Boxer Arreola will fulfill his promise to a slain friend

It is a quiet weekday afternoon, the slightly overcast kind that Vin Scully calls a "soft day." Arreola, an imposing man of muscle and width and tattoos, sits in the backyard of his Riverside home and looks out on treeless hills and dirt paths carved out by various off-road vehicles.

"A lot of days, that's where I run," he says. "Good place to do tough roadwork."

Arreola, 25, is only days from entering the ring for the 26th fight of a professional career that has been inching its way, since September 2003, toward a level of prominence that could make him famous and wealthy. He will fight once-beaten Florida heavyweight Travis Walker on the first-ever boxing card at the new Citizens Bank Arena in Ontario on Saturday night. His bout will be the semi-main event to Paul Williams versus Verno Phillips at junior middleweight (154 pounds).

There is plenty of boxing going on these days, but this card is attractive enough to be the HBO "Boxing After Dark" show.

Arreola knows he is on the doorstep of something big, that fighting Walker is not like slugging it out with some of the bloated bags he has faced while building a reputation with 22 knockouts on the way to a 25-0 record. He knows this is serious business, that his dream of being in boxing's big time -- "I want it in Staples Center, September 2009, a title fight maybe against one of the Klitschko brothers" -- is closer with success in Ontario.

But for the moment, he is lost in thought elsewhere. Asked the innocuous question of how this boxing stuff got to be serious, he gazes into the distance and appears to choke up. After a pause, he tells the story of Alex Carranza.

"He was my best friend. We were like brothers," Arreola says. "When I was a kid, my dad started me boxing, and, from the time I was 7 years old, until I was maybe 16, that's all I did. Go to school, go to the gym, come home, do homework, go to bed. Every weekend, all over L.A., they'd have boxing shows and I'd be there."

By the time he was 16, he was boxed out, he says. His parents divorced, his mother moved him to Riverside, and one day, at a barbecue, he met Carranza.

"He was this huge dude, maybe 6-5," Arreola says. "Right from the start, we hit it off. Pretty soon, everybody just expected us to be with each other. It was kind of like, here come the two big Mexicans."