Contender,” is gaining popularity. And another boxing movie, “Cinderella Man,” about Depression-era boxer and folk hero Jim Braddock and starring Russell Crowe, is due out June 3.

“Boxing continues to grow new toes even as it continues to shoot itself in the foot,” Englebrecht said. “Yet I think the magic of these shows has proven that boxing can work if it’s run the right way and the prices are kept in line.”

Englebrecht said the National Hockey League lockout that wiped out the Anaheim Mighty Ducks’ season probably hasn’t hurt attendance either. He said, too, that though ticket prices for major sports rise nearly every year, his prices -- $25 and $35 -- have remained constant for seven years.

“This has got to be one of the only local sporting events where a multimillionaire who owns a house on Linda Isle sits next to a guy making eight bucks an hour,” Englebrecht said.

Dave Hutchins of Tustin, who works for an Orange County developer, said the eclectic crowd and dress styles, ranging from shorts, T-shirts and backward baseball caps to Versace suits, adds to the spectacle.

“This place is a little like Venice Beach,” said Hutchins, a regular whose second-row seats are just beyond what he calls the blood-and-spit zone.

“Sometimes the show outside the ring is better than the one inside the ring,” he said. “I actually came here for the people-watching, and I ended up becoming a fan of boxing.”

Hutchins said friends were surprised to learn that there’s boxing in Irvine, a place more likely to conjure up images of golf balls and tennis rackets than smelling salts and spit buckets.

“It’d make more sense if this were in Santa Ana or Stanton, but I think these shows give Orange County character,” Hutchins said.

“Orange County is often characterized as so homogeneous and conservative. There’s a lot of grit to Orange County; people just don’t know it,” he said.

The boxing cards are filled with young fighters trying to establish themselves and older ones past their prime. The lesser boxers among them are paid $100 per round; featured fighters may earn $2,000 a bout.

Thursday night’s matches were a mix of brutal knockouts and fast-paced, nonstop bouts that went the distance.

One of the knockouts was a little too intense for first-time boxing attendee Kate Burton of Irvine, who sat ringside, a few feet from a boxer’s spittoon.

While most fans stood and screamed their approval after Enrique Gutierrez’s sweeping right hand put Michael Lyudarsky on the canvas for the third and final time, Burton looked sick to her stomach.

“I’m a little shocked,” said Burton, 28. “The boxing class we took in college wasn’t like this.”

But Burton’s friend Bethany Cook had a different view.

“It’s so raw,” said Cook, who was documenting the night’s action with a camera.

“It comes down to men being men, and it’s so primal. It’s a turn-on.”

Two bouts later, both women were caught up in the action, joining other fans in showering the ring with hundreds of crumpled dollar bills after female pugilists Rhonda Luna and Rosadea Razo punched nonstop for six exhausting, spirited rounds.

“It feels kind of good sitting here watching them go at it and see how appreciative these people are of them,” Burton said. “I’m proud of them. It shows that it’s all about power, but also skill.”

As Luna’s trainers counted the extra cash she would share with Razo, who lost a split decision, Luna talked about the oddity of boxing underneath the sparkling chandeliers.

“I’ve fought inside a bullring in Pico Rivera,” said Luna, a high school teacher in La Puente.

“As long as there’s a ring and some ropes, I’m going to fight. But it does feel good to be appreciated.”