When boxing was big
Ratonians recall roaming the ring

Something all good boxing coaches tell every young fighter they work with is this: Protect yourself at all times. It’s a common mantra in competitive boxing circles, one that Orlando Martinez paid attention to, and one that, apparently, most of his opponents didn’t. In 75 amateur fights, Martinez was knocked down only twice and was never knocked out.

By the time he reached middle school, Martinez, now 66, knew he wanted to box. He learned how to protect himself and throw a punch and went on to win about 90 percent of his officially sanctioned bouts by knockout. But even before he entered the ring, he was familiar with fighting, differentiated from boxing in that with fighting, you pretty much sanctioned the fights yourself. Martinez made no differentiation, however, between in-ring or out-of-ring when it came to who he would take on.

“In school, I was always fighting,” says Martinez, still stout and compact at five-foot-seven. And it wasn’t just fellow students he scrapped with. Once, at the middle school, two teachers “jumped” him, intent on punishing him for some offense they say he had committed but which Martinez maintains that he had not.

“When I was wrong, I would take a whipping,” he says. “This time, I rebelled and I . . .”  He pauses to choose his words. “Let’s just say I defended myself.”

Not long after that, another teacher gave him some smart advice: “He told me that instead of fighting in the streets and getting in trouble, I ought to get in the ring and get my anger out that way. It ended up making a man out of me.”

Martinez began boxing in makeshift rings people would set up in unlikely places all over Raton. The sport was big here in the fifties and sixties, and everybody wanted to be the next champ, even if it was just champ of a small town, or even of a block. (Martinez tells of bloody street battles that involved baseball bats and shotguns and made in-ring warfare look tame by comparison.)  He learned important lessons from coaches and opponents, not the least of which was that fighting belonged in the ring, not outside of it and that controlled bleeding with gloves on is better than bleeding to death naked-handed in the middle of a field somewhere. Today, so many years later, he still cherishes his memories of combat in a rough and sometimes violent sport.

“I stepped in the ring with a guy who was a year or two older than me,” Martinez says of one of his early fights. “He was a pretty good boxer. I mean, he bloodied me. But I finally got him. But he whipped me like an orphan child for two or three minutes. When I finally did connect, he went down and didn’t want to fight no more.”

Bravado and raging self-confidence may be frowned at, socially, but they paid nice dividends for Martinez in the ring.

“(The people I fought) could outweigh me by thirty or forty pounds. It didn’t make no difference. I’d fight anybody who came along.”  Like once when he was 24, fighting at 135 pounds. His scheduled opponent for a match never showed, and he was asked to fight a heavyweight.

“I said, ‘I’m not scared of anybody. I’ll fight him.’”  So he did, and the heavyweight opened up on him and stunned him in the first round. Martinez wasn’t about to go through that for the rest of the night. “In the second round, I broke his collar bone in half,” he says as matter-of-factly as if he’s talking about changing a tire on his truck.

Punching with the best
“You throw a punch with your body.”  He demonstrates a series of quick jabs, twisting his doorway-wide torso to lend momentum to the strike. (He’s punching the air, not somebody.)  “When you hit him in the face, or wherever you hit him, you hit him with full force. The power you have in your hands is a natural power, but not everybody has it. There are guys who have knockout punches. They have heavy hands.”

Martinez, who has very heavy hands, considers the question: Which professional fighter throughout boxing history would you least want to get hit by?

“George Foreman,” he says. “I don’t think he throws his punches right, but he’s so big and powerful. He’s devastating. He can knock you out with either hand.”

As to the greatest heavyweight fight of all time: the first of three big Ali-Frazier fights. (It was March 8, 1971, and Frazier won a 15-round decision over Ali.)

“It was fight all the way,” Martinez says. “They were both undefeated. It was just a matter of who wanted it more. In the end, Frazier wanted it more.”

And the greatest fighter to ever step in the ring? Rocky Marciano. (Marciano finished his eight-year professional career with 49 wins, 43 by knockout, and no losses.)

“He was able to take punches,” Martinez says of Marciano. “How do you hurt a bull? He’d keep coming at you and coming at you. He’d paralyze your arms by hitting you so much.”

Conditioning
Martinez remembers what he put himself through outside the ring so he could walk away from it in one piece. “I’d run from here to Lake Maloya and back in the morning,” he says. “I’d run up to the old pass. I’d run the stairs at the football field, fifty times up and down. After work, I’d go train four or five hours. Dedication is the name of the game.”

After building his legs, he got to work on the rest of his body. “I did sit-ups with a fifteen-pound medicine ball they use to hit me with. I used to be able to put a person on my back and do pushups. I could carry a hundred-pound sack of oats or beans with my teeth.”

