Evasive Foes Spell Elusive Money Fights : Boxing: Middleweight Joey DeGrandis’ future hinges on his ability to beat opponents who dance. So far he has not had much luck.

Joey DeGrandis doesn’t dislike John McLain or Roland Williams, but as fighters he figures they probably made fine prom dates.

When DeGrandis, a two-time New England Golden Gloves champion, turned pro in 1990, people warned of the hard life that lay ahead. They cautioned that, at least for a while, there would be meager wages and scant glory.

They pointed out the endless hours of grueling, painful training that would be required and the tough guys he would encounter.

DeGrandis could handle all of that. A childhood in the turbulent D Street Projects of South Boston taught him all about toughness.

But no one ever told DeGrandis that there would be opponents who fought not like Michael Tyson but rather like Michael Jackson, that he would find himself in the ring with guys who seemed to have been trained not by Angelo Dundee but by Fred Astaire.

Guys like McLain and Williams.

Both men defeated DeGrandis (10-2), putting a pair of ugly stains on his record by dancing and moving and refusing to stand and fight, leaving DeGrandis thrashing at air most of the night and exposed for an occasional rat-a-tat-tat against the side of his head, most of them harmless punches but all of them piling up points with the judges.

DeGrandis has a name for boxers like them. It’s slang and it means the opposite of manly. The name will appear here the day Luciano Pavarotti sings backup harmony for Hammer.

“Joe doesn’t know yet how to deal with guys like that,” said Joe Goossen, DeGrandis’ trainer. “Those pop-and-move-and-dance guys really bother him. We’re working hard on beating that style, but he doesn’t have it yet.”

The frustrating part has been the occasional flash of brilliance that DeGrandis displays. Last August he stepped in against highly regarded Greg Dickson of Los Angeles, clearly the best fighter DeGrandis had been matched against, a quick and hard-hitting puncher who had a 22-2-1 record with 19 knockouts. One of the two losses was to Reggie Johnson, the International Boxing Federation’s top-ranked middleweight contender.

And DeGrandis demolished Dickson, staggering him several times en route to a lopsided decision.

One month later, against the dancing Williams, a club fighter with 12 losses and not much of a future in the sport, DeGrandis looked terrible.

DeGrandis found Goossen and the Van Nuys-based Ten Goose Boxing Club two years ago. With only his amateur credentials, he asked Joe to train him and asked brother Dan Goossen to be his manager. The club still was reeling from the defection of then-IBF middleweight champion Michael Nunn, had a vacancy and agreed to take DeGrandis aboard.

Despite the two losses, Joe Goossen is glad he made the decision.

“To tell you the truth, he was a lot better than I expected him to be,” the trainer said. “I had never heard of him. He had no credentials, no raving recommendations. He turned out to be a great kid. He really is. He’s got talent and he’s got a huge heart. There is no quit in Joey DeGrandis. He will fight anybody.”

Fight is the key word. DeGrandis, a pure slugger, might be champion of the world if boxers were required to wear ski boots in the ring. The bad news for DeGrandis is there is no such rule.

“Those dance-and-move guys, those cute guys, I can’t land anything solid,” DeGrandis said. “They make me hesitate and pull back. I just don’t have the experience to deal with it.”

It’s not as though the two guys who beat him were Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. McLain, who defeated DeGrandis in 1990 in a four-round bout in Las Vegas, had six losses and only nine wins entering that fight. And Williams, who outpointed DeGrandis over eight rounds at the Country Club in Reseda in September, had a record of 22-12 when he faced DeGrandis.

Both, however, were slick boxers. They consistently landed quick combinations and then danced away from the lunging counterpunches of DeGrandis.

At age 22, DeGrandis has time to learn how to cut off the ring on the dancers and slow them with body punches. He and Goossen work at it diligently in the gym. Transferring the gym work into a fight has not come easily, though.

“I can show him and I can train him to do it, but he has to do it during the fight,” Goossen said. “He has to break down that wall against guys who dance and move. Against the sluggers, Joey will beat 99 out of 100 of them. But to achieve great success in boxing you have to be able to beat all styles. He has to learn how to punch against the movers. Against the two guys who beat him, he’d plow in with his head, get to them and then stop punching. But he’ll learn.”

Dan Goossen has not been quite as patient with DeGrandis as has his brother.

“He just can’t afford to lose any more fights,” Goossen said. “I hear this reason and that reason, but the excuses have to stop. He has to beat everybody to make the jump to the big time. When he’s fearless, when he’s relentless with his punching, he is a helluva fighter. But when he stops that against the dancers and just bores in with his head, he just isn’t the same. The fight against Dickson, a legitimate contender, Joey looked great. He showed all of his ability. Then he looks horrible against a guy who isn’t anywhere near as good as Dickson.

“The bottom line is this: I’m not in the business of having local attractions who stay local attractions all their career. I’m in the business of making local attractions into national attractions.”

It is not DeGrandis’ intention, either, to spend a career being a local attraction. His monthly boxing purses of $1,000 or so don’t go very far. He has an apartment in Sherman Oaks and he gets some help from his family. He tried working weekends for a moving company to earn extra cash but found that moving furniture interrupted his training schedule.

“I knew when I turned pro nothing would come easy,” he said. “I’ve never had an easy fight in my life. And it has been real hard at first, financially, but I’ve managed to get by. And I know it’s going to get better from here.

“I see myself 10 or 12 fights from now making some decent money, working my way up and getting everybody to know about me. The key is to win ‘em all from now on. No more losses.

“Those two guys who beat me, they weren’t better fighters than I am. Not even close. But they performed on fight night, and I didn’t. They used their experience against me, and I couldn’t respond. But things will be different from now on.”

One of the great lures being dangled by Dan Goossen is a chance for DeGrandis to return to Boston for a fight before his family and legions of New England followers. A deal has been signed, according to Goossen, to match DeGrandis against world middleweight contender Brett Lally on March 17 in Boston. A $10,000 paycheck for DeGrandis accompanies the deal, 10 times more than he has earned in any other bout.

But first, an obstacle.

On Saturday night at the Country Club, DeGrandis will face John Armijo of Irvine, another promising middleweight, who has a record of 11-2-1 with five knockouts. DeGrandis must win to get the shot at Lally in Boston.

The scouting report for Saturday night’s fight: Armijo is a slugger. Not a dancer.

“You can’t imagine what a big deal fighting in Boston would be for me,” DeGrandis said. “Beating this guy at the Country Club is all that stands in my way. I won’t lose. I won’t say much else about that fight. But I won’t lose. Fighting back home would be the biggest thing that ever happened to me.

“I sparred with Brett Lally a few times. He’s strong. But I’m stronger. And he likes to bang. He’ll stand and fight.

“I like those guys.”