ANAHEIM — If I’d met Diego Aviles the first time anywhere beside a boxing gym, I would have assumed from his handshake that I was meeting a member of the student council.
The direct eye contact and impeccable manners? Something you’d expect a young man to employ in a summer job interview.
I wouldn’t have expected that this good-natured guy regularly beats the snot out of anybody. Much less everybody who’s crossed his path lately.
Wouldn’t have imagined that the kid who graduated from Magnolia High in May also became a National Golden Gloves champion that month, perhaps just the second from Orange County if his coach’s research is right.
Diego Aviles acknowledges friends at the Magnolia High School graduation ceremony May 22, 2024, in Anaheim. (Photo by Michael Kitada, Contributing Photographer)
Wouldn’t have ID’d someone so humble, someone so quick to share credit, as a future contender who in April was identified and honored as a Rising Star by the National Boxing Hall of Fame.
Wouldn’t have pegged him as a soon-to-turn-pro pugilist who won five national championships between the ages of 15 to 17 and who was robbed recently of an opportunity to compete at the U.S. Olympic boxing trials by fate and the fact that he turned the now-necessary 18 years of age two weeks too late.
Because Aviles is not the biggest guy, OK? All of 5 feet, 5 inches, he’s a youthful 112-pound flyweight who will try 118 pounds on for size (and for fun) in a couple weeks at USA Boxing’s National Junior Olympics in Wichita, Kansas, beginning June 22.
But watch him spar for 60 seconds and you’d get it too: This fearsome boxer-puncher with the small frame could be the next big thing in boxing.
Quick and quick-thinking, with confidence built up over nearly 100 bouts – more lost than won in the beginning, many more won than lost of late. A pressure fighter who isn’t there to dance or dally. A no-nonsense antagonist.
You don’t have to have a temper to have it in you to whale on an opponent. Don’t have to have too many screws loose to uncork a beautiful barrage.
You just have to be about the boxing.
STUDENT OF THE GAME
Art James has been Aviles’ coach for the past five years or so. James runs the city of Anaheim’s boxing program – which he now operates as a nonprofit called Team PunchOut – where the soundtrack is ’80s rock, Bon Jovi and Cutting Crew. He compares their sport to the old Looney Tunes cartoons featuring Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog; at the top of an episode, the characters punch the clock and exchange pleasantries, and then proceed to, well, “beat the (crap) out of each other, right? But at the end of the day, the coyote’s got all these bandages on him and it’s just like, ‘See you tomorrow, George.’ ‘See you tomorrow, Sam.’ You have to kind of learn to go hard but learn to just let it be.”
I didn’t know enough about Aviles yet to know this when I asked him why he fell in love with boxing: “It’s hitting people, right?”
Well, sure. There’s something novel about being able to hit someone and not get in trouble for it. But the thing that really struck a chord was the moments of clarity the sport offers and requires.
“It’s a good mental break,” he said. “I feel like it’s somewhat like therapy, if that makes sense? Just going in there and letting all your emotions out, I feel like that’s been good for me, to go lose myself in the gym.”
He’s been doing it regularly since he was 7, when his dad brought Diego and his big brother Rafael to another gym, initially to learn self defense.
No one else looked at Diego and predicted he’d grow to be a great boxer then, either.
But Diego dug it so much. He improved his jump-roping by watching YouTube tutorials. Studied Canelo Alvarez’s fights, inspired by the star who shares his Mexican heritage. Diego would learn how much there was to learn about the sport, the trap-setting of it, the strategy – and he loves that part. Word is he’s never missed a morning run, those six or 10 miles of everyday endurance training with teammates who have a hard time keeping up anymore.
Diego Aviles, 18, right, shadowboxes with Antonio Garcia during training June 7, 2024, at the Anaheim Boxing Club in the Downtown Youth Center in Anaheim. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)
When Diego arrived on James’ Anaheim canvas at 11 or 12 years old, it didn’t take the coach with decades of experience long to spot something in this new pupil. He would lose most of his matches, “but it was always close,” James said, “and we’re fighting tough guys in California.”
Antonio Garcia, one of James’ older fighters, recognized it right away too.
“I remember him being on the bag, a little guy, just throwing pitter-patter,” Garcia said. “But Art had paused us, and he said something like, ‘I need you guys to work on right cross step and throw another jab. Take a step or angle up.’
“And Diego just did it. He was different from most kids. I was like, ‘Wow, OK. We might have something here.’ … and Art also has a big factor in all of this. Art’s amazing. A boxing wizard.”
In the 17 years James has been working with the city, his fighters have won more than 100 tournaments, he said, including seven national championships. Among his prized pupils: Caitlin Orosco, who won the Youth World Championships for Team USA in 2014, and Jonathan Esquivel, who won the 2016 USA Olympic Trials.
Now, in addition to leading classes of 20 beginning boxers every Tuesday and Thursday at Anaheim’s Downtown Youth Center, James is pouring his time and resources into Aviles and another young fighter, 14-year-old phenom Lupita Ruiz, who’ll soon be a Garden Grove Santiago High student, and who hasn’t lost once in 35 fights. A real menace, this friendly girl.
She’s a lot like Aviles, James and Garcia said, because of how seriously she’s taking it, how coachable she is, how much she loves it. Helps that she’s got Aviles showing her the ropes.
Diego Aviles, 18, left, and Lupita Ruiz, 14, jump rope during training June 7, 2024, at the Anaheim Boxing Club in the Downtown Youth Center in Anaheim. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)
“He hits hard and he puts people down and puts on a show,” Ruiz said. “And he’s a very hard worker. That’s what amazed me, how he works. He makes me want to push myself more. Like run more, run faster, throw more punches. He’s actually the person who motivates me.”
FIGHTING ON
Next week, James and his fighters and their family members will descend on an Airbnb – cheaper than a hotel – hoping their Southwest Airlines connections get them to Wichita without delays. They’ll eat what their coach prepares to the best of his culinary abilities – big plates of broccoli with lemon, a little fish or a store-bought rotisserie chicken without the skin on the side.
They’ll stay locked in for days straight of combat, chew gum pre-fight to work out their jaws, keep their gazes trained on their opponents and on making weight (a little easier for Aviles this time, with six extra pounds to play with). There will, of course, be championships on the line, and another prize – pizza! – awaiting at the end.
And then, in August, Aviles is planning to take the next step.
“I’m gonna turn him pro,” James said. “Winning the Golden Gloves is big. Now you’re in there with Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Hearns, Muhammad Ali. It’s a huge one to win. So he doesn’t want to stay amateur, he’s seeing all these kids he knows go pro.”
It wasn’t just that Aviles won the prestigious title, it was how he won it – with the best boxing of his life so far. Including a dominant semifinal victory against 20-year-old Jordan Roach, who was the No. 1 seed for his weight class at the U.S. Olympic Trials late last year.
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It was as though the game slowed down, Aviles told me. “A beautiful fight,” James called it.
“It was just different,” Aviles said. “I felt better, I felt stronger, I felt faster and I even felt a little cocky, you know? I had a little cocky to me. Like, I had my hands down a little bit – and it was funny because when I had my hands down, (Roach) told me, ‘Hey, get your hands up!’ But I don’t know why I did it, I just did it.”
Turns out, there’s more to this fighter than even the fighter recognized.