CHRIS ARREOLA vs TRAVIS WALKER

FRIDAY P.M. UPDATE: Big hitting should be the order of the day when unbeaten Chris Arreola meets Travis Walker in a heavyweight fight that looks most unlikely to go anywhere near the full 12 rounds on Saturday.

The fight, part of an HBO double-header along with the junior middleweight bout between Paul Williams and Verno Phillips, features two big men who like to let the punches fly.

Arreola is a huge betting favourite, but this fight does have some risk attached. Walker, at about 6ft 5ins and a chiselled 231 pounds, is the biggest man that Arreola will have faced, and he has a winner’s mentality — he doesn’t see himself as a rank outsider in this fight.

Walker’s manager, Steve Munisteri, said over the phone from Houston this week: “We love this fight for Travis. The fight was actually first brought up when Arreola fought on Versus in September. I was willing to waive my fee and let all the money go to Travis to try to make the fight happen but we couldn’t close the deal.

“I have a great deal of respect for Arreola and I love his style, the way he gets in and fights, but his style is actually made for Travis. The sort of boxer who will give Travis the most trouble is a slick guy, a Chris Byrd type, not someone who will be right in front of him — we love that.”

There are doubts concerning Walker, who is not considered to have a very good chin and whose stamina is thought to be highly suspect. Walker’s 15-second defeat against the southpaw T.J. Wilson was shocking and he seemed to be running out of gas against the stumpy southpaw George Garcia in a close points win. He did, though, batter Wilson in two one-sided rounds in a rematch.

Munisteri said: “That fight with Wilson was stopped too soon. Travis wasn’t hurt but he has a bad habit of dropping his hands when he’s been hit. He wasn’t glassy eyed and his legs were fine. You saw him arguing with the referee the moment the fight was stopped. Travis is a very well-conditioned athlete who runs nine miles every morning. I don’t believe he got tired against Garcia — he won the last round — but he did get sloppy, and there’s a difference. Actually that should be a KO win on Travis’s win because if you remember he dropped Garcia with a left hook to the body in the second and the referee didn’t know what happened, he even asked Garcia: ‘What happened?’. Garcia was down for something like 15 seconds.

“I don’t see what Arreola’s done to make him such a big favourite. He stopped my guy Malcolm Tann, but we knew Malcolm was coming to the end, he had an elbow problem. Malcolm has sparred a lot of rounds with Travis, and he told me: ‘Travis will stop this guy.’ I’ve seen Arreola hurt in fights that people don’t know about. He was nearly stopped by Domonic Jenkins and he got wobbled by Damian Norris, and these weren’t big, powerful guys like Travis, a former football player who used to carry sofas on his back when he moved furniture for a living.”

We hear so many positive things about Arreola, who is seen by many as the coming heavyweight star that America has been waiting for (with a Mexican heritage that gives him appeal to the Hispanic boxing community), I thought I should give the other side a look-in.

Looking at the fight, it is easy to see why the linemakers see Arreola as almost a sure thing. Arreola has been walking through everyone. He maintains the sort of high-activity style that is seldom seen from a heavyweight. Even when he is packing excess poundage (as when he ran over Israel Garcia in his last fight) he still manages to keep the punches flowing. He has been training at Big Bear for this fight, but surprisingly he weighed in at 254 pounds today, the second-heaviest of his career.

Walker, 29, didn’t start boxing until he was 21 but he captured a national Golden Gloves title in a relatively short amateur career, and his best win as a professional was a close decision over his old amateur nemesis Jason Estrada. I know that Walker has worked hard to develop good technique under his trainer Derwin Richards, a former professional welterweight, but, to me, Arreola, who was a national light-heavy champion in the amateurs, is more of a natural fighter. Walker gives me the impression of having to think about what he is doing, whereas Arreola just goes out and does it, as if everything is second nature to him.

If this was a bodybuilding contest, Walker would win in a landslide, but muscles alone seldom, if ever, win fights. Arreola seems able to keep chugging away, round after round, whereas Walker just seems to me to be the type of fighter who is always likely to fade late — especially if he is forced to fight at a fast pace, which will be the case on Saturday.

This fight, of course, might not go too many rounds. Someone will inevitably get stopped.

I didn’t see Arreola against Domonic Jenkins but he was definitely shaken in the third round when the 207-pound Damian Norris hit him with a right hand.

The thing with Arreola, though, is that he just keeps on coming after getting hit. Walker might well be able to catch him and hurt him, but keeping him hurt is another matter. Meanwhile, I am not so sure about Walker’s resiliency. What happened against T.J. Wilson in the first fight might have been just an accident, but it was troubling to me when I saw Walker’s legs buckled by the very limited Ralph West in the opening round, although he came back strongly to get his man out of the fight in the very next round. (“Ralph West, with his left hook, is a very dangerous guy for one round,” Steve Munisteri said when I asked him about this fight. “I think this actually showed Travis has a good chin, because he took the punch and didn’t go down.”)

Despite Munisteri’s confidence in his fighter, I will be quite surprised if Walker wins on Saturday — but I don’t think it is completely out of the question. Arreola is relentless, throws impressive combinations and to most of his opponents he must indeed have seemed to be the “Nightmare” of his nickname, but he has been hurt a couple of times and Walker is a heavy-handed fighter. The result I am anticipating is an Arreola TKO win in about five or six rounds, but I do think that the odds opened very much on the high side: For sporting types, a tickle on Walker at the initial line of around +1000 was, to me, an easily understandable play. After today's weigh-in, a play on Walker looks a little better.