Requiem for a boxing town

It was a melancholy thing to see the face of handsome young Mando Ramos, once the lightweight boxing champion of the world, staring up off the obituary page of Monday’s Times. He was just 20 when he won the crown, and just 59 when he died of natural causes in his sleep Sunday. More than 20 years ago, he waged a successful fight with alcohol and drug addiction, but diabetes and a back injury suffered while working as a longshoreman had sapped his health in recent years.

He was the second Los Angeles boxing great to die this year. Art Aragon -- who in the late 1940s and ‘50s drew crowds in the tens of thousands and Hollywood actresses in droves -- died in March at the age of 80.

There was a time when Ramos and Aragon were sporting names as resonant as Kobe Bryant or Sandy Koufax, but their quiet passing is a sobering reminder that Los Angeles is a city of many histories, each with its own celebrities. It isn’t well understood -- or even much recalled these days -- that L.A. always was one of the world’s great boxing cities.

Since 1906, when the Irish American Tommy Burns defeated Marvin Hart for the heavyweight title in the city’s first important championship fight, L.A. has produced legions of world-class boxers, including Jim Jefferies, Enrique Bolanos, Aragon, Ramos, Bobby Chacon, the Lopez brothers (Ernie and Danny), Armando Muniz, Shane Mosely and Oscar De La Hoya.

Among aficionados of the “sweet science” around the world, Los Angeles is recognized as a boxing Mecca, although the sport has seemed to recede in recent years. In part, that’s because, like the history of the working-class and immigrant sports fans who idolized fighters like Ramos, the story of boxing in L.A. is a scattered and neglected one, still awaiting a narrator.

Ramos, for example, ended up on the docks because he was handled by Hall of Fame trainer Jackie McCoy, a onetime longshoreman who never gave up his union card. When two of his champions -- Ramos and former welterweight titleholder Don Jordan -- came to the end of their careers, McCoy got them into the union. Jordan, who despite his name was a Spanish-speaker from East L.A., died in 1997 after a beating he’d suffered in a parking lot left him in a yearlong coma.

Partly, Los Angeles neglects its pugilistic history out of embarrassment. A culture that criminalizes secondhand smoke and regards veal as a cruelty is unlikely to glorify a sport rooted in struggle and the street, one in which competition is stripped to its brutal essence.

Today, Los Angeles no longer has a venue that makes matches or holds weekly cards. The Olympic, where Ramos’ great patroness, the matchmaker Eileen Eaton, once reigned, is closed. The Forum, where Don Fraser made the matches, is now a mega-church. The late Howie Steindler’s Main Street Gym, where, as a sign used to proclaim, “The Greatest Fighters In the World Train Here,” is a parking lot.

Professional boxing flourishes mainly as programming for cable and pay-for-view television. Even there, though, the brightest star long has been East L.A.’s De La Hoya. His career is nearing its end, but his popularity endures. He is, after all, the good-looking guy who won middle-aged Chicana hearts from Downey to El Sereno when he dedicated the 1992 Olympic gold medal he won in Barcelona to his mother’s memory.

Today, if you want to get the bittersweet flavor of the sweet science as practiced in gritty L.A., you can turn to literary fiction. Try Yxta Maya Murray’s marvelous 1999 novel, “What It Takes to Get to Vegas,” whose female protagonist is one of the most memorable in recent L.A. fiction. Or seek out “Rope Burn,” F.X. Toole’s superb short story collection, which includes the novella-length “Million Dollar Baby” and his flawed but fascinating posthumously published novel, “Pound for Pound.”

F.X. Toole was the pseudonym of a onetime fighter named Jerry Boyd, who was born in Long Beach, lived in L.A. and had a 22-year career as a trainer and cut man, mostly on the local boxing circuit. Along the way, he studied theater and worked as a longshoreman and bartender. Boyd was 70 when his first book came out, and two years later was working on the novel when he died after emergency heart surgery. His last words were, “Doc, get me just a little more time. I gotta finish my book.”

Somebody, someday, needs to say the same for the story of boxing in Los Angeles.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com