Chris Arreola fought gamely, but that was all he did this past Saturday Night in Los Angeles.
Vitali Klitschko fully reasserted his dominance over the heavyweight division (alongside his brother and titleholder Vladimir) with a tenth round technical knockout of the then-undefeated Arreola.
Referee Jon Schorle stopped the fight after Arreola went to his corner following round ten. By this point in the fight there was no conceivable way Arreola could win the fight other than a knockout of Klitschko, and that simply wasn’t going to happen on this night.
That is not to say that Arreola didn’t have his moments. Round four saw Arreola’s first big flurry of the night after three rounds of getting repeatedly jabbed. Round eight was almost unanimously given to Arreola as that was the round where he caught Klitschko “asleep at the switch” if you will. Klitschko apparently picked that round as a rest round or a slowdown round, but Arreola seized the opportunity of having a less aggressive Klitschko in the ring and landed more punches in round eight than he would in any other round during the fight.
Klitschko, on the other hand, was in his own world Saturday night. Simply put, Arreola would’ve had to have been a tank to stop Vitali on this night. Working jabs and power punches into a symphony of striking, Vitali was able to find the balance within his game that his brother Vladimir hasn’t; Vitali landed 150 jabs and 151 power punches in the fight. Arreola was forced to abandon his run-and-gun style early and prepare for a longer fight; this forced Arreola to throw and land more jabs than power punches (62 jabs to 24 power punches), a scenario not too familiar to Arreola.
This was the first fight of Chris Arreola’s career to go past round 8.
To his credit, Arreola did maintain great endurance during this fight, something that should be attributed to his training when considering his Riddick Bowe-like eating habits outside the ring and weight issues in the past. However, by round nine it was evident that Arreola was spent. Round nine became the first round of the fight where Vitali was able to land almost at will with the majority of those punches aimed towards Arreola’s chin.
For Arreola, the world is still wide open for him. The loss itself is disappointing and could call for a return to the drawing board for Arreola, but as far as future fights goes, the loss shouldn’t affect him much. The Klitschko’s have become a force within the boxing world, but what makes them different from a Manny Pacquiao or a Floyd Mayweather or even a Bernard Hopkins is that their domination is coming in the largest weight division hence against the largest boxers on the planet. When someone who knows about boxing to a large extent or even a small extent hears that one of the Klitschkos beat up on their opponent again, they shrug with indifference as if it had already been set in stone. Sam Peter, Juan Carlos Gomez, David Haye, Nikolai Valuev, and Alexander Povetkin are all out there looking for a rebound fight or their first really big shot and Arreola could provide both to whomever will take him on.
As for Vitali, a fight with his brother looms stronger than ever thanks to this performance. While no different from his recent dominations of Peter and Gomez in the past year, this domination meant more because it came at the expense of possibly the last real shot America had at having a heavyweight champion for the forseeable future with Eddie Chambers being the only highly ranked American who hasn’t met a Klitschko yet. While the winner of the upcoming Haye/Valuev title fight would pose the only remaining obstacle in the Klitschko’s monopolizing of the heavyweight title, the only way the boxing world is going to see an undisputed heavyweight champion in the forseeable future would be to have the only brother combination to wear heavyweight gold at the same time finally face off.
