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Boxers prove to be fast-acting

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Times Staff Writer

The only thing not predictable about Thursday night’s victories by boxers Chris Arreola and Paul Williams was how fast they happened. Each won easily in bouts, in a show at Soboba Casino in San Jacinto, that were clearly overwhelming mismatches.

Viewers on the Versus network got a total of 8 minutes 48 seconds of actual action.

Arreola, promoter Dan Goossen’s projected heavyweight star of the future, took out a 38-year-old from New York named Israel Garcia with a TKO 1:11 into the third round. Arreola and Garcia, neither looking exactly sculpted, went to the center of the ring, leaned on each other and started to whale away. Arreola got the best of that and had Garcia helpless against the ropes when the fight was stopped.

Arreola, normally fighting around 235 pounds, weighed 258 1/2 . Garcia weighed 246.

“I got too caught up in lifting weights,” Riverside’s Arreola said, before correcting himself with the obvious.

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“Make that lifting burritos.”

Williams, a classy fighter from Aiken, S.C., who reached the pinnacle of his career, to date, when he beat Antonio Margarito last summer at the Home Depot Center, made short work of Andy Kolle of Fergus Falls, Minn. He stunned him early, then dropped him hard to the canvas with what Williams described later as a hook-right combination.

“The hook got him in trouble,” Williams said, “and then came the right.”

Only 1:37 of the first round had elapsed. Kolle tried to get up and actually beat the count, but his legs were so wobbly the fight was stopped.

Arreola and Williams will fight again Nov. 29. No site or opponent has been announced, but the show will be on HBO’s “Boxing After Dark.”

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com

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