A Fight for Life : Boxer Eddie Solis Has Come a Long Way

At the age of 18, Eddie Solis had it all.

Unfortunately, most of it didn’t belong to him.

Oh, some of the stuff was his.

But in another stroke of misfortune, that stuff happened to be cocaine.

And so, at an age when many young men are thinking of their senior prom, Solis found himself convicted of burglary and drug possession and shortly thereafter locked tightly inside a chilling place called Soledad State Prison, staring--albeit carefully--at wave upon wave of angry, maniacal-looking men who spent most of their waking hours pondering things like how many times they could slam another man’s head against the concrete floor before a guard stopped them.

“It scared the hell out of me,” Solis said. “I had reached the very bottom.”

Three weeks ago, his body now free of the cocaine and alcohol that ran wild through his veins for so many years, Solis finally broke free of his hell.

He had fallen far on that day in 1984 when the cold, gray steel bars slammed behind him at Soledad. But now, his taped hands clutching a giant trophy, he saw his 6-year-old daughter just outside the boxing ring and made his way toward her. “Daddy, you did it with your heart,” the little girl said, her small arms wrapped tightly around the trophy.

And Eddie Solis, ex-drug addict, alcoholic, ex-convict and ex-gang-banger, looked into the child’s eyes and began to cry.

That’s when he knew that he had come all the way back.

“I had learned that the trick is being honest with yourself,” said Solis, 26, of Burbank, who captured the Southern California district championships of the American Boxing Federation.

“I learned that when you’re out there doing crime and gang-banging and all your homeboys are telling you not to worry, that they’ll send you magazines and money and anything you need in prison . . . they won’t. They’ll be nowhere to be found. But there will be people back at your home praying for you, people who love you so much. I learned that those are the people you hurt the most.

“And I also learned that real men have feelings and real men don’t run from their problems, they face them. And real men cry.”

Solis’ victory in the middleweight division of the ABF district tournament at Lincoln Park in Los Angeles came with a championship-round victory against Samuel Bartolli of Azusa, who had beaten Solis in the final of the district Golden Gloves tournament in 1992. Last weekend, Solis lost in the final of the ABF regional in Las Vegas to Damon Williams, a Marine from Camp Pendleton.

But the victory in the district tournament, including the victory against Bartolli, brought Solis an emotional high he said he had not experienced. Thus lifted, he will fight in April in the Golden Gloves and then, he said, will embark on a pro boxing career.

“I don’t know how far I can go,” he said. “But I have talent for boxing and I have the determination. And, really, I probably wasn’t supposed to even make it this far.”

Solis headed down the wrong road at an early age. By the time he was 13 he was living in a world of drugs and alcohol, shuffling his baggy-pants self into the early morning hours as a member of the San Fernando Locos, a gang that included among its members a giant of a man named Alex Garcia, who is now a highly ranked heavyweight boxer.

“Did I know Alex Garcia? Yeah, I knew Alex Garcia,” Solis said. “We were in Soledad together.”

Garcia served five years at the prison for manslaughter in a gang-related killing.

Solis served slightly more than three years there.

“Soledad was fear, just plain fear,” Solis said. “All the tattoos and the big, long mustaches and the hard looks and the displays of manhood. I had great fear. I thought there were gangs on the outside. It was nothing like what goes on in the inside.”

There, Solis said, the Latinos were divided into the North and South gangs, the farmers and the sewer rats, as Solis referred to the two sides. And the Bloods and Crips and the Mexican Mafia, all competing for a little turf and most willing to kill over almost anything.

“I saw a lot of people die,” Solis said. “They showed somebody a little disrespect, or stepped on the wrong guy’s shoe, or some meaningless thing like that. Everybody had a piece of steel hidden away. I mean everybody. I came very close to not getting out of there. Very close.”

He made a knife in the prison metal shop and carried it wherever he went.

“You had to have one,” Solis said, “because everybody else did. When trouble started, it was time to reach for your steel and get the job done.”

The method for smuggling a blade out of the metal shop was simple, Solis said. To get past the guards and the metal detectors, inmates hid the blade in their shoe, stuck another piece of metal in their pocket and, when the alarm went off, pulled the metal scrap from their pocket and handed it over, satisfying the guard.

While doing these things, Solis often wondered how he had gotten himself into this situation.

Solis had boxed in makeshift rings in gyms around the Valley since the age of 15, finding the violent release a pleasant way to pass time. But with a head full of alcohol and cocaine, he never impressed anyone. At Soledad he became a bit more serious about the sport, working out almost daily and fighting bouts within the walls. He claims to have won the unofficial middleweight championship of the prison in 1986.

He continued boxing after his release late in 1987, but he continued about everything else, too. In 1990 he was arrested again for possession of cocaine and sent to Folsom State Prison, where he spent most of that year. It was during his second incarceration, he said, that he realized where it all was heading.

“I would have been dead,” Solis said.

So, on his release, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and began cutting his gang ties. He has been clean, he said, for two years. And as his body began recovering from the horrible beatings he had inflicted on it with cocaine and alcohol, he discovered something: He could fight the third round of his amateur bouts.

“Until I got clean and sober, it was two rounds and out for me,” Solis said. “I just didn’t have the stamina to fight the third round. Guys knew that if they survived the first two rounds with me, the fight was theirs.

“Now, I could box all day. I never get tired.”

Gary Ballin of San Fernando, who began training Solis when he was a teen-ager, has seen the change.

“To be honest, I never knew how severe a problem Eddie had,” Ballin said. “I noticed that he got tired easily and I guess I knew he dabbled in drugs, but (I) never knew he had such a problem. He hid it pretty well. Now, he can work continuously in the gym. He can run until I get tired, just from watching.

“You know, Eddie is such a good kid. He had a rough beginning to his life . . . his parents got divorced and all that . . . and he got into drugs, and that stuff can make a prisoner out of you in a hurry. But that’s all over now. Eddie has a good heart and a great wife and daughter. He’s turned his life around.

“I’m so proud of him.”

Solis works for Glenair, Inc., in Glendale, a company that manufactures aircraft parts. His boss, Dennis Comfort, said he was never apprehensive about giving Solis a chance.

“He was very candid with us about his background, but from the first time we talked (he) seemed to have risen above all that,” Comfort said.

In boxing and in other areas of his life, Solis said, he’s working hard to make up for the years he threw away in a concrete room.

“I spent my life running from reality,” he said. “Those days are over. I’ve got a lot to do now.”

And then, from across the kitchen table, the gaze of a 6-year-old girl fell upon him, and a man who has known unspeakable hardship in his young life smiled.

“She calls me Lionheart,” he said, softly.