Groundswell Builds to Send the Late Dan Goossen Into the Boxing Hall of Fame

Groundswell Builds to Send the Late Dan Goossen Into the Boxing Hall of Fame

In New Orleans, some funerals are never a cause for tearful mourning. The life of the recently departed is celebrated with something called a Second Line, with smiling friends and relatives dancing toward the cemetery to the beat of a jazzy brass band at the front of the festive procession.

The late Dan Goossen wasn’t a New Orleanian, but you’d have to figure boxing’s most cheerful promoter and fun-lovingest guy would have appreciated just such a sendoff. Dan the Man was, in the words of younger brother and noted trainer Joe Goossen, “a gregarious guy, a pleasant guy with a lot of swag. He was larger-than-life even to me, and I’m his brother.”

Dan Goossen was four days shy of his 65^th birthday when he died of complications from liver cancer in the early morning hours of Sept. 29, 2014. Now, with the five-year anniversary of his passing fast approaching, Goossen’s ardent supporters, with legendarily upbeat publicist Fred Sternburg as the chief drum-beater, are mounting a grassroots campaign to gain the fight game’s most happy fella enshrinement in the International Boxing Hall of Fame’s Class of 2020. Sternburg worked closely with Goossen when both were with now-defunct America Presents from 1998 to 2002, a professional pairing of jokesters to rival Abbott and Costello.

If Team Dan is successful, and there is mounting evidence that it might be, it would be almost appropriate for the IBHOF organizers to bring the Olympia Brass Band up from the Big Easy to sashay along the parade route in Canastota, N.Y., just prior to the June 14 induction ceremony. If there was anything that Dan Goossen enjoyed as much as promoting world championship fights and fighters, it was making sure that a good time was had by all, including media members for whom he organized low-intensity, high-frolic softball and basketball games a couple of days before his events.

“It (induction into the IBHOF) should have happened when he was alive and able to experience and enjoy it,” said Tom Brown, one of Dan’s brothers-in-law and the president of TGB Promotions, an obvious outgrowth of Ten Goose Boxing, the California-based, family-stocked promotional company that Dan began as a vague notion in 1979 before it became a reality in 1982. “To me, he’s been a Hall of Famer for a long time. He definitely left his mark on the boxing business. Name some of the top fighters of his time and Dan was involved with many of them. He promoted Ray Mancini’s last fight, against Greg Haugen. Roy Jones was on the undercard that night. You can go on and on. And the job he did with James Toney, late in Toney’s career, was phenomenal. James was thought to be mostly done when Dan signed him. Same thing with Glen Johnson. Both became Fighters of the Year after everyone had pretty much written them off.”

Not that every Goossen relationship with fighters ended on a cheery note. There was the unfortunate breakup with Ten Goose’s first superstar, middleweight champion Michael Nunn, which came as close as anything to wiping the near-constant smile from Dan’s face. Goossen had moved on to the presidency of America Presents when he became embroiled in a dispute with Bernard Hopkins, and it was more of the same at Goossen Tutor Promotions when Andre Ward, one of Dan’s two Olympic gold medalists (the other being David Reid), left after a similar falling-out.

In a Dec. 10, 1999, story I authored for the Philadelphia Daily News, Dan admitted to frustration at his occasional inability to satisfy the demands of fighters who, after achieving stardom, were insistent on squeezing out every last perk that went with that status.

“One of the biggest disappoints in my 20 years in boxing is Bernard Hopkins,” he said. “He’s right up there with Michael Nunn. I always felt Michael Nunn had the ability to be one of the greatest fighters ever, and I had that same feeling about Bernard. But Nunn never achieved greatness, based upon his own decisions, and it’s too late for him now. With Hopkins, I wanted to have a good relationship with the guy and to enjoy it, but, well, Bernard is Bernard. I’m not going to get in a war of words with Bernard Hopkins. He isn’t happy with what we did; we are.”

Joe Goossen correctly notes that virtually every promoter with a plaque hanging in Canastota has had a history of tension in dealing with fighters, but that the spats involving his brother stung more because they were never just about business. From the outset, those affiliations were uniformly personal, to the point of being almost familial.

“The reasons why those situations hit Dan so hard was because he really liked having relationships with guys that went a step beyond,” Joe said. “He always wanted his fighters to feel as if they were a part of our family, and vice versa. He put his heart and soul into it, every time.

“Look, we were raised by a father who was a homicide detective. My dad always said that loyalty and trust were so important. I think he imbued that into all of us kids. So, obviously, it hurts more when you do everything with the best intentions and somebody still turns on you. But Dan was not one to wallow in any sort of misery. He always maintained a positive attitude and if a relationship with a fighter did go south, he took satisfaction in the knowledge that he had done everything he could to keep that from happening. Dan was not one to get down on life because somebody else wasn’t holding up their end of the bargain.”

The group entry into boxing by the Goossen siblings – 10 in all, eight brothers and two sisters of feisty Irish heritage, hence the Ten Goose moniker – would make for an interesting story in any case, but even more so if you peer behind the curtain to get additional particulars. All of the Goossen kids were athletes of varying degrees of accomplishment, the most notable being Greg, now deceased, who was a good enough baseball player to make the major leagues as a catcher. Dan was almost there with him, skilled enough at hoops to allegedly wangle a training camp invitation from the Dallas Chaparrals of the old American Basketball Association.

