Larry Goossen, the man credited for sparking the rise of a boxing institution, is battling through congestive heart failure while surrounded by the sport’s famed family at a San Fernando Valley (California) hospital.
Goossen, who counts late brother and Hall of Fame promoter, Dan, brother and Hall of Fame trainer, Joe, and TGB Promotions head/brother-in-law Tom Brown as kin, made the abundant contribution of establishing the Southern California mountain community of Big Bear as a destination for a multitude of world champions’ training camps.
“Larry’s the first one to come up and set up a training camp that I worked at, and Oscar [De La Hoya] followed,” veteran trainer Abel Sanchez said. “If he hadn’t come up here, none of us would have.
“It built an invincibility. When you train in the mountains, you know training off the mountain isn’t enough. I carry that confidence into every fight with my guys: The other guy can’t do what we can. They run out of gas.”
Sanchez, serving as an assistant trainer, and De La Hoya witnessed those benefits again first-hand.
It came this past Saturday night when their fighter, former 140lbs title challenger Arnold Barboza, made his welterweight debut off a Big Bear camp and “looked the best he ever has” in defeating Kenneth Sims Jnr in a DAZN main event in Anaheim, California.
In 1990, trainer and former matchmaker Larry Goossen was contacted by a wealthy, 51-year-old builder, Steve Wickliff, about attempting to reach supreme shape and attempt a professional boxing match.
Setting up shop in a secluded hangar at the tiny Big Bear airport, Goossen soon spread the word of the cardiovascular effects of high-altitude training, the leg-strengthening of torturous mountain running and the solitude of the area, as others followed him.
In a 1992 Los Angeles Times story, the late Earl Gustkey wrote that Goossen, providing inexpensive rent to other trainers, had been joined at the hangar by his middleweight Reggie Johnson, brother Joe’s lightweight champion Rafael Ruelas training for Jorge Paez, junior-lightweight Gabriel Ruelas training for Azumah Nelson and De La Hoya preparing for his pro debut after winning Olympic gold in Barcelona.
Las Vegas trainer Kenny Adams came over with future heavyweight champion Michael Moorer, Jimmy Ellis and U.S. Olympian Kennedy McKinney.
Another fighter of note, Greg Haugen, came up to prepare for his record-audience fight in Mexico City versus Julio Cesar Chavez Snr.
The late Hall of Fame promoter Don Chargin predicted to Gustkey that Big Bear (at 6,752 feet of elevation, accessible by a winding two-lane road subject to perilous weather) would evolve into a powerful location for the sport, as the seclusion, altitude and maximum conditioning potential of the location made it a boxer’s haven.
Larry Goossen trained former three-division world champion Johnny Tapia for several world title fights in the mountains.
“It’s the solitude of Big Bear … and the fact that the people here leave you to train. The people of Big Bear aren’t star struck. They know what you’re doing and leave you alone,” Sanchez said. “Larry had a great idea.”
That solitude allowed Sanchez’s new Hall of Fame inductee Gennadiy Golovkin to arrive with only a few belongings from his native Kazakhstan. The Olympic silver medalist dedicated himself to training in Sanchez’s gym while honing his English and modeling himself after Chavez Snr while watching videotapes of the Mexican legend’s bouts in a basement at night.
Golovkin embarked on a lengthy reign as middleweight champion and a 23-fight knockout streak.
No nightlife temptation. Just the isolation of training like hell for eight weeks or more, breathing in the clean, high air and sharpening the fight plan for the given foe.
“Oscar would just go to the movies at night – even if it was a bad movie,” said Top Rank’s Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler.
De La Hoya’s ability to act himself was seen when a local reporter asked him about a wildfire that had swept through the San Bernardino National Forest and interrupted training camp.
Pointing to then-trainer Gil Clancy, who walked with a limp and wore a toupee, De La Hoya made up a tale, saying the blaze had caught Clancy’s wooden prosthetic leg (which didn’t exist) afire while also scorching his hairpiece.
“That’s how you kill time up there in Big Bear,” Trampler said.
De La Hoya’s competitiveness was evident throughout.
While preparing for a Cinco de Mayo 1995 showdown at Caesars Palace for the unified lightweight title versus Rafael Ruelas, the pair crossed paths while running. Knowing the benefit of Big Bear training, De La Hoya confided to Tom Brown recently at the cross-promoted Ryan Garcia-Mario Barrios bout that he “was never more nervous for a fight.”
De La Hoya proceeded to land a knockout punch on Ruelas in the second round.
On another training run, De La Hoya saw 1996 U.S. Olympian and fellow Southern Californian Fernando Vargas slip and fall over the icy roads, smirking at the scene and laughing at Vargas.
Vargas came to Trampler and said he was willing to strike a truce rather than heighten a rivalry by sharing a meal with De La Hoya. Trampler broached the idea to De La Hoya, who said, “Let me shower and think about it.”
“Well?” Trampler asked De La Hoya after the shower.
“Fuck Fernando Vargas,” De La Hoya answered.
The pair would meet in the ring in 2002, a classic bout preceded by a festive and hostile weigh-in, punctuated by De La Hoya’s gripping 11th-round stoppage victory and then Vargas’ positive post-fight test for steroids.
In hyping that fight, De La Hoya promoter Bob Arum, veteran boxing writers Kevin Iole and Royce Feour and four others escaped death when the Cessna executive jet carrying them crash landed and burst into flames very near the hangar where Goossen brought boxing.
As smoke entered the cabin, Arum roared, “Open the fucking door!” and proceeded to entertain the assembled reporters not only with De La Hoya-Vargas talk, but an address on the value of life.
It turns out De La Hoya’s first defeat would be at the hands of a Big Bear-trained opponent, Hall of Famer “Sugar” Shane Mosley, who would later lose his first fight to Big Bear-trained Vernon Forrest and then again to De La Hoya-trained Canelo Alvarez.
Mosley opened his Big Bear gym to the 23-year-old Alvarez for workouts preceding Alvarez’s super-fight against Floyd Mayweather Jnr.
Down the road at Sanchez’s gym, Golovkin sparred both Alvarez and current WBC light-heavyweight champion David Benavidez.
Former 154lbs champion Jaime Munguia bought the gym from Sanchez, who opened another, cornering heavyweight Filip Hrgovic among others.
“It created a new outlook for training, that if you’re fighting at 2,500 feet elevation in Las Vegas, how much do the benefits of training for two months at nearly 7,000 feet in Big Bear carry you?” Trampler said. “The fact that so many have trained up there for so many years speaks to that.”
Brown said his brother-in-law Larry Goosen, 75, who’s been visited continually in recent days by his wife, Cindy, their two children and the large Goossen family, took deep pride in what he started.
“It wouldn’t be there if not for Larry Goossen,” said Brown. “There should be a statue for him. Can you imagine all the money he’s brought to the economy up there by what he did?”
Lance Pugmire is BoxingScene’s senior U.S. writer and an assistant producer for ProBox TV. Pugmire has covered boxing since the early 2000s, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The Athletic and USA Today. He won the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Nat Fleischer Award in 2022 for career excellence.
