Boxer Victor Reynoso Puts His Gloves Up

The scrappy upstart, who was born in the Dominican Republic, is working his way through the pro boxing circuit.

“It is what it is. Losing has made me more mentally strong and now I have the mentality that I can’t leave things to the judges,” he says. “I have to be able to dictate my next move. Educate, dictate, annihilate.”

After graduating from technical high school, Reynoso had to choose: boxing or college. He enrolled at Rhode Island College to study criminal justice, lived on campus and got a job as a correctional officer at the Wyatt Detention Facility, a maximum-security federal prison in Central Falls.

“I gained the freshman fifteen, yes,” Reynoso says with a laugh. But boxing was never far from his mind. A tattoo on his left arm that was inked when he was seventeen — a knife piercing a heart with the words “love is pain” scrawled across it, boxing gloves dangling — was a physical reminder of his long-held dream.

It took a championship fight in 2014 to push Reynoso back into action. Providence boxer Demetrius “Boo Boo” Andrade was competing for the world light middleweight title against British fighter, Bryan Rose, which Reynoso watched with a friend after a shift at the prison. Andrade won the belt that night — and a $200,000 purse — and, in a way, Reynoso won, too. Right then and there, Reynoso decided to quit college and focus on boxing.

“It was terrifying, taking a leap of faith like that,” Reynoso says. “But time is precious. It was now or never.”

It wasn’t when he lost his freshman fifteen, then twenty-five more, in a span of four intense weeks of training camp in Atlanta, Georgia, under the direction of champion Boo Boo Andrade’s brother, Floyd.

And it wasn’t when he got beat up at Balletto’s Gym in Providence, then came back the next day and sent his sparring partner running from the building, never to return again.

Sting Ray Shorts realized Reynoso was a champion at a tournament in 2017 when, after getting dropped by his opponent, he got back up and, in a split second, knocked the other guy down for the win.

“When he went down, the crowd went crazy. It was one of the best fights of the year. Our hearts were in it. You almost gave Phil [Cooper, a trainer] a heart attack,” Shorts says, grinning at Reynoso inside Big Six Boxing Academy on the North End of Providence.

Despite cold temperatures outside, it’s balmy in the small, loud cinderblock space. The air, smelling of sweat and vinyl, hangs thick in the gym, where twelve-year-olds hit bags up front and a couple of guys spar in the ring.

Reynoso is dressed in heavy gray sweats and a knit cap with square diamonds in his ears. He’s been jump-roping to make weight, which he likes to maintain at the very top of his junior middleweight category at 154 pounds.

Shorts and Reynoso have worked together for three and a half years — first at Balletto’s and, now, at Big Six — and their trainer/boxer relationship is atypical. You’ll never hear Shorts screeching from Reynoso’s corner during a match. Shorts focuses on building his pupil’s boxing IQ in the gym — pumping that jab, keeping an opponent on the outside — then lets him put it to use in the ring.

For the last two years, they’ve been working on Reynoso’s right hand. He’d been throwing it all wrong but, learning from his past mistakes, he used that right hand to knock out his last two opponents.

“You try to think. But there are certain interactions where you just gotta do,” Reynoso adds. “Like Mike Tyson says, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ ”

Either way, Shorts and Reynoso talk it through.

“It’s just smooth,” Shorts says. “With Victor, I don’t have to yell because he has the determination. He’s got that turn-on button. You can’t teach that.”

Another thing you can’t teach, Shorts says, is work ethic — also Reynoso’s foremost weakness. Sometimes he works so hard Shorts has to send him home. Sometimes he watches his diet too closely and loses power behind his punch. Ultimately, though, to be a good boxer you need three ingredients, Shorts says: Brains, heart and balls. Reynoso has all three. Plus, he’s hungry.

“I’ve trained hundreds of kids. I’ve got a performance book with champions for eight years and up. I’ve been doing this a long time,” Shorts, a former welterweight who went eight-and-one in the ’80s and early ’90s, says. “You can be a great trainer, but you need a great pupil. And he’s my best student ever.”

In early 2018, the big guy at Big Six took notice, too. Owner Roland “Doc” Estrada, an optometrist and father to Olympian Jason “Big Six” Estrada, got to talking with his friend Jimmy Burchfield Sr., who helms the promotional company, Classic Entertainment and Sports (CES) Boxing. Burchfield is the key to going pro in the regional boxing circuit. His company stages its professional fight nights at Twin River in Lincoln.

“This is our twenty-seventh year of doing what we do: making world champions,” says Burchfield, who’s promoted Peter Manfredo Jr., Gary “Tiger” Balletto, Vinny Paz, Jason Estrada and other successful boxers. “So my passion and love for this sport has been tremendous. If it wasn’t for us in this area, I don’t know if there’d be any boxing. We’ve kept the fires burning for all these years.”

Doc Estrada, who serves as Reynoso’s manager, approached Burchfield in early 2018, but Burchfield says the young boxer wasn’t ready to commit.

“He was very cautious in a way that I think, in his life, he got some disappointments,” Burchfield says. “We were almost ready to let him make his pro debut and he went MIA for four, five, six months.”

