Kicking Back With Lilly

As a girl, Lilly Rodriguez tried to please her mother. But mom--or Crazy Linda, as Lilly’s mother was known professionally--wasn’t pushing ballet lessons. She wanted her daughter to wrestle, as Crazy Linda did.

Then there was her father, an amateur boxer who taught Lilly to box when she was 6. She earned her black belt in karate at 17. Which led her to kick boxing.

We are standing, several decades later, in her family’s North Hollywood gym. On the wall is a picture of a fearsome-looking Benny “the Jet” Urquidez-- world-champion kick-boxing legend and Lilly’s little brother--nailing an opponent in the gut with a spinning back kick.

“His signature move,” Lilly beams.

At 51, Lilly looks more like a hard-boiled softball coach than a woman who might floor me with a front ball kick. She has deep-set brown eyes framed by a thick coat of eyeliner and a mass of dark hair streaked with highlights. She grew up in the gyms and karate dojos of the San Fernando Valley, sparring with her five brothers and, later when she turned professional, boxing girls with names like Lady Tiger.

“I was never a girl,” she says. “I was a tomboy all the way.”

Well, I was a tomboy too, but I stuck to climbing trees and playing the trumpet.

Everything I knew about kick boxing--basically, that you taped up your wrists and pummeled punching bags--came from that lovelorn John Cusack movie “Say Anything.”

Turns out Benny trained Cusack.

Still, I was up for it. I’d joined a gym recently, one of those yuppified clubs crammed with sweaty lawyers pumping away on StairMasters. It was all so artificial; no wonder I never went.

The sheer grit of kick boxing, the street-smart fists, the thud of a well-placed kick in the stomach--that’s more like it. It’s a sport that commands respect, even from people who aren’t sure exactly what it is.

“Yeah,” I imagined myself saying casually, boxing gloves slung over my buff shoulder. “Just got back from my kick-boxing lesson.”

Meanwhile, Lilly Rodriguez, who won state boxing and world kick-boxing championships in the 1970s, whose students greet her with a respectful bow, who truly has buff shoulders, doesn’t even want to talk about her martial prowess.

She’d rather tell me about the “day of peace” that she and her husband, William “Blinky” Rodriguez, are helping to organize. Blinky is one of the architects of the Valley peace treaty, the 1993 truce among 75 gangs.

“We push on peace a lot,” Lilly said. “This is a thing we have to grab. Peace. That’s where my heart’s at.”

My heart, at the moment, is surging with adrenaline. Here come my kick-boxing comrades, a muscular crew carting their duffel bags into the Jet’s Gym for their Monday night lesson. For all I know, these people have been karate-chopping since they could walk. Lilly motions me to put down my notebook, and I feel a sudden pang of fear.

The lesson begins with startling vigor.

“I don’t want no talking!” Lilly barks. Her assistant instructor, a stocky young guy with a goatee, shouts that we should be set to fight with our wrists already taped. My wrists are embarrassingly naked.

First comes a round of stretches. The young guy demonstrates, neatly folding his body in half so that his goatee brushes his left shin. I bend down as far as I can, my chin hovering somewhere over my thigh. He orders us to touch the ground with our palms. I manage to clasp my shins and hope he doesn’t notice. Lilly marches up behind me and pushes on my back to force me closer to the mat.

With a growing sense of alarm, I remember her description of how kick boxing evolved in the early ‘70s. The sport, once dubbed “full-contact” karate, offered an outlet for fighters like Lilly and her brothers whose brand of combat was deemed too aggressive for traditional karate tournaments.

“We were hitting a bit too hard,” she said. “They were always disqualifying us.”

When the time comes to spar, I try to sneak off with a cluster of first-timers to learn kick-boxing basics. But Lilly steers me into another class, where I soon find myself face to face with an immense man roughly twice my weight. I say hello. He is wearing a plastic mouth guard, which seems to preclude speech, and does not respond.

I pull on a battered pair of old gloves that smell like decomposing leather soaked with ancient sweat--perhaps a relic of Benny the Jet’s childhood bouts. The young guy with the goatee calls out a few commands, and the next thing I know the big lug across from me starts swinging.

He almost hits me in the face, but I duck just in time.

The hulk keeps jabbing at me but I bob and weave my way around his blows. It becomes evident that he’s not really trying to hit me. The goatee guy reminds me to keep my fists up to guard my head. I obediently raise my hands, but then I catch a good whiff of the gloves.

I lower my fists, just to catch my breath, and get whacked in the chin.

The hulk apologizes, I think. It’s hard to tell with that mouth guard. Maybe he’s laughing.

Next it’s my turn.

Jab, right cross, left hook, front side kick, ball kick.

We’re supposed to be merely practicing each move, polishing the arc of each swing, but I try to clobber my partner anyway. Sting like a bee, baby.

The furious burst of movement saps what energy I have left, so I try to fake the crunch sit-ups and knuckle push-ups that conclude the evening workout. After about 500, we’re free to go.

Lilly catches up with me after class. “Hey, how’d it go?” she asks, smiling encouragingly. She has a beautiful smile.

“It was hard,” I say. She gazes at me, sizing up my rumpled sweatpants and quivering arms with the practiced eye that comes with a half-century of fighting.

“Come back on Wednesday,” she says finally. Then she gives me a hug.

As I drive home, the indignities of my untaped wrists and untutored blows begin to fade. Confidence, even cockiness, returns. As I open the door to my house, my partner calls out, “Is that you?”

I saunter inside, despite my aching legs.

“Yeah,” I say casually. “Just got back from my kick-boxing lesson.”