ALTADENA — The first fights of the Golden Gloves boxing tournament were getting underway in the Loma Alta Park gym. Down the hallway, in an empty room, coach Fausto De La Torre sat in a folding chair facing Roger Gomez-Peralta, one of his amateur boxers at Villa Parke Boxing in Pasadena.
Away from the bustling gym, it was a quiet Thursday night as De La Torre began to wrap Gomez-Peralta’s hands in pristine white gauze.
“I try to calm his nerves,” De La Torre said. “I want him to go away from preparing for a fight for just 15, 20 minutes.”
It’s a peaceful moment that almost didn’t come to be. When Gomez-Peralta, now 18, was a kindergartner, he was diagnosed with encephalitis, a rare neurological disorder that causes inflammation in the brain.
One morning Gomez-Peralta woke up and told his parents he couldn’t get out of bed. His mom, Maria, gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking he was trying to get out of going to school, and let him stay home.
When it became clear he had lost the ability to walk, they took him to the hospital, where staff recommended immediately that he go to Children’s Hospital.
“We started to panic,” Rogelio Gomez, Gomez-Peralta’s father, said. “They didn’t tell us anything and that we needed to take an ambulance. We thought it was something simple.”
Doctors told the family that no medications were available and that the last encephalitis patient they saw took more than 20 years to recover. Gomez-Peralta was hospitalized for a month, and although he remembers little from this time, his parents recall him being morose.
“He was letting go of himself,” his mother, Maria Gomez, said. “At one point the doctors told us he’s letting himself die.”
After nearly a year of physical therapy, Gomez-Peralta began to make progress. Through the therapy and encouragement from his family, he slowly regained mobility. He spent most of first grade in a wheelchair and with an aide who helped him with everyday functions.
He also started to go to therapy at school to deal with the emotional trauma that resulted from the encephalitis, but he at least had some semblance of a normal kid’s life.
“I remember telling the doctor that I could walk,” Gomez-Peralta said. “Saying, ‘I’m good,’ and showing them, but I would just stumble to the floor after a few steps.”
Until one day when he really could walk. He went to school as usual in the wheelchair, then stood up and walked to his aide. She embraced him immediately, one of Gomez-Peralta’s clearest memories of his time with the disease.
He overcame the physical disability, but he became angry. He didn’t want to eat or go to school and argued with his mom constantly. Maria was bothered by it, especially since she gave up seeing her newborn daughter for almost a year to stay by her son’s side.
She stuck to her tough-love ways, however, which is part of the reason why Gomez-Peralta started boxing. He was already playing other sports, but Maria wanted him to have self-defense knowledge as he entered high school.
“It just grew into being a passion of mine,” Gomez-Peralta said. “A lifestyle that I couldn’t live without. When COVID hit and we were stuck indoors, I just had that itch to get in the ring.”
De La Torre had no knowledge of the encephalitis when he began coaching Gomez-Peralta. He found out during a pre-tournament meal when the topic came up in casual conversation. Had he known, the coach said, he would have encouraged him to continue pursuing soccer.
“Obviously if there were any issues, his parents would pull him from (boxing),” De La Torre said. “But he just gravitated so much to boxing and he dedicated so much to boxing that they don’t want to take that away from him.”
Even while going to college at San Diego State and working an on-campus job in concessions, Gomez-Peralta still makes time for boxing.
He’s majoring in business marketing and also plans to get his real estate license. The week ahead of Golden Gloves was particularly challenging because of midterms and a weight cut – the latter made especially torturous because of his job in concessions.
His parents drive him to and from college on the weekends so that he can train with De La Torre in Pasadena. Maria prepares meals and juices for him to help ease the weight-loss process.
“My mom would always tell me, you were able to get up out of that wheelchair and stand on your own and prove the doctors wrong,” Gomez-Peralta said. “And that’s kind of where my mentality goes to.”
The days of encephalitis seemed very far away on Thursday as Gomez-Peralta slipped punches and countered on his way to a late-night victory on the first night of the Golden Gloves tournament. He was a “colorful” boxer, as De La Torre terms it.
It was his first fight in nearly three years, and he won it with his extended family’s chants of “Roger” filling the gym and welcoming him as he exited the ring.
“The doctors told us he’s not going to be a normal kid,” Rogelio said. “And you know what? The doctor was right. He’s not a normal kid because he played soccer, he played football, he does boxing, he was in AP classes in high school. Look at him now. We’re still in shock.”
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