By Allen Fox: Former heavyweight title challenger Chris Arreola (34-2, 29 KO’s) will be back in the ring as the co-feature on the undercard of the Showtime broadcast headlined by Paul Williams vs. Nobuhiro Ishida on February 18th in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Arreola is reportedly looking to face a high profile opponent to knock off and get him closer to a hoped for fight against IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko in 2012. Arreola already faced Wladimir’s older brother WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko in September 2009, and was stopped for the first time in his career in the 10th round by Vitali.

That led to another loss this time to Tomasz Adamek in April 2010 in a 12 round majority decision loss. Since then, Arreola has dined on 2nd tier opposition, winning his last six fights quite easily. Areola is now ready to step it up and he’s going to have to fight someone fairly significant on February 18th if he wants to get Wladimir’s attention.

Wladimir has a March 3rd fight against Jean Marco Mormeck, and after that he has a mandatory defense of his International Boxing Federation title due against Tony Thompson. Wladimir’s trainer Emanuel Steward isn’t interested in seeing Wladimir face Thompson again and instead prefers to see Wladimir fight the all action Arreola. That makes sense because Thompson fights in a rather slow and methodical manner that’s difficult to get excited about. Wladimir will wipe him out in a rematch and won’t interest fans nearly as much as a bout against Arreola.

Arreola at least needs a contender for his next fight if he wants to win back a lot of the fans he lost after the Vitali and Adamek fights. Arreola has lost a lot of weight and is now weighing in the neighborhood of 240. He’s also lost some of his power and he’s still not very fast, but he’s clearly faster than he was when he was tipping the scales at 255+.