Christina Cruz: “I walked into the gym that first time and immediately fell in love with the sport.”

Christina Cruz: “I walked into the gym that first time and immediately fell in love with the sport.”

Christina Cruz has an amateur resume that has few equals. A seven-time US National champion, her first was in 2007 and then six times consecutively from 2012 through to 2017. Cruz has two world championship bronze medals to her name and she broke Mark Breland’s record for consecutive NY Golden Glove titles. The records and the titles are even more impressive considering that Cruz started her boxing journey at the relatively late age of twenty-one.

Cruz had a sporting background, but not one that involved the sweet science. Over Zoom, she told me that despite fleeting thoughts of giving boxing a try it was the more conventional sports that initially interested her:

“When I was really young it had crossed my mind, but I didn’t know how to get into it. Growing up in New York City I always played city sports like basketball and baseball so I was quite the tomboy growing up. I grew up with my two brothers and my dad, so I was always fighting them. But it was always mainstream sports back then.”

In many ways, it was luck that gravitated Cruz to a life in the ring. A persistent old friend saw something in Cruz and eventually, his persistence got its rewards:

“I started at a late age, I was twenty-one when I first started. A friend called ‘Lucky’ a neighbourhood guy who I knew from growing up introduced me to a boxing gym. He was always bringing his son to the boxing gym and we would always run into each other as we were playing out on the street and he would always say when are you coming to the gym you would really love it. But I would always say I was too old to box and just kept putting him off. And then one day he grabbed me by the arm and said you are going to the boxing gym. I walked into the gym that first time and immediately fell in love with the sport. I paid my month’s dues, bought a pair of boxing gloves and from there it all started.”

Boxing has a familiar theme largely running through its long history, fighters from the wrong side of town, or even the wrong town have been saved by the sport, or given something that they didn’t or couldn’t have elsewhere. Cruz grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, a notorious area of Manhattan, New York that has been labelled by some the bastion of the poor, and worse. But the ongoing development since the 1980s has seen that label lifted somewhat since the darker days of the area, and Cruz and her family were early beneficiaries of the improvements in her neighbourhood:

“I grew up in an area that wasn’t so great. They had Triple X stores and prostitution everywhere in the neighbourhood. The building that I grew up in is one that kind of changed the neighbourhood. They built this luxury building but they let 17% of low-income families live there, and my family was one of those families. So I grew up in a very unique place where there were some people who were not a great influence but there were also some very successful people who showed me that there was something different out there. Growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, for me, was fun. You grow up in an apartment, you don’t grow up in a house. We lived with my grandparents, and me and my two brothers shared the living room together. For me, it was fun because I had my two brothers but there were definitely some hard times.”

Cruz had a late entry into boxing, but her success was rapid. Just a few months into her new sport brought Cruz her first fight and her first victory, and in just twelve months her life changed forever:

“Everything just happened really fast. After just four months of training, I had my first fight which I won. After that, I was just thrown into tournaments and I was winning these tournaments. After a year my coach at the time decided to take me to the US Nationals which is the main competition to try and qualify for Team USA. There were sixteen girls in my bracket and I had to fight four times and I ended up winning it. I didn’t know who I had just beaten and it wasn’t until after that people were telling me I had just beaten four former US National champions. It wasn’t a big deal to me until my coach said to me I am now on Team USA, and that was the point when I decided to take it seriously.”

The accolades, the plaudits the trophies and all the medals Cruz amassed over her long and incredibly successful amateur career are missing one important piece of the jigsaw. In quite an unbelievable statistic, Cruz never ever appeared in an Olympic Games. She came close, very close, and in 2020 Cruz thought her luck had changed:

“With Team USA I tried to make the Olympic team three times. The last time I did but only as an alternate. Team USA decided to do a different kind of selection for 2020 where we had the Olympic trials and then we had to be evaluated in camp and the third part of it was international competition. They took the top two who made it to the finals and they put you through that process and you get points for it. I made it to the finals and lost in the final to Ginny Fuchs on points and then they evaluated us in training camp and then we went to Bulgaria for an international competition and they put us on either side of the brackets so that we could possibly meet in the finals. We both reached the final and I lost to Ginny on a split decision, so Ginny was chosen to represent Team USA in the Olympics.

“And after all that happened, Puerto Rico called me, I am of Puerto Rican ethnicity, and my family is from Puerto Rico. They wanted me to compete for them in the Tokyo Olympics but I had to compete in their qualifiers. I just looked at it as an opportunity, and I was honoured and thought it would be one of my last years as an amateur before I retire and I was getting this huge opportunity. So I went to Puerto Rico and I won the Olympic trials and I qualified for the Olympic team, but that doesn’t mean you are going to the Olympics, you still have to qualify internationally.”

Just five days away from travelling to Argentina to solidify her place on the Olympic team, disaster struck. Covid put a stop to many things in 2020 and beyond in the sporting world, and Cruz fell victim to it as well. The qualifiers in Argentina got pulled a few days out, and another planned qualifier in Paris fell by the wayside also, as did the rescheduled tournament in Argentina the following year The International Olympic Committee then used a ranking system instead and Cruz didn’t qualify under that criteria and Cruz missed out on her final opportunity to fight at an Olympic Games.

“It was very upsetting how they went about it and was very unfair for a lot of the athletes who deserved to be there. A lot of us got left out because of the new qualifying procedures. So it was very upsetting and I was ready to retire. I told my coach I have been doing this for so many years and I never had any thoughts about turning pro, but he told me to try the pro game out for one year and see if I love it and decide from there. I stepped into the professional ring and loved it.”

The decision to turn professional was made, a belated call, but one that couldn’t be resisted. You sense it is to give Cruz some missing inner peace and career satisfaction from missing out on competing on the Olympic stage. The speed of the two-minute rounds took a little time to adjust to but after three fights and three wins Cruz has made those adjustments and is now looking to make up for lost time in her first eight-rounder in her next fight set for later this month.

There have been the usual frustrations, Cruz would like to have been more active, but since her last fight in June last year, Cruz has suffered with three scheduled fights being lost, struggles to find a suitable opponent and even an entire card falling through. But the ambition hasn’t dimmed, Cruz wants world titles in 2023 and even offered herself as an opponent for the former WBA bantamweight champion Jamie Mitchell prior to her losing her title to Nina Hughes. Make no mistake, despite the move up in weight, Cruz wanted that fight. Cruz knows that at 40 she doesn’t have the luxury of taking her time and building up her record. But the former amateur star can take much inspiration from what Hughes did with only a handful of professional fights behind her. Boxing always finds a way to surprise, and by the year-end, if the plans being laid come to fruition Cruz could be exactly where Hughes is now, sitting pretty as a world flyweight champion and after all her Olympic woes, it would be the perfect and fitting ending to her long career.