THE GLOVED ONE : George Latka’s Golden Years as Pugilist and Proprietor

On the outside there’s only a sign and a few coats of paint to distinguish Latka’s Golden Glove Tavern from the biker bar once housed at 5061 Warner Ave. The inside is far cheerier, though a fern would still likely die a fast death here. And according to George Latka, who owns the tavern with his wife, Trudie, “You’ll hear some of the roughest talk in the world here, but it’s just a big happy gang.”

Orange County country musician Chris Gaffney, who has seen the inside of a few bars, says, “I like bars where the people are nice, and Latka’s is it .” According to Gaffney and other customers, that niceness emanates from its owners.

It’s a handy thing that George Latka is a likable guy, because one look at the tavern walls makes it clear he could be trouble if he weren’t: There are numerous tobacco-yellowed photos of a gloved Latka in the ring, in the midst of a pugilistic career that in 55 pro fights yielded only six losses. He was dubbed the Boxing Professor, both because he was the first pro fighter to earn a college degree (UCLA in ‘44) and for the boxing lessons he would administer in the ring to his more muscled opponents. Though he hung up his gloves nearly 50 years ago, this 76-year-old still moves with a wiry assurance.

And in most of those years, the World Boxing Hall of Fame inductee has kept his hand in the sport in one way or another. He has managed and trained fighters, and thousands of Southland boxing fans know him from his years as a referee and judge. Along with being a fixture of fight telecasts from L.A.’s Olympic Auditorium, he officiated 35 world championship bouts. He also turns up in movies, TV and commercials. There aren’t many who can claim a big-screen career that includes both “Matilda (The Boxing Kangaroo)” and several critics’ choice for the best film of the past decade, Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull.”

Latka has a modest explanation for why he’s the one who gets the calls for such jobs: “I’m so damned old now that all my contemporaries are dead. So people only come to me because there’s hardly anyone else left who knows what it was like back then.”

His tavern is practically a photographic museum of boxing, with photos of fighters both legendary and obscure, and he has boxes more of them that he plans on sorting through one of these days. More voluminous still are Latka’s memories. He rarely talks about himself unless asked, but many come to the bar simply for that reason. And even for those who know not a whit about boxing, to hear Latka expound on his life and times is an unforgettable experience.

Taking some time off from behind the bar recently, he explained how he started in fighting: “All of us guys say, ‘We lived in a tough neighborhood.’ Well, you’ve gotta remember that all those years ago nearly every neighborhood was fairly tough.” Latka’s certainly qualified, since he grew up in the shadow of a steel mill in Pueblo, Colo., where his Slovak Gypsy father worked. “You’ve heard the story about the company store by Tennessee Ernie Ford (“16 Tons”). Well, we lived that damn song. My folks owed everything to the company store.”

With his small build, Latka was an easy target, and he estimates that he had nearly a hundred fistfights in his youth, which compelled him to get pretty good with his fists. “By the time I was in high school, no one messed with me. Big guys loved me because I was a scrapper.”

It wasn’t all bloody noses. “In retrospect I had the greatest childhood in the world, but I didn’t know that until I came to the cities. But until I was 15 I grew up in Pueblo, and we didn’t have paved streets. It was just plain old mud out there,” Latka recalled, saying he and his friends would engage in cost-free street games with names like pump-pump-pullaway and hide-the-switch, the object of the latter being “the one that finds the switch gets to whack the hell out of everybody.” Other days he’d head to a nearby lake and shoot frogs with a homemade slingshot. “I’d start the day off with a pocket full of rocks, and as it emptied, I’d fill the other pocket with frog legs.” “And I thought I had a horrible lifetime,” he continued, “mainly because at Christmas I’d never get anything but candy and maybe fruit, a big apple or something. So I’d feel sorry for myself because of those rich kids on the other side of town. They weren’t really rich, but they were well-off. Kids think people are rich because they got a sled, they got a wagon, they got a bicycle. So I stole a sled. I stole a bike.”

When he was 15 he moved to Gary, Ind., which he described as “another tough place. I got baptized real quick in Gary. About the third week I was there, bam! I got hit over the head with a two-by-four.”

It was there that Latka began boxing. A coach made him and another boy take a schoolyard fight into the gym, where, once gloved, Latka recalls, “I slaughtered the guy.” He was encouraged to enter the Golden Gloves and his career took off.

That schoolyard tussle marked the last fight he ever had outside the ring. “That was almost 60 years ago, and since then I’ve either talked my way out of them or I block my way out. I’ve had some very close things in the bar, most when we came in 15 years ago after it being a biker bar. But you know how to conserve energy when you’re a professional boxer. That’s why I’m still not afraid in the bar, ever. I’m not going to throw a punch at a guy. He’s going to throw 10, 15 or 20 at me before I do anything. And he’s going to get tired.

“Though I know I shouldn’t be that way with some young, strong guy, if you push me around or insult my wife, sometimes that little boy comes out in me again, though it’s mellowed now by the fact that I’m smart enough to know that you don’t have to fight to be a tough guy. So I’ve talked guys out of potential fights here, by saying, ‘Hey, any guy can fight. It takes a man to walk away.’ ”

After winning nearly 20 amateur championships--amid 159 bouts with only eight losses--Latka moved to California in 1936 and turned pro. He was rated among the top 10 lightweights in the world for three years, and California sportswriters were practically unanimous in pegging him as a sure world lightweight champion.

Nearly all accounts praised his “scientific” approach to boxing, of which Latka says, “I wasn’t that devastating of a puncher, so early on I recognized that I’ve gotta live by my wits. And I think I was just born with quickness. There’s a lot of difference between being quick and fast. You might be a fast runner but maybe you don’t think that quick and maybe your hands aren’t that quick.”

