Country Club Back in the Ring

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

It feels so familiar. Just like the 1980s, when Nunn put this place 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 light-heavyweight title here last Friday. Former lightweight champion Rafael Ruelas faces Javier Valadez in a featured bout on Thursday. 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. “You got to talk not only about boxing but about what went on in people’s lives.”

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.

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The building was never much to look at, brick and boxy and windowless, perched along a run-down stretch of Sherman Way. That has always been part of its charm. In a metropolis dominated by trendy clubs and arenas, the Country Club felt like a neighborhood joint.

It used to be a discount drugstore. 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.

Not long after, Landis leased the stage to Jim Rissmiller of Wolf & Rissmiller Concerts. Over the next two years, the Country Club became an essential venue at a critical period in Los Angeles’ musical history. Local bands such as Tom Petty and X played there. So did Jerry Garcia and U2.

But trouble brewed almost from the start. Neighbors complained of rowdy patrons littering, urinating and having sex in their front yards. The club’s reputation was further tarnished when a businessman was convicted of soliciting a rival’s murder in the parking lot.

Rissmiller was subsequently evicted and the club slipped from the city’s elite. A new manager, Scott Hurowitz, tried renting the stage for film and video shoots. After the 1987 MTV Awards show at the Universal Amphitheatre, the artist formerly known as Prince hosted a private party at the Country Club.

Recalled Hurowitz: “From the time I looked outside and saw how many people were lined up trying to get in that night--and I saw Whoopie Goldberg, Bette Midler, the Cars, you name it--I knew there was cause for hope.”

He was wrong. 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.

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“When we first started, there was no boxing in the suburbs,” said Peter Broudy, a longtime Southern California boxing promoter who cut his teeth at the Country Club. “When we started, there were 40 or 50 people there. We were laughed at, ridiculed.”

In those days, boxing was a way to fill empty nights in the music schedule. 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. Jimmy Lennon served as announcer, the flamboyant Irish tenor trilling Spanish surnames. 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. “That’s what gets people excited,” Garcia said. “You need to have rising stars, young guys from the area.”

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 recalled. “The rugs started getting holes in them.”

Broudy took his shows to the Warner Center Marriott. By the fall of 1993, there were no more regular fights at the Country Club. The city had pulled its liquor license--a reaction to continuing neighborhood complaints--so there was not much of anything else in the darkened hall.

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Last September, Broudy started getting telephone calls from Mehdi Zamani, another new manager at the club. “He left a number of messages but, to be honest, I didn’t return any of them,” Broudy said. “Finally, he got me on the line and said, ‘Please don’t hang up. I’m not like the old owners.’ ”

Broudy agreed to give the place a look, if only because he had an afternoon appointment in the West Valley. 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 ringside.

“A lot of people were surprised that my brother is fighting here,” he said of the bout scheduled for Thursday night. “They think we’re too big for this small place. But this is what made us.”

He hooted and hollered along with the rest of the crowd as Nunn scored a second-round knockout of Rudy Nix. Afterward, Nunn said: “Being back in this room tonight brought back a lot of memories for me. I’m glad I was able to come back here and put on a show.”

And 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.”

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What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been In the 17 years since it opened, the Country Club in Reseda has experienced its share of ups and downs.

1980: Chuck Landis buys drugstore and converts it into a country bar. Merle Haggard plays opening night.

1981-82: Wolf & Rissmiller Concerts leases stage for rock shows. Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, U2 and Tina Turner are among the top acts to perform.

1983: The club adds fight nights. Early cards feature Frankie Duarte, Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and a young Michael Nunn.

1987: The artist then known as Prince rents the hall for a private party. MTV films its New Year’s Eve special there.

1988: After years of neighborhood complaints, the Los Angeles City Council revokes the club’s liquor license. Gabriel and Rafael Ruelas make their professional debuts in the ring.

1991: New management attempts a revival, canceling heavy-metal bands and booking a Christian rock group for Halloween. Former NFL star Mark Gastineau is jeered in a heavyweight fight.

1993: Oscar Lopez wins by unanimous decision over Mauro Gutierrez in a lightweight bout on July 22. A decade of fight nights comes to an end.

1996: Boxing returns to the Country Club as heavyweight Lionel Butler, ranked sixth by the World Boxing Federation, knocks out Bomani Parker on Nov. 22.