Boxer Arreola will fulfill his promise to a slain friend

Many people wear their emotions on their sleeve. Heavyweight boxer Chris Arreola wears his a bit higher.

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.”

Arreola says it was Carranza who got him back into boxing.

“It was seven or eight years ago,” he says. “We’re sitting around, watching boxing on TV, and I see these guys fighting who are just terrible. And I’m saying how I could whip all these guys. So Alex says to me -- he had this squeaky little voice that was funny on a big guy -- ‘OK, if you’re so bad, stop talking and go do it.’ ”

So Arreola did, winning the National Golden Gloves title in Reno in 2001 at 178 pounds and, with a slight pause for the birth of his daughter, Danae, 6, never looking back.

Carranza drove him to Reno for the Golden Gloves and was at almost all his other fights, except when his job as a truck driver kept him away.

“He never wanted anything,” Arreola says. “He was just my friend. . . . He always said all he wanted from me was to take him to the good parties and to let him get up in the ring one time with me after a fight.”

On Oct. 27, 2007, Arreola took Carranza, 25, to what he thought would be a good party. It was just a few miles down the road from where he lives, he says.

“I went to get some beer,” he says, speaking more slowly now. “I came back and there were people running around in a panic. They said, ‘Alex has been shot.’ I went into the backyard and people told me he had just fainted.

“I bent over him and tried to lift him. There was no blood. Then my finger went into the bullet hole in his back and I knew it was bad.”

There had been a dispute, several men with guns started shooting, Carranza had shielded a woman and a bullet entered his lower back and had done serious internal damage without exiting. Carranza died, the woman was wounded in the leg and another man, shot five times, survived.

According to Arreola, the shooters left the party and were never apprehended. He says he doesn’t care. “I’m not an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy,” he says. “Besides, it wouldn’t bring Alex back.”

Scheduled to fight in St. Lucia in November 2007, Arreola canceled.

“I went to his funeral,” he says. “It was an open casket. There was this huge dude in this wooden box. I couldn’t take it. I still feel him with me.”

Arreola has a regret. He never brought his friend up into the ring with him, as Carranza had asked. He was waiting for bigger fights, bigger moments.

But he has done the best he can to fix that. Since his last fight, he added to his extensive collection of tattoos. High on his left arm is a picture of Carranza. Underneath is written: “The Good Die Young.”

“Saturday night will be his first time in the ring with me,” Arreola says.

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com