“We had a huge living room that had to be 40 feet long,” Joe said of a space that was part sporting goods store, part recreational area and perpetual beehive of activity. “We did a little bit of everything in that room, including boxing. Our lives revolved around sports.”

Or at least they did until adulthood forced the Goossen siblings, with the exception of Greg, to stow most of their athletic dreams. Unable to make an ABA roster despite his nice jump shot and sharp elbows in the paint, Dan spent a decade as a clothing salesman, which explained his affinity for high fashion and deal-closing. Deep down inside, however, he retained a competitive itch that peddling pants and shirts could never satisfactorily scratch.

No wonder the Goossen kids – most of whom were then in their 20s, with a couple in their early 30s – found refuge in weekend barbecues and take-no-prisoners Wiffle ball games on a nice-sized piece of property owned by one of the brothers, Tom, in North Hollywood.

“We’d have Wiffle ball tournaments, on a regulation field we had laid out, and it was great,” Joe recalled. “Other people would come over and they loved it.”

One of the frequent visitors to those gatherings was an ex-fighter named L.C. Morgan, who lived in downtown Los Angeles. He asked Dan if it would be all right if he brought some inner-city kids over. Dan said sure, the more the merrier, and the following weekend Morgan pulled up in a van and “six or seven” preteens and teens spilled out. Morgan had brought some pads with him, which the kids and some of the Goossens took turns whacking with gloved fists. As Morgan readied to leave, he remarked to Dan that “wouldn’t it be great?” if the property also included a boxing ring. Dan could have dismissed it as idle conversation, but it got him to thinking.

When next Morgan and his crew showed up they were stunned to find a quickly erected and structurally sound outdoor ring, a surprise so stirring to Morgan that he broke down in tears of joy. Some sparring sessions ensued and, well, things would never be quite the same for the Goossen clan.

“We strung up lights in the branches of a tree that hung over the ring so we could train guys at night,” Joe said, and the seed that was to blossom into Ten Goose Boxing was planted and began to take root. It was something straight out of an old Our Gang episode from the 1930s where Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla and the crew get together and proclaim “Let’s put on a show!,” except that a few years later that backyard show was getting rave reviews on a much grander scale.

“In 1981 we had a gardener from the neighborhood whose name was Nacho something-or-other,” Joe continued. “He was kind of a rough-looking guy and Dan convinced him to try boxing. He was our first `fighter,’ although he didn’t last long. We were recruiting anyone we could. A used-car salesman, Harry Kazanjian, was one of the first guys we actually got a fight for. Harry probably had eight fights for us. I still see him around sometimes.”

In relatively short order, Dan had graduated to staging cards at a country club in Reseda, Calif., which featured such legit fighters as Frankie Duarte and Randy Shields. The young Ruelas brothers, Gabriel and Rafael, were in the pipeline and in time would go on to become world champions.

But the real breakthrough was when Dan showed up at the 1984 Olympics in LA, where he met Bob Surkien, who had Nunn, an Olympic alternate with vast potential. “Dan somehow got Nunn, who was being recruited by Manny Steward, to come to our gym in September and, as they say, the rest is history,” Joe said.

“We weren’t one of the big players in boxing then, not at all. But we had Dan, who was the ultimate go-getter. When Nunn won the (IBF middleweight) title in 1988 – four years after we signed him – by knocking out Frank Tate, the guy that beat him out of the Olympic berth, Dan said, `Tate might have won the gold medal, but I got the gold nugget.’ And he was right. We turned that gold nugget into something really big.”

It also helped to buff and polish the Dan Goossen brand when, during a fight card in Chicago, Top Rank executive Akbar Muhammad was having difficulty striking a deal with a recalcitrant manager of a fighter TR founder Bob Arum hoped to sign. Muhammad asked Goossen inside the office where the negotiations had hit a snag, and less than five minutes later the two emerged, wearing wide grins. That magic touch led to a long and productive run with Top Rank for Dan, whose reputation as a closer was gathering momentum.

By the time he took ill, Dan Goossen had worked with, in addition to bell cows Nunn, Reid and Toney, such notables as Hall of Famers Mike Tyson and Terry Norris, David Tua, Paul Williams, Joel Casamayor and Lance Whitaker. He also promoted two of Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s bouts after “Money’s” split with Top Rank.

As promotional resumes go, Goossen’s would seem to pass any eye test for entry into the exclusive IBHOF club. If his name appears on my ballot, I’d give it a check mark. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be the only voter to do so.

It does make you wonder, though. What if L.C. Morgan hadn’t happened along, opened his mouth and got an intrigued Dan to construct that ring? What if all that open space had just continued to be used for neighborhood Wiffle ball games?

There’s no way of knowing for sure, but my guess is that Dan Goossen would have gone on to become the first commissioner of a pro Wiffle ball league and first inductee into the Wiffle Ball Hall of Fame that didn’t exist then and still doesn’t.

So much pulsating energy had to be channeled into something, right?

Check out more boxing news on video at The Boxing Channel  

To comment on this story in The Fight Forum CLICK HERE