Boxing Offers A Way Out Seldom-Seen Side Of Boxing Alive In The Inner-Cities Of America

In a sweltering East Los Angeles gym, they spar to Latin rhythms blaring from a boom box, every sharp crack of the glove the sound of opportunity and second chance.

Teens from gang-plagued neighborhoods turn to boxing at the Sheriff’s East Los Angeles Community Center as a way out of trouble, not into it.

It’s a side of the sport that many say has been obscured by the Mike Tyson fight-and-bite fiasco.

“I thought I was going to be nobody when I grew up,” said David Flores, 17, who is preparing for his first amateur bout next month. “Now, it’s like it’s all changed. I’m the opposite man I used to be.”

Flores, who had fallen out of school and into juvenile hall for robbery, turned to boxing at the suggestion of a jailhouse priest. Now, Flores is a 1997 high school graduate heading for Santa Monica Community College with dreams of becoming a computer engineer.

And he didn’t have to bite anybody to get there.

“That thing with Mike Tyson, that’s not good sportsmanship,” Flores said. “That fight … was more of a street thing or settling a personal disagreement. That’s not boxing.”

That sentiment is underscored by a sign hanging in the gym: “Champions never take the easy way out. Pay the price.”

Saturday’s heavyweight bout between Tyson and Evander Holyfield brought disgrace to the already suspect world of big-money professional boxing. Nevada boxing commissioners are considering whether to suspend Tyson for a year or more for biting Holyfield’s ears.

But boxing’s supporters say there is a starkly different and seldom-seen side of the sport - one that is less savage and has saved kids sliding toward gangs, crime and drug use.

It’s worked that way, advocates say, in a lot of places for a long time.

The Police Athletic Leagues, which began in 1944 with a baseball in New York, spread to other sports and now boasts 283 chapters across the nation. In boxing, it has produced such heavyweight champions as Muhammad Ali and Holyfield.

“Our primary focus is to take the kids from their neighborhoods and areas and put them in situations where they are going to have a healthy environment,” said Nerilda Roque-Lugo, director of member services for PAL. “Instead of being out on the streets after school causing problems in the neighborhood, they’re going to centers or gyms or ball fields.”

The sheriff’s boxing program is not a PAL chapter but part of a publicly and privately funded foundation that offers a range of activities, from Mexican folk dancing to computer classes.

The emphasis in all programs, officials say, is on something boxing critics say the professional sport sorely lacks: self-control.

“The program allows an individual to be a hero in a very disciplined environment,” said Peggy Moore, executive director of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Youth Foundation. “Deputies teach the boxing, participate with them in boxing, and by instilling that discipline within themselves, they learn to take it into other arenas of their lives, such as education.”

The teen-agers come from an East L.A. neighborhood where the sheriff’s department has identified 58 distinct and often violent gangs.

About four years ago, Sal Garcia, 18, was on that after-school downslope.

“I had been a good student,” Garcia said. “But I was like hanging around too late in the park with all the other guys on the corner and I was like staying up too late.”

A newspaper ad - and some nudging from his mother - led him to the sheriff’s boxing program, and now he is one of the stars, a nationally ranked amateur preparing for his first professional fight.

“It changed me,” he said of boxing. “It kept me off the streets and gave me a chance.”

And young boxers shouldn’t look up to Tyson any more, Garcia said.

“Tyson is the one who makes the sport look bad,” Garcia said. “Just because one person does one incident like that doesn’t mean the sport should have a black eye.”