Chris Arreola was Clubbing at the Beginning!
By
Brent Matteo Alderson

Like a lot of professional fighters, Arreola is a second generation boxer and his connection to the sport was first established by his father.  “I’ve been in the gym basically my whole life with my dad. I was hitting the heavy bag and the speed bag with him when I was one and two-years old. He’d hold the bag and I would hit it!”
After growing up under the tutelage of his father and training at various gyms in the Los Angeles area, Chris’s parents split up and he moved to Riverside with his mother and continued his involvement with the sport and won the National Golden Gloves at 178 pounds in 2001.  Shortly thereafter Arreola burned out and stopped boxing for a couple of years.  
   
Then one night Arreola went out clubbing with his friend from the gym, Henry Ramirez. The two had met when they were both training as amateurs. After Ramirez stopped fighting, he became involved in the teaching aspect of the sport and started helping his old trainer, Andy Suarez, train fighters. 
That night at the discotheque amidst the booze and the broads Arreola informed Ramirez, “I want to start training again, and I want you to train me.” Henry told Chris he was drunk and told him to talk to him when he was sober.  Days later, in a sober state, Chris again informed Henry of his decision to give boxing another go-around.   
Since that night at the club, a lot has changed and Ramirez is happy with Arreola’s progress and smiles when he talks about their meager beginnings, “At first we tried to get him in the 2003 National Golden Gloves, but something happened, we had missed some deadline or something, so we decided to go pro that summer. His first two pro fights he fought four-round fights for six hundred dollars a piece at two little shows they were doing at the Edge Water [Hotel] out in a tent in Laughlin [Nevada].”
And the scene was a lot different than it is now. There wasn’t any fan fare, any television exposure, and there definitely weren’t any interested promoters, even at the club level.  
“It was weird, he wasn’t doing then what he is doing now, nowhere near.  You didn’t see what you see now.  He looked like shit but I approached Cameron Dunkin and Brad Goodman at Top Rank and asked if there was any interest and they said “No.”  Now Brad tells me Chris is a gold mine.”   
Shortly after his two wins in Laughlin, Arreola started fighting on the Thompson boxing cards at the Double Tree Hotel in Ontario, California. 
“I had been trying to get Chris on a local show for a while, but it was hard. Then one day Alex Camponovo (Manager of Thompson Boxing) called and said that he had an opening, that a fighter had fallen out and it was like on three days’ notice, but Chris had been training so we took the fight and started fighting on Thompson cards until his seventh or eighth fight and that’s when we got hooked up with Al Hayman.  One of his associates, Wes Crockett, had spotted us on one of the cards and liked what he saw and we got together and set up a deal with Al and the rest is history.”  To think, it started at the club.      

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Brent Matteo Alderson, a graduate of UCLA, has been part of the staff at BoxingScene.com since 2004 and now works as the head writer for FighFanNation.com. His published work has appeared in publications such as Ring Magazine, KO, World Boxing, Boxing 2008, and Latin Boxing Magazine. Alderson has also been featured on the ESPN Classic television program “Who’s Number One?”