Remembering Enrique Bolanos, An L.A. Boxing Icon of 1940s

Published

12 years ago

June 15, 2012

Johnny Ortiz (left) poses with Enrique Bolanos.

Enrique Bolanos packed stadiums and arenas in Los Angeles with raucous and loyal fans during his fighting days in the 1940s and 50s. He was a boxing icon in an era when other sports could not compete with prizefighting.

Those days have passed and last week the gentleman Bolanos also passed at age 87 in Pasadena.

Bolanos fought numerous boxing legends, including perhaps the greatest lightweight of all time, Ike Williams, a total of three times. Many say he beat Williams once, but that’s a debate that the “greatest generation” has taken with them. All total he engaged in more than 100 prizefights, winning 79.

Born in Durango, Mexico, the light skinned Mexican boxer was one of the first to migrate north of the border and successfully grab the attention of fervent boxing fans at the Olympic Auditorium and Wrigley Field. Sell outs became a trademark of Bolanos and fans flocked wherever he fought.

“My father used to drop me off in the morning to buy tickets to Enrique Bolanos fights,” said Amado Avila, who has since passed away. “People would try to cut in front of me and I wouldn’t let them. I would wait for hours in line to buy tickets at the Olympic.”

World War 2

Known as the “Durango Dropper,” Bolanos arrived during World War II when it was difficult to find boxers not enlisted in the military. Mexico was neutral during the war and aside from sending workers to the United States it also sent prizefighters with Bolanos leading the group in 1943. He stayed in the United States and raised a family in the Los Angeles area.

The amiable boxer quickly became a fan favorite with his blend of stylish boxing mixed with potent punching power. Mexican fans living in California loved Bolanos who fought all of the best fighters from the “Swing era” such as Manuel Ortiz, who many experts consider the greatest bantamweight world champion of all time. They met in the prize ring in Aug. 29, 1944. Ortiz was the bantamweight world champion at the time and both met in a non-title fight set at the featherweight limit. Bolanos was floored twice in the sixth round and his corner wisely stopped the fight.

“He could hit very hard,” Bolanos told me when we met in 1994. “Manuel Ortiz was a great fighter.”

Of course the fight was a sell out.

Luis Magana

Bolanos was a big ticket seller at the old Hollywood Legion Stadium, which is now a fitness center on Gower Street. Soon he would be lured to the Olympic Auditorium again and fought another Hall of Fame fighter Chalky Wright. He lost the first encounter by split decision in August 1945 but avenged that defeat in two later encounters.

“He surprised me when he spoke Spanish to me,” said Bolanos of his first encounter with Wright, who was an African American fluent in Spanish. “The first time we fought he used his experience to beat me. He was never easy to fight.”

Other fighters he beat were Jackie Wilson, Joey Barnum, and John Thomas.

“Enrique Bolanos was a magnificent boxer,” said Luis Magana, a former publicist for the Olympic Auditorium.

Magana died several years ago and had introduced me to Bolanos in 1994. We met for lunch at a small diner on Melrose Avenue and discussed the world of boxing during the 40s and 50s. The three of us spent three hours comparing boxing from that era to the 1990s before Oscar De La Hoya would burst on the scene and obliterate box office records.

“Best I ever faced”

Bolanos spoke graciously about his two greatest foes, Ike Williams and the original “Golden Boy” Art Aragon. He said Williams was “a magnificent boxer with tremendous power” and a killer in the ring. I tried to set up another lunch meeting with Bolanos and include his old nemesis Williams, who was living in Los Angeles. Both agreed but before the meeting could take place Williams died on September 5, 1994. He was 71.

Bolanos was very saddened that he would never see Williams again.

Bolanos and I met again at Senor Magana’s house in the Fairfax district and looked over photos and other boxing memorabilia stored in a backroom. That day we saw an 8-millimeter tape of the third and final prizefight between Bolanos and Williams that took place at Wrigley Field on July 21, 1949 for the lightweight world championship. On the scratchy looking film Bolanos can be seen using his jab like a spear to keep Williams from setting up his power shots. The referee that night was the former great heavyweight world champion Jack Dempsey. Bolanos only used his left hook and left jab for three rounds as Williams seemed ready to counter the right. The Mexican fighter used that “educated left” as Magana described it to keep the dangerous Williams from unloading.

In round four Williams unloaded and knocked out Bolanos. It was their last encounter.

“Many people say that Enrique won the second fight,” said Magana, adding that he did not have a tape of that encounter that ended in a split decision. “Ike Willliams was a tremendous boxer.”

Bolanos agreed and called Williams the “best I ever faced.”

Golden Boy

One other boxer who rivaled Bolanos for fan frenzy was Art Aragon, the boxer from Boyle Heights. The colorful Aragon had a cockiness that many fans abhorred and whenever he fought the aisles of the Olympic Auditorium were packed with fans eager to see him lose or win.

When Aragon signed to fight the immensely popular Bolanos it was a fight fans delight. Their first clash occurred on Valentine’s Day in 1950. People lined up for blocks to buy tickets for the event.

“Enrique Bolanos was a real nice guy,” Aragon told me in an interview in 1995. “I really liked Enrique. When we fought I was too strong for him.”

The first fight ended in a 12^th round technical knockout win for Aragon.

Johnny Ortiz, a boxing journalist and former owner of the famous Main Street Gym, recalls the fight that saw his idol Bolanos lose.

“Enrique Bolanos was far and away the most popular fighter Los Angeles ever knew, no one has ever come close, Oscar De La Hoya included. I may have been young, but I remember it all like it were yesterday. He had a ‘look’ like no other, you would have had to see it to know what I mean. It was the ‘look’ his fans saw and loved. There will never be another like him,” said Ortiz, whose book Life Among the Icons describes Los Angeles from the 50s to the present. “Enrique never had an amateur fight. Promoter George Parnassus turned him pro when he brought him from México. Enrique Bolanos was known as “The Durango Kid.”

Ortiz’s brother Phil Ortiz trained in the Main Street Gym alongside Bolanos and introduced them. He witnessed the Mexican fighter train numerous times.

“He had the greatest footwork I have ever seen or will ever see, he and Sugar Ray Robinson. After watching him workout, I would go home, go into my garage and try to emulate everything I saw him do during his workouts, especially his footwork. I used all of it in all of my amateur fights,” says Ortiz, who lives in the San Fernando Valley. “Los Angeles fight fans were crazy about him, there was something about him that was kind of mesmerizing, he always fought before sold out crowds. After he lost the second of his three fights with the great Ike Williams, he kind of lost interest, he was just never the same. His days as a serious contender were over for the most part. He began drinking, putting an end to a once brilliant career.”

Aragon fought Bolanos again five months after the first loss and quickly dispatched of the popular Mexican prizefighter in three rounds.

“He really was a nice guy,” said Aragon, who died in 2008. “People thought we hated each other but I really liked the guy.”

Everyone liked Bolanos.

The last time I saw Bolanos was during a Bernard Hopkins media day training session in downtown Los Angeles. He was introduced to the “Executioner” who was very gracious to the old master.

Many of the “greatest generation” have passed on and Bolanos was one of its super novas. He passed away on June 4.

Remembering Enrique Bolanos, An L.A. Boxing Icon of 1940s / Check out more boxing news on video at The Boxing Channel.

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David A. Avila

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-289-East-L.A.-A-Fight-Town-Claressa-Shields-and-More

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

3 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

Arne's-Almanac-Jake-Paul-and-Women's-Boxing-a-Curmudgeon's-Take

Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

Former-World-Bamtamweight-Champion-Richie-Sandoval-Passes-Away-at-age-63

Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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