The fights he remembers most are the times he faced off against former featherweight champ Baby Arizmendi and Georgie Crouch, known as the “Black Icecube.” Crouch particularly was known as a punishing boxer, and Latka’s clear victories, he said, “gave me more confidence than anything else. Up until then I was just hoping I did the best I could and didn’t get hurt.

“Because I really didn’t want to get hurt. I dreaded looking like a fighter. Then, I had a priest friend and I used to tell him how I dreaded that, that I’d give up when I saw my nose begin to grow and my eyes begin to hang over from scars. He’d say, ‘George, you don’t know how lucky you are. I’d give anything to look like a fighter. Your face has character . People respect you for it.’ So from then on I never watched my face. I was getting character. Ha!”

Latka’s fighting career came to an abrupt end, never allowing him a shot at the world championship. In 1940 his boxing contract had been bought by tough-guy actor George Raft and a managing partner. In 1942 he that found the partner wasn’t paying Raft his due, and Latka refused to fight until the situation was resolved. “I didn’t think I was going to quit, I just thought it was going to put some pressure on them. Then three months, five months go by that I’m not making any money and I’m married with a kid, paying bills. I had to make a decision.” In his last two fights Latka battled former featherweight champs Petey Scalzo and Richie Lemos, and won both. “So I beat Richie Lemos in my last fight, and the next week I went to work for Douglas (Aircraft Co.) at 60 cents an hour.” While waiting for the business situation to be resolved, Latka said, he eventually lost the desire to fight. By the time it caught hold of him again, he was working as a teacher, and the school principal said he’d fire him if he boxed.

In the years following, Latka held down two careers, putting in 30 years with Douglas (later McDonnell-Douglas) and refereeing and judging for 28 years. Among the champions he officiated over in that time were Muhammad Ali, Davey Moore, Ken Norton, Floyd Patterson, Sugar Ray Robinson and Roberto Duran.

He met Trudie while working at Douglas 18 years ago, after his first wife of 31 years died.

“We had four dates and we got married,” he said. “And I must say, we’re so damn happy we’re like kids. We laugh all day, if that’s possible, and we’re with each other 24 hours a day. In fact, we’re so happy we’re scared. You won’t know that feeling we’ve got until you’re old and you know your days are marked, that at 75 years you’ve defied the odds already.”

Latka was laid off from Douglas during the last recession, and he and Trudie decided to open the Golden Glove Tavern, a move he describes as “both the luckiest thing and the dumbest thing I ever did. I’d saved up Douglas stock, which at one time my stock was worth about $125,000. In the year I was laid off the stock went down so far I only got $15,000 out of it to open this place. It was tough going here for a couple of years, but since then it’s been really good for us.”

He said his reputation played a large part in the success of the tavern. “I’ve been very lucky. I never dreamed that as I got older I’d have a lasting fame. There’ve been a lot of good fighters where people don’t know who the hell they are anymore. But I’ve been involved in so many things, the movies, TV and all, that people still notice me.”

Latka’s first brush with mass media came in 1940 when he took part in the world’s first televised fight (against Jimmy Garrison). The film appearances began in 1948 with the Richard Widmark film “The Street With No Name.” His most notable big-screen job was 1980’s “Raging Bull,” in which he played the referee for the Jake LaMotta/Marcel Cerdan world title fight. Latka was the only ref in the film with a speaking part, though he would have preferred not to have one.

“Mostly I just did my job. I didn’t mess with Robert De Niro, because they said he didn’t like to talk to anybody. And I didn’t want to interfere with the director, but I thought it was bull and put my two cents in when they had me stop the fight with Cerdan. They’d just had me referee and do whatever I wanted up to that point, but then Scorsese said, ‘Now I want you to go over there, call this guy ‘commissioner’ and say you’re going to stop the fight.’

And I said, ‘Martin, I’ll do anything you want me to do, but if I’m a referee I’m not going to go tell any commissioner I’m going to stop the fight. I’m just going to stop the fight, period. That’s not authentic.’ We didn’t argue or anything, he said, ‘Just call the commissioner,’ and so I did.”

The most fun he had on camera, he said, was shooting an episode of the late, lamented CBS series “Frank’s Place,” chiefly because they just let him be himself. Doing the show, which involved him officiating a fight between two rival chefs played by Tex Cobb and Larry Holmes, also proved fairly dangerous.

“In boxing for 10 years in over 200 fights (amateur and pro) and in refereeing for 30 years I was never knocked out, and was only knocked down once, when my knee hit the mat. But when they were filming this fight I was down (several) times. First, they left the microphone in the ring and I tripped when I threw it out. I got back up and those guys were slamming away and it really looked authentic. I walked over there and Tex stepped on my foot, and, damn, it just about killed me, and I fell.”

He just recently shot a Budweiser commercial. Along with giving Latka a supplemental income, such exposure brings more people into the tavern. “I’d go on for nothing, but I’m not going to tell them that,” he said with a laugh. “Whenever I do one of those things, all the people come down here to say they saw me on the tube.”

From initially working six-day weeks in the tavern, he and Trudie have now cut back to one day, though he’ll usually wander in several days a week. “I love it here. You watch ‘Cheers,’ and these guys are just like that. We get a hell of a mixture, company vice presidents, directors, construction people. To me, it’s like home.”

Latka’s Golden Glove Tavern, 5061 Warner Ave., Huntington Beach. Open daily, 11 to 2 a.m. (714) 846-9708.