For his last boxing match, on the weekend of July 25, Juan Daniel Velazquez drove down to an arena in Oakdale with his dad.
How’d it go? “It was good,” Velazquez said. “They stopped the fight. He wasn’t throwing punches—if they see that he gets hard hit, they stop the fight.” He pulled his first count in the first 10 or 15 seconds of the first round; a second came, then a third. On the fourth, they stopped the fight.
“I got a belt, so—I won,” he said.
It’s been seven years since Velazquez followed his dad to the United States from Puebla, Mexico. “It’s better here,” he said. “You go to work, school, dream.”
Velazquez, who is 17, keeps himself busy. During the summer weeks, he spends his days laying tile with his dad. On the weekends, he works at Scratch Kitchen washing dishes for extra cash. Monday through Thursday, he trains at the gym; he told the Sun that he spends his Sunday and Saturday afternoons training as well.
On Sunday mornings, lest he have a moment of rest, he plays soccer as a left midfielder. “It keeps you active, it keeps you in shape,” he said. In the spring, he sprints for the Cabrillo track team—and the coach there, who does long distance as well, is trying to get him to come out for the cross country team in the fall.
It’s no surprise: Velazquez has remarkable endurance, and he’s come down a long road to get to the Lompoc Boxing Gym.
Coming to the United States, he said, was hard. “I came with my mom,” Velazquez recalled. “It was tough.” His dad, who had lived in Lompoc for a decade already, wanted him close. Still, it was hard for him to leave his family behind.
“My dad hasn’t seen his friends for 17 years,” Velazquez said. “Sometimes I think about it. We can’t do nothing about it.”
As a preteen, shortly after moving from Mexico, he started boxing at another gym in Lompoc, called Revolution Boxing.
“I wanna try it, I wanna try something new,” he remembered telling his dad. “We went to the coaches, and they were like, ‘Do you know anything about boxing?’ I didn’t know anything about boxing.”
Initially, he told himself he would box for one year—“just one year, and see what I can achieve,” he recalled. “And then I’ll do something else, like weights—you know, something else.”
That something else never came. Revolution closed its doors, but Velazquez wanted to keep boxing. So, at the ripe old age of 13, he would wait on the corner three days a week to catch the bus to Solvang and box there. “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Just for boxing, you know?”
When the soccer season came back around, he didn’t have the time for the long trips to Solvang. Then, the gym there closed, too. Velazquez figured the gyms in Santa Maria were too expensive, and he was looking for something more local. So he started boxing at the gym in Lompoc.
“So I got to the gym, right? It was like the first week.” Roy, a trainer, came up to him. “‘There’s a show in Santa Maria, and we’d like to take you,’ he said. I was, like, surprised, you know? I talked to my dad first.” When the date for that first bout came, he hopped in the car, knowing that he was out of shape and not sure what to expect. “We went, and I won.”
The fight, he said, was cool. “Since I wasn’t ready, and I won. I wasn’t as ready as I was supposed to be. Most of my friends and my dad were there. After that, I kept on going.” He travelled down to L.A. for his second fight and ended up squaring off against a much more formidable opponent—a relative veteran of the ring, who, according to Velazquez, had fought more than 50 times.
He lost that second fight, but stayed with it. “Since that day, I’ve been winning,” he said.
His weakness is keeping his hands up. “I throw punches, and once I throw them, I drop this hand, and I get hit. Other than that, it’s good, you know.”
As an unsponsored amateur, Velazquez is limited in where he can go to box. “The guys here, we don’t have sponsors to pay for the gas or hotel. It’s expensive,” he said. He still manages to box at closed shows in the area or tournaments in L.A. every couple of months.
Sometimes, he scraps with opponents who are sponsored. “They have money, we don’t,” Velazquez explained. “They go to whatever—this show, that show, boom-boom-boom.” To defray the cost of gas and accommodation, the boxers from Lompoc Gym reach out to local businesses looking for small donations of $10 or $20.
His dad, he said, is his biggest supporter. “I ask him—can I go to this fight?—and he says, ‘If you feel ready, then go,’” he said.
What about his mom? “She don’t like me fighting. She thinks that when you get hit, it’s bad for you.” Still, Velazquez said, she supports him in other ways.
Velazquez isn’t sure what he wants to do when he graduates. On a run up to Lookout Point, he met a Marine recruiter who later added him on Facebook. There are upsides to entering the service, he said, but his dad doesn’t want him joining the Marines. He’s considering starting a tiling business or attending Lompoc’s Allan Hancock College campus.
Despite his mother’s worries, it looks like the boxing bug runs in his family. As Velazquez talked to the Sun, his younger sister puffed her way through a routine in the ring. With the warm regard of an older brother, he described her as motivated and headstrong.
“She doesn’t like the fact that I don’t get belts or trophies or whatever,” he said. “She wants them too.” He doesn’t know if she’s ready, “but she gets mad if I tell her that.” She’s training for her first fight right now, he said.
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 20-27, 2015.