Arreola an anomaly in anemic heavyweight ranks
Early on the morning of June 22, 2008, boxing promoter Lou DiBella ran into a fighter named Cristobal Arreola at a Beale Street bar in Memphis. Arreola, with beers the size of oil cans in either hand, looked to be having a good time.
He was certainly enjoying himself more than DiBella, whose fighter Arreola had just demolished, knocking him down twice in the third round. If you can't beat him, the promoter figured, drink with him.
As it happened, DiBella once had a chance to sign Arreola. "Wish I had," he says now. "He's not the most gifted heavyweight. But he's the most compelling character we have — a Mexican kid with balls. Also, he's a great guy to have a beer with."
In fact, Arreola is Mexican-American, from Riverside, Calif. I don't know if he has the skills. But he has the punch, not to mention the look, a memorable gang-banger's face that is by turns affable and menacing. Already, much has been made of the fact that he stands to become the first heavyweight champion of Mexican descent this Saturday night at Staples Center against Vitali Klitschko. Less mentioned — and nearly unthinkable in the not so distant past — is the idea that he could become America's first rightful heavyweight champ in more than a decade, since Evander Holyfield first fought Lennox Lewis in 1999.
Sorry, I refuse to regard the Hasim Rahmans and the John Ruiz's, the Chris Byrds and the James Toneys as anything other than accidental champions. In fact, their apparent and ephemeral success are symptoms of what ails both the division and the economic health of boxing. It may sound jingoistic, but it's the truth. It wouldn't hurt to have an American champ.
For baby boomers and their kid brothers, the phrase itself — American heavyweight champion — still feels redundant. I mean, what else would he be? Boys became men assured in the knowledge that the title was a star-spangled birthright.
He was impossibly famous and wealthy. He was the baddest man on the planet. But now you wonder: whatever happened to the American heavyweight?
"He's playing tight end or wide receiver," says DiBella. "Or he's a power forward, a small forward, or any kind of forward."
The reason is irrefutable, economic determinism. Says DiBella: "The way things are, if a kid's a good athlete, he's well advised to do something else."
Boxing, said the boxing guy, "is a bad economic choice."
"It used to be the highest paid athletes were star fighters," said promoter Dan Goosen, who had the foresight to sign Arreola. "It wasn't a basketball player or a football player or a baseball player. It was always a fighter."
"When Muhammad Ali was fighting in the '60s, a lineman in pro football was making six grand a year. He had to have a second and a third job," says Bob Arum.
It's worth noting that Arum decided almost three decades ago to concentrate on the lower weight classes. The intervening years may have seen boxing lose a lot of cachet in the U.S. But America still produces good and great fighters in all but the heavyweight division.
A list of the pound-for-pound best would include Bernard Hopkins and Chad Dawson, both fighting at 175 pounds, Floyd Mayweather and Shane Mosley at 147, Paul Williams and Kelly Pavlik, who will meet at 160. They're all Americans, but the biggest of them couldn't play wideout, much less tight end. Most of them are too small for baseball. As Arum puts it, "When was the last time you saw a major leaguer the size of Mayweather?"
You can point to mixed martial arts, if you must. But America's pool of heavyweight talent started shrinking long before anyone heard of the UFC. By the way, boxing isn't something to which one returns, or begins late. You don't fight just because you've failed or been injured in another sport. Being a good athlete doesn't make you a fighter. The examples of doomed heavyweights who thought they could get by on mere physical gifts are legion, from Ed "Too Tall" Jones to Michael Grant.
Fighters are born, then arduously developed. Consider what longtime boxing publicist Bill Caplan calls "the Golden Age of Heavyweights" — an era that runs, roughly, from Muhammad Ali through Larry Holmes. The supporting cast of that era — guys like Earnie Shavers, Ron Lyle, Jerry Quarry, and yes, even Gerry Cooney — would've been champions today.
Arum cites a couple of compelling examples. Larry Johnson was a great amateur in Houston, before signing with UNLV, and later, with the Charlotte Hornets, who would give him a then-unheard of $84 million to go with his Converse deal.
Then there's Giants running back Brandon Jacobs, who was "a terrific amateur" in Louisiana. Jacobs still loves the fight game, but apparently not enough to have passed up a scholarship to Southern Illinois.
"Talented big guys have so many opportunities in football and basketball," says Arum, "that they're not particularly interested spending their days and nights in a smelly gym."
Put it this way: You can have the painful and monastic life of an apprentice fighter. Or you can have boosters and coeds, training table and team doctors. Not much of a choice, is it?
"They're all part-time boxers today," says Bruce Silverglade, owner of the renowned Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. "They have to work for a living.
"Let's say an up-and-coming kid gets four four-rounders in a year. If he's getting top dollar, he's getting a thousand a fight. His trainer takes between 10 and 20 percent. A manager, if he's got one, can get up to a third. Then there's the cutman, $125 for medical, urine and blood tests. The kid's real lucky if he walks away with $650.
"But he's still got to tell his girlfriend why he's all busted up."
Which brings me back to Cris Arreola. I don't see him having much more than a puncher's chance against Vitali Klitschko (personally, I think he'd do better against Vitali's more talented, but not as tough kid brother, Wladimir). But he's resolutely old school, which is to say that, win or lose, he'll have earned those double-fisted refreshments.
