Fighting for a Comeback

The Country Club buzzes with chatter, laughter rising on clouds of cigar smoke, everyone waiting for light-heavyweight Michael Nunn to enter the ring for the main event.

It feels so familiar. Just like the 1980s, when Nunn put the onetime Reseda discount drugstore on the boxing map, winning fight after fight before raucous fans. The same bare walls and concrete floor, the cocktail tables pushed close to ringside. One of those tables is reserved for actor David Hasselhoff and his buddies.

“This was our church. It was like our religion,” Hasselhoff said. “Now we’re all back to get things started again.”

Boxing has indeed returned to the Country Club. After a three-year drought, there are regularly scheduled fights. The crowds are starting to come back. So are the boxers.

Nunn retained the North American Boxing Federation title here last Friday. Former lightweight champion Rafael Ruelas and his brother, Gabriel, began their careers in this club.

“You’d see the same people here every time,” said Gabriel, a former super-featherweight champ.

Maybe it is too much to expect the Country Club to rekindle its glory days. But it would not be the first time in its roller-coaster history that this dowdy little hall staged a comeback.

Brick and boxy and windowless, the Country Club felt like a neighborhood joint. The late entrepreneur Chuck Landis bought the property in 1980, building a stage in one corner with tiers of tables and a balcony. He turned it into a 1,000-seat country music bar--hence the name--and Merle Haggard played opening night.

But trouble brewed almost from the start. Neighbors complained of rowdy patrons littering, urinating and having sex in their front yards. The club slipped from the city’s elite. A new manager, Scott Hurowitz, tried renting the stage for films and videos. It didn’t work.

Yet even as the Country Club began its inexorable fall from grace in the music industry, it was stumbling upon a way to reinvent itself.

In those days, boxing was a way to fill empty nights in the music schedule. Forty or 50 people might attend. “We were laughed at, ridiculed,” said Peter Broudy, a longtime Southern California boxing promoter who cut his teeth at the Country Club.

Early cards featured big names on their way down: Frankie Duarte, Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Randall “Tex” Cobb.

But fans from the San Fernando Valley, realizing they no longer had to drive to the Olympic or the Forum, showed up in increasing numbers. For a reasonable price, they got seats close to the action.

Boxing at the Country Club truly caught fire when the joint established itself as a proving ground for a cadre of young, talented fighters.

Nunn came first. The young fighter rose steadily through the middleweight ranks and developed an avid following. Eventually, he attracted such regulars as Hasselhoff, Michael Landon and Victor French. When it came time for Nunn to move on to bigger arenas, there were others to take his place.

Alex Garcia, a San Fernando kid who had run afoul of the law, came out of prison to win the national amateur super-heavyweight championship. The Ruelas brothers waited in the wings.

Nunn and the Ruelas brothers went on to win world championships. Garcia rose to the top five in the heavyweight division, attracting bouts around the world.

Finally, after 10 good years, there were no more local fighters to grab the spotlight. The Country Club had to bring in ex-NFL star Mark Gastineau, who was jeered as he stumbled his way through a heavyweight bout with a hairdresser from Indianapolis.

“Chuck [Landis] died and the club deteriorated,” Broudy said. “The rugs started getting holes in them.” By the fall of 1993, there were no more regular fights at the Country Club. The city pulled its liquor license.

Last September, Broudy started getting telephone calls from Mehdi Zamani, another new manager at the club. Broudy agreed to give the place another look. Not very much had changed. The same small tables and chairs. The same dank balcony. But the walls had a fresh coat of paint and the floors were clean. Broudy couldn’t help thinking about the Valley fans who refused to come to the fights he was now promoting at the Olympic Auditorium.

“I realized that I missed the place,” he said.

The promoter brought boxing back to the Country Club last November. There was another show just before Christmas. Then last Friday’s national telecast on Fox Sports West. Of course, Nunn headed the bill.

So it felt like old times, with Hasselhoff’s table drinking a toast to dear, departed Victor French as Gabriel Ruelas watched from ringside.

Broudy couldn’t help thinking that this unassuming hall, this converted drugstore, might have one more shot at redemption.

“The Country Club has an intensity to it, it’s got history,” he said. “You can’t underestimate that.”