Reynoso had just started a new job as a therapeutic technician at Bridgewater State Hospital, a medium-security facility for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. It’s tough, physical work akin to that of a correctional officer, and he was putting in forty hours a week while also trying to train at the gym. Eventually, though, Reynoso came around. If he had any chance at making it, he couldn’t wait another minute to go pro.

“You know what it takes to be a world champion?” Burchfield asks. “You gotta be a freak. You gotta make weight. In the summertime, these gyms are 100 degrees. You gotta run outside in the wintertime. It’s a tremendous amount of sacrifice.”

Reynoso was finally ready, and Burchfield signed him to a three-year, twelve-fight contract. Since then, the young fighter proved just how much work he’s willing to put in, clocking six days of workouts while maintaining two per-diem jobs.

Burchfield, who lives in North Providence, likes to walk the hilly loop at Lincoln Woods State Park. Over the years, he brought Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali there, too.

“[Ali] said: ‘Jim, are you nuts with these hills?’ ” Burchfield remembers.

Last summer, when Burchfield was ascending one of the park’s major inclines, he heard someone call from behind him, “Mr. B! Mr. B!” Reynoso flew by at a clip, a big grin on his face.

“I don’t have to worry about Victor being in shape,” Burchfield says. “I don’t have to worry about him getting arrested selling drugs fifty feet from a school — or fifty miles from a school. And he’s so marketable. He’s got that beautiful smile. He can win you over pretty good.”

Right now, Burchfield says, Reynoso is crawling. He’s getting ready to walk. Every fight is an experience. After Reynoso gets through twelve or fifteen fights — preferably all wins, and preferably all knockouts — they’ll consider a title match. Until then, Reynoso has a lot to prove.

Shorts is surer of his potential. Like Leonard Brown at the Nickerson House, Shorts doesn’t ask for money from Reynoso, knowing the athlete’s first professional contract — like an internship: low paying but high in experience, Reynoso says — won’t quite cover his gym memberships, nutrition and boxing gear.

“It’s always been my dream to train a fighter and become a world champion,” Shorts says, “and I think Victor’s that guy.”

Not everyone’s as supportive of the young pugilist.

Reynoso’s mother, Julia Jimenez, has never seen her son in the boxing ring. She refuses to go. His sister, Evania Reynoso, had a panic attack on the way to her brother’s first professional fight and nearly missed the match, walking in just before he knocked down his opponent in the second round.

“I used to say I would not like to have a son to be a fighter because I don’t see boxing as a sport,” says Jimenez from a plush armchair inside her tidy two-level condo in Olneyville. She’s not alone; public opinion has turned on boxing. Even HBO, the sport’s foremost subscription outlet, will no longer broadcast fights. “You get hit — I don’t know. To me, I don’t see it as a sport. It’s very difficult to me.”

Reynoso, seated across from her on a sofa, says nothing. He’s used to this refrain. If it had to be a sport, she would’ve preferred baseball — the D.R.’s national pastime. She says her home country is a very violent place, and she wanted her kids to be safe and well-educated in the United States. She brought them here so they wouldn’t have to fight for their survival.

Evania ran with her mother’s wishes: first at Sophia Academy, then Classical High School, then Johnson and Wales, and now Roger Williams University for her master’s in public administration. Jimenez prioritized her own education, as well. She earned her associate’s degree from the Community College of Rhode Island and her bachelor’s from Rhode Island College. She still works two jobs: mornings with Children’s Friend, a social services agency, and afternoons as a therapist for kids on the autism spectrum. It’s easy to see where Reynoso gets his work ethic.

But it’s not just a lack of respect for the sport that puts their mom off, Evania says; Jimenez doesn’t want to see her son get hurt. Evania doesn’t, either.

“I’ll continue to support him because I have to; she won’t go. My concern is him getting hit,” she says of her brother. “He has gotten hit, but he hasn’t gotten knocked out or anything. So it’s not something I’ve seen in the past. You just always have that fear, I guess.”

Football stands at the heart of the traumatic brain injury debate, but boxers fare worse. According to a study published in 2016 in the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Neurology, boxers experience more severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated concussive or sub-concussive blows to the head that can manifest as Parkinsonism or dementia — than athletes involved in other high-impact activities. It makes sense, in a sport that rewards knockouts with title belts.

But Dr. Peter DeBlasio, a local ringside physician, ophthalmologist and former mixed martial arts fighter, is more concerned about brain bleeds than concussions.

“They get hit in the head and bleed later on,” he says. “It’s the number one killer in the ring. A concussion won’t kill you.”

DeBlasio says the state’s boxing commission is careful and screens athletes before and after matches, particularly if there might be cause for concern. And he says the referees stop a fight if a boxer is exhibiting risky behavior — think: Muhammad Ali’s infamous rope-a-dope, a showy tactic where he’d back himself against the ropes and dodge punches to exhaust an opponent.

“These guys are really healthy, probably the healthiest people I examine,” DeBlasio says, adding that they’re prepared to protect themselves in the ring. “They’re sparring every day before they get in for the fight.”

Reynoso, for his part, says he’s weighed the risks in full.

“I think about it all the time, so I just try to prepare for the future,” he says. “I eat very healthy. I train. I know I’m going to war, so I have to prepare myself and do whatever I’ve got to do to decrease chances of getting hurt. There are controllable factors and uncontrollable factors.”

From her Olneyville condo, Reