Kirino Garcia ''Gutter to Great''
http://static.boxrec.com/wiki/d/d2/Kirino_Garcia.JPG
By his own admission, Kirino Garcia was a petty thief, a street hustler, a panhandler, one of the thousands of cold-hearted lions that prowled the subterranean jungle of Ciudad Juarez, hungrily searching for strayed lambs. For him, a good day was one that ended absent the too familiar pangs of hunger or the pains of fresh wounds from an endless series of street fights. Home was a squatter’s cardboard shanty ruled violently by an alcoholic father, one that would beat him without reason or mercy.
Garcia was a seasoned warrior in a 22-year-old body etched with a roadmap of scars and grotesque tattoos when several of the border town coyotes convinced him that he could find the path to a better life in the boxing rings of the United States. For the coyotes, Mexico’s piranha of the poor, he had the potential of a human pit bull, but one they would coldly discard in the Chihuahua desert if his earning potential proved less than they demanded. Convinced that anything would be better than what he had, the hardened gang member turned his back on a future as empty as the pockets of his threadbare jeans and headed toward one of the few things he truly feared, the waters of the Rio Grande.
There are five routes between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso on the northern bank of the historic river, none of them requiring travelers to get their feet wet. There are the three main bridges connecting the city’s centers; a fourth span another seven miles to the west; and the fifth a few miles to the east. For Garcia, American law blocked all of them. Instead, shown the way by the coyotes, his first journey took him 100 miles west, through the desert that surrounds Ciudad Juarez to a narrowing of the waterway Mexicans call Rio Bravo, a crossing secluded by high sand dunes on both sides, which would become his favorite gateway into the United States.
“But I can’t swim,” he told his companions. “And I am afraid of the water.”
One of the coyotes pulled from his backpack a folded inner tube and an oversized air pump. “Blow this up,” he ordered Gomez. “You don’t have to swim; you can float across. Or are you a coward?”
Reading Garcia’s eyes, he stepped back quickly. “Never mind, I will blow it up for you,” he said. “With the tube, it will be easy, and we will watch you until you are safely across.”
After the crossing, there was another four-hour walk across the steamy Arizona desert, to a point where another group of coyotes picked him up and drove him into Tucson, where he was paid $85 to let a junior middleweight from New Jersey named Bobby Gunn hammer him for three rounds before the referee gave him the rest of the night off. “The best thing about that,” Garcia told Mike Katz, then the New York Daily News boxing writer, and me in Juarez a few years later, “was that a half-hour after the fight, I was in a diner getting something solid to eat. It was the first food I’d had in two and a half days.” Then he laughed. “The second good thing was when I returned home, I did not have to swim the river; I walked across the bridge.”
Between April 27, 1990 and January 29, 1994, Garcia fought 18 times, all but two of them after slipping across the river into Arizona or Texas. When he could, after the long trip in, he would curl up and catch a few hours of sleep in an alley. He fought when he was exhausted, and he was always exhausted. He fought when he was hungry, and he was forever hungry. Before he could eat, he had to fight. The only thing that added fat on his trips were the records of the men he fought.
“Sometimes he was so tired and so weak from hunger,” said Olvaldo Kuchle, the young Juarez boxing promoter who took over Garcia’s career after his 18th straight defeat, “he was not able to last past the first couple of minutes. He did not fall from a punch, but from hunger and exhaustion. The coyotes got their hooks into him and they did not see Kirino, they only saw the money. The coyotes are Mexican or Mexican-Americans from both sides of the river who turn these kids from Mexico’s slums into punching bags for anyone willing to pay them a few dollars. There’s no training. Nobody looks after them. Until he came with me, Kirino had never seen the inside of a gym.”
On the evening of October 10, 1990, Kuchle watched Garcia fight for the first time. It was not supposed to happen that way; Garcia and some friends had gone to the arena in Juarez to see Raul Gonzalez, a pretty fair middleweight out of Pasadena, California, with a 9-1-2 record. “I fought him four months ago,” Kirino told his friends. “He stopped me in four rounds.” That was no surprise; the Californian had stopped six of his last eight opponents. At the last minute, the Juarez promoter discovered Gonzalez’s opponent was a no-show. Desperate, the unhappy promoter jumped into the ring and asked if there was anyone in the audience willing to fight Gonzalez.
