Alex Garcia Might Have Gotten There Ahead of Andy Ruiz Jr.

Published

5 years ago

August 3, 2019

Alex Garcia Might Have Gotten There Ahead of Andy Ruiz Jr.

Making history by getting there first is something that can never be taken away from Andy Ruiz Jr., who became the first Mexican or Mexican-American heavyweight champion when he shocked IBF/WBA/WBO titlist Anthony Joshua of Great Britain on a seventh-round technical knockout at Madison Square Garden on June 1. Some characterized Garcia’s victory as an upset almost on a par with Buster Douglas’ conquest of the seemingly invincible Mike Tyson in Tokyo on Feb. 11, 1990.

Ruiz, who was born and still resides in Imperial, Calif., not far from the Mexican border, flew to Mexico City two days after stopping Joshua for a celebratory meeting with Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

“Me becoming the first Mexican heavyweight champion of the world, it’s a blessing,” gushed the 30-year-old Ruiz, who almost instantly became a national hero of that country, so rich in boxing history with such legendary champions (including those of Mexican descent) in lower weight classes as Julio Cesar Chavez, Salvador Sanchez, Canelo Alvarez, Ruben Olivares, Oscar De La Hoya, Marco Antonio Barrera, Juan Manuel Marquez, Miguel Canto, Carlos Zarate, Erik Morales, Ricardo Lopez, Fernando Vargas and Mikey Garcia.

The coronation of Ruiz further reduces the memory of what another Mexican-American heavyweight contender, Alex Garcia, might have accomplished nearly a quarter-century earlier. Garcia seemingly was in line for a fat, seven-figure title shot, but blew the gig because of a greedy manager who put him into a low-paying ($15,000) stay-busy bout with dangerous journeyman Mike Dixon that turned out horribly wrong. More on that in a bit.

A lot of puzzle pieces would have to fall into place for more Mexican heavyweight history to be made, beginning with a repeat victory for Ruiz over Joshua in a contractually mandated rematch whose particulars have yet to be negotiated. If Ruiz can hang onto his bejeweled straps in the do-over, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a future defense might be arranged against another Mexican-American, longtime contender Chris Arreola, who is 0-3 in shots at the big prize but could soon find himself back in the mix. Hey, it’s boxing. Stranger things have happened.

The 38-year-old Arreola (38-5-1, 33) insists he will retire if he loses Saturday’s Fox-televised 12-round matchup with fellow power puncher Adam Kownacki (19-0, 15 KOs) at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. But if he wins, and especially if he wins inside the distance, he thinks it just might lead to a go against Ruiz, in what would be the first all-Mexican world heavyweight title bout. Kownacki, 30, also has history on his mind, holding firm to the belief that an impressive victory over Arreola might put him in position to become the first-ever Polish heavyweight champion.

“I was happy for him, for his family, because he deserves it,” Arreola said of Ruiz (33-1, 22 KOs), an acquaintance of long standing whose unexpected rout of Joshua, who was floored four times, stands in stark contrast to Arreola’s failed bids for world titles against Vitali Klitschko, Bermane Stiverne and Deontay Wilder, all of which came on knockouts or stoppages. “I’ve known the kid since he was 17 years old and he’s always been hungry. He’s always worked hard. He’s always been a big boy, but he’s always been a big boy with skill.

“I was elated for him. I was elated for the Mexican fans that finally had a Mexican champion. He did it, man. And honestly, a lot of pressure came off me.”

If there are common links between Ruiz, who made Mexican boxing history, and Arreola, who for so long had wanted to, the main ones deal with their hardscrabble upbringings and apparent aversion for always showing up for fights in prime condition.

Although Ruiz’s hometown is Imperial, he frequently has made the relatively short trip (20 miles) to Mexicali, where his grandfather in the 1960s ran a gym that was something less than splendidly furbished. Not that life on the U.S. side of the border was any easier or more privileged for the large kid with the constantly famished appetite.

“Everyone had it tough there because it’s just a small town near the Mexican border,” Ruiz said in an interview with the New York Times. “Lots of drug smuggling. There’s gangs. Cartels. But luckily, boxing saved my life. It kept me disciplined, it kept me away from the streets.”

Ruiz might always have been hard on the inside, but that internal grit sometimes was difficult to detect as it always came wrapped in a flabby exterior. Particularly fond of Snickers candy bars, he waddled into the ring against Joshua at a jiggly 268 pounds, his love handles lapping over the waistband of his trunks like waves during a tropical storm’s landfall. But in boxing, as in everything else, appearances sometimes can be deceiving.

Like Ruiz, Arreola long has been viewed as a heavyweight whose potential has been blunted by a supposed lackadaisical approach to training. Several inches taller than Ruiz at 6-3, he has fought as low as 229 pounds and as high as 262¼, but he insists conditioning will not be a problem against Kownacki after three months in the gym with new trainer Joe Goossen.

More physically imposing than either Ruiz or Arreola with his robe off was Garcia, whose Mexican-American roots made him attractive as a possible title challenger in the early to mid-1990s. Garcia had a deserved reputation as a tough customer, first as a standout middle linebacker at San Fernando (Calif.) High School and later as a gang member who served five years in various state penal institutions before shifting his pro career into high gear.

There was talk of Garcia being in line for a $1 million payday to fight then-WBO champion George Foreman, but Garcia’s then-manager, a Los Angeles attorney, insisted the smart play was to hold off a while longer, at which point Garcia’s purse would have risen to $5 million. But Foreman was dethroned by Tommy Morrison, and Garcia was put in for chump change and a couple of vacant minor titles against Dixon, whose 16-30 career record is deceiving considering that he shared the ring at various times with the likes of Lennox Lewis, Ray Mercer, Bruce Seldon, Corrie Sanders, Herbie Hide, Oliver McCall, Michael Grant, Larry Donald, Jameel McCline, Kirk Johnson, Buster Mathis Jr. and Zeljko Mavrovic, among others. Dixon floored Garcia with a left hook to the temple in the second round, and when the favorite arose it was on wobbly legs. Dixon went right at him and was whaling away when referee Joe Cortez stopped the fight.

It hardly seemed to matter that Garcia got some too-little, too-late revenge in the rematch with Dixon on May 24, 1994, winning a 10-round unanimous decision. The seven-figure window of opportunity that had been so conspicuously open not that long ago had just as conspicuously slammed shut.

Might Garcia have beaten Foreman or Morrison? Probably not. But then that’s what everyone had predicted of Douglas vs. Tyson and, later on, Ruiz vs. Joshua. Garcia might have been a movie star of sorts, cast in the role of Minoso Torres in the 1992 film Diggstown, but real boxing matches do not follow scripts. There would be no visit to the Mexican presidential palace for Garcia, who did not even get the multiple failed shots at the title that went to Arreola or the successful one that went to Ruiz.

Proving once again that boxing history is a constantly moving target.

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

2 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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