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.