“I will,” shouted the irrepressible Garcia. “How much will you give me?”
After a purse was negotiated, the ring announcer introduced Kirino as Jesus Garcia-Lopez. Upon hearing that name, Kirino merely shrugged. This time, according to the record, Gonzalez knocked Garcia out in the second round, dropping his record to 0-4. “I promised the promoter I would fight,” Garcia told his amused friends later. “I never said how long.” Since that fight, everyone with the exception of Kirino’s immediate family has called him Jesus.
“Hey, that’s a pretty good name,” said Kirino. “Some pretty famous people have been named Jesus.”
By mid-1994, with his record standing at a dismal 0-18 and no one offering him fights, Garcia decided he had better find a different approach. He even considered training, an abysmal thought immediately discarded. While he was fighting as a professional, he still considered himself a street fighter, and street fighters treat gyms and trainers with disdain.
“All his life he ran with gangs,” said Kuchle. “He thought like a gang member. “Then there was the trouble with his father; he never went home. He was always on the street, asking people for money. He’d steal a little here, a little there. He didn’t have time to both train and steal, so he stole. He stole to survive. He didn’t have any equipment; he did not have anything but his fists. He loved to fight. When the gang from his territory would have a fight with a gang from another territory, he was the king of fighting. He’d say: ‘Hey, I am good at fighting. Why should I go to a gym?’”
But by early 1994, after his 15th loss, a six-round decision to a novice named Brian Shaw in Biloxi, Mississippi, the coyotes graduated him to 10-rounders. He fought two; he weighed 154 and 158 pounds, he was listed as 169 and 161, and both opponents were over 170. He took them both 10 rounds but lost the decisions.
“Hey, I was a Mexican named Jesus fighting gringos with names like Shaw and Parker and Carter in Mississippi. I would not have been surprised if the judges showed up wearing sheets,” said Garcia, grinning. “I’d like to fight all those guys in a back alley in Juarez.”
After the three losses in Mississippi, Garcia went to see Kuchle, who by now was the biggest promoter in Juarez. He begged for a local fight. “I’ll fight anybody; I don’t care who comes out of the other corner,” he said. “Please, I don’t want much, just a few dollars.” At first, Kuchle said no. “I have no time for fighters that do not train,” the promoter told him. “Look at your record, Jesus; it is very bad.”
When Garcia persisted, Kuchle said that if he trained a little, he would put him on his next promotion. Garcia trained, a little. On Sept. 9, 1994, he stopped a decent fighter named Norberto Bueno in six rounds. After four years of fighting as a professional, he decided that it felt good to win one.
"You see what training can do?” said Kuchle. “Now train some more, a little harder, please, and let us see how good you really can be.”
By then, Garcia was 26 and had a wife, Margarita and two sons, Kirino Jr. and Jose Carlos, and he knew Kuchle was his last chance to make a better life for his family. With money he had saved from his fights in the United States, he had purchased a small piece of land, a thin oblong slice of arid Mexican dirt, in the neighborhood where he always lived. Next he fashioned a two-room shanty framed with wood and covered by cardboard. The flimsy dwelling was scant protection against wind and rain.
“Some day I will build you a real home,” Kirino promised Margarita. Neither of them had ever known anything else.
Kuchle followed Kirino’s progress through daily reports from Felipe Delatore, whom he had assigned to train his latest tiger. The reports were always the same: Garcia had trained hard that day. “Half the time I had to kick him out of the gym,” said Delatore, laughing. “I had heard about Jesus, how he never trained. When I got him, I thought I’d have to fight to get him in the gym. Instead, I had to fight to get him out.”
As a test of Garcia’s newly discovered resolve, and of his progress, over the next seven months Kuchle sent him to Mexico City for three fights. No one in that group made it past the sixth round. “I guess you are now the best fighter with a 4-18 record in all of Mexico,” Kuchle told him jokingly. “OK, now we will make you some real money.”
Kuchle knew what he had. Garcia’s skills were limited, “but,” said the promoter, “I told him he had a hard head and nobody could hurt him, and he had a big punch. And he was a fighter, a real fighter, not some guy giving dance lessons. I knew the fans would love him.”
![Rico Verhoeven [right] clouts Oleksandr Usyk in Egypt on May 23, 2026](https://photo.boxingscene.com/uploads/Oleksandr-Usyk-Rico-Verhoeven-20.webp)