That last is evidence of a crucial part of a boxer’s conditioning: the head and neck area. Martinez maintains that a “glass jaw” in fighters who are easily knocked out is really just an unconditioned jaw.

“Like they say, if the head drops, the body is gone,” he says.

Down but not out
One of Martinez’s least favorite memories is of a fight when he was 22, at the boys school in Springer, where matches were held regularly. He’d beaten this particular opponent twice before, but now the challenger was being coached by the same man who coached Martinez. The opponent knew how to fight Martinez and sent him to the canvas twice.

“After he knocked me down, I popped an elbow, and they put it back in place,” Martinez recalls. “My corner man told me I was photographing my punches. He said, ‘Go in there and act like you’re going to throw that left, because he’s going to be watching for it, then back off, and when he throws his right, you hit him with the left.’”

Martinez did as instructed and ended up hitting the guy about fifteen times. The referee called the fight after that. “He was out for about twelve minutes,” Martinez says. “He was hurt.”

Victory and defeat
In 1959, Martinez won the New Mexico Golden Gloves championship in the Novice class. Two years later, he entered in the Open class. During a five-day Open tournament, he knocked out every opponent except one who wouldn’t even get in the ring with him and another who did and had the fight “given to him,” costing Martinez the title. This is another unpleasant memory.

“It was a dirty decision,” Martinez says. “They should have never given it to him. But he was home-town. Things like that happened all the time. When they announced the decision, people booed and threw cups. Afterwards, when I shook his hand, he said, ‘You’re the best I ever met.’”

His last fight was in 1963, in the San Luis Valley in Colorado. He beat Little Joe Espinosa on a decision. And since that day, all those memories are still close to his heart.

“I loved it,” he says. “If I didn’t have bad legs and knees, I’d still be playing with the kids.”

By “playing with the kids,” he means helping maintain boxing activities in Raton, something Nick Salazar, himself a former boxer, has been working on for years.

For the community
Some form or another of a Raton boxing organization has been in operation fairly steadily since the 1950s, when athletes trained at the old National Guard Armory. In 1969, Salazar’s brother, Luke, who passed away in 2003, opened a gym on the corner of Sugarite and Garcia Street, where Nick coached for several years. The site of operations changed a few times, and Nick Salazar spent four years as a boxing coach in Albuquerque and also fought for seven years in New Mexico and Washington before returning to Raton to open the current Salazar’s Gym on Martinez and East Cook.

“There were a lot of us who boxed back in the sixties,” Salazar remembers. “It was big. My brother had a team you wouldn’t believe. He had twenty-seven members, and they went to Denver (on one occasion) and won twenty-six fights.”

He says the Raton community loved boxing in those days and supported the gym and the Raton Boxing Club. “All the ex-fighters in Raton were involved,” he says. “I still respect all those men.”

Today Salazar is 53 and works two jobs, making it impossible for him to keep the gym open full-time. He hopes to secure support from interested community members and groups to revitalize the sport here.

“Everything about it is for the kids – I’d hate to see it go to waste,” says Salazar, whose sons, Tim,  33, and Nick Jr., 19, have won numerous boxing titles including several Golden Gloves championships.

Nick Jr. is currently training at the gym for an upcoming Golden Gloves tournament. He’s one of the many young fighters his father has brought up.

Self-discipline, Nick Jr. says, which is learned across all the elements of training, “helps you control your attitudes. It’s how you control everything. Being in the ring keeps you out of trouble.”

Can boxing be big again?
Salazar believes a lot of young people would embrace a full-time boxing program at his gym. Now it’s just a matter of finding people who want to help run it. In the interim, he opens the doors as often as he can.

“A few years ago, when I was open full-time,” he says, “I would get forty to fifty kids a day in there. I was even babysitting some kids.”

It’s easy to tell from talking with Salazar and from knowing his past that he has a soft spot for Raton’s youth. In addition to boxing, at various times he’s coached T-ball, Little League, flag football and soccer. He lets the local S.O.Y. program use the gym during down times to work with at-risk youth.

“I always thought that keeping the kids involved with sports would help keep them out of trouble,” he says. “I figured if you just help one or two, you’ve accomplished something. The majority of the kids (who stay with sports) turn out real good.”

Commenting on the potential of building a strong club at the gym, Orlando Martinez agrees that it will require community support.

“Nick needs help,” Martinez says. “Anybody who gets a club going is going to need help. This is for the kids. It’s not for you or me. It’s to try to keep them off the streets and out of trouble. Right now, there’s nothing for the kids to do.”

Both Martinez and Salazar want to see a program that’s available all year long. Boxing, says Martinez, teaches kids lessons they may not learn anywhere else.

“They learn to be gentlemen – in and out of the ring,” he says. “To me, it’s one of the greatest things you can do.”

END

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