Photo: Vincent Ethier, EOTTM – Christopher Guerrero is starting to get used to winning before the limit.
It’s becoming a habit, but Christopher Guerrero won before the limit again last Thursday night. After some good body shots, ‘Machine Gun’ put an end to Edwin Villarreal Flores in the 3rd round of the fight presented at the Montreal Casino on February 2nd.
“For me, it’s like a video game; my coach [Giuseppe Moffa] has the PlayStation controller in his hands, and I’m just executing,” says the Montreal boxer.
With this victory, Guerrero remains undefeated in six fights, with two KOs in his record, both recorded in his last two outings.
The mindset of the greats
From one fight to another, Christopher Guerrero seems to be experiencing the progression curve that any boxer, promoter, or coach dreams of. Indeed, in the eyes of the man holding the controller, Giuseppe Moffa, Guerrero only has himself to thank for the growing success he’s currently experiencing.
“He’s always in the gym, he’s a gym rat, as they say. He loves boxing, lives for boxing, and watches boxing when he gets home. When you have that attitude, you can’t help but improve,” he explains, also highlighting his boxer’s talent, defense, maturity, and versatility.
A productive week in Cuba
For this particular fight, Christopher Guerrero could also rely on a training camp different from the others. For a little over a week, he was in Cuba, not to enjoy the beach but to train alongside Junior Ulysse and their coach, Giuseppe Moffa: “It was great fun, for eight days, Junior and I learned a lot about boxing, but also about ourselves… It was really just a beautiful experience,” confided ‘Machine Gun.’
For the coach from the Ulysse Nation Sports Center, the sentiment is the same. Listening to him speak, even a week’s vacation couldn’t have been as beautiful as the eight days of intense work spent in Cuba.
“It was exceptional. There, boxing is so different, very technical […]. We learned, and it paid off for Chris. We did a lot of sparring, we lived in the countryside, it was wonderful… truly wonderful,” adds Giuseppe Moffa.
A ‘student’ of boxing
A loose translation of the English expression ‘a student of the game.’ Christopher Guerrero is only 21 years old, and with the time he spends in the gym, whether in Canada or Cuba, he continues to learn every day in training. Outside the gym, even once in the ring, with only six fights in the professional circuit, he admits he’s still adapting to the paid ranks.
“I’m still getting used to the action, even with the smaller gloves [than in amateur boxing], and especially, I realize more and more that every punch counts,” affirms the boxer who learned that one of the most formidable weapons to get KOs is sometimes “patience.”
Wanting to continue learning, Guerrero hopes to return to the ring as soon as possible, maybe next month if a spot opens up on the March 23rd card. In the medium term, he aims to fight at least four more times this year, concluding it by transitioning to fights lasting six to eight rounds.
A father’s pride
It was beautiful to see Oscar, Christopher Guerrero’s father, on Thursday night. Near his son, both in the ring and outside, with a smile on his face, pride was palpable in both his expression and words.
It’s been a little over 10 years since Oscar brought Christopher to a boxing gym for the first time. The father, originally from Mexico, never wanted his son to fight in the streets; he simply wanted him to learn to defend himself from the bullying he experienced at school.
Today, it has paid off, as Christopher no longer fights in the schoolyard but in a boxing ring, earning a living from his noble sport. Yes, the son won another fight on Thursday night, but when you read his father’s eyes, you realize it’s also life that the Guerrero clan has won, nothing less. You should have seen that pride; it lit up the entire Casino.
