By Scott Gilfoid: #12 WBC Chris Arreola (36-4, 31 KOs) is in the running for a fight against WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder (34-0, 33 KOs) on September 26th. Wilder hasn’t said who his opponent will be for that date, but Arreola has been mentioning as a possibility if he looks good and wins his next fight against Fred Kassi (18-3, 10 KOs) on July 18th at the Don Haskins Convention Center, in El Paso, Texas, USA.
The 34-year-old Arreola says he’ll retire if he fails to win a world in this attempt, which will be his third try for a world title. Even if Arreola doesn’t get the fight against Wilder in September, he still has a good chance of eventually getting a shot at the WBC belt in the near future, as long as Arreola keeps winning against the guys his management are putting him in with.
Judging by the guys they’re matching Arreola up against, it doesn’t look like he’ll have any mishaps on his way to a third title shot.
“I have one run at a title, that’s it. Third time’s a chance. If I don’t get it by the third time, then I’m gonna quit,” Arreola said to Fighthype.com. “I got to make a statement [against Kassi]. I’ve got to make myself a front runner for a title shot. Why wait?”
Arreola is going to have to look a lot better against Kassi than he did in his last fight against Curtis Harper because that was not a good performance from Arreola. He struggled for four rounds, took a lot of shots, and the only he won the fight was because Harper got tired in the last half of the fight. Had Harper continued to fight like he did early on, he would have beaten Arreola.
The thing is Harper is just a 2nd tier guy that Arreola fought as a confidence booster. It wasn’t supposed to be a competitive fight. While you can blame Arreola for struggling on him being overweight, he still should have been able to beat a guy of that class with ease. If Arreola doesn’t look better against Kassi, I can’t see him getting the Wilder fight even if he beats Kassi. Arreola has to look really sharp because the last thing a talent like Wilder needs is someone who is sloppy and out of shape for his September 26th fight.
In talking about Wilder’s last fight against Eric Molina, Arreola said “I believe Wilder was just carrying him. Wilder was trying to get in rounds. I honestly believe that. I think he could have taken him out in the first two or three rounds.”
I totally agree with Arreola. I think Wilder carried Molina to the 9th on purpose to get in rounds in front of his home crowd in Birmingham, Alabama. A lot of boxing fans from his home state came to see Wilder fight Molina, and that’s why I think he didn’t want to let them down by destroying Molina in one or two rounds. If you watch that fight, you can see that Wilder isn’t using his right hand. He was mostly messing around with his left hook and jab. It was exactly how Wilder fought when he faced Jason Gavern. Wilder didn’t throw any right hands with mean intentions until the 4th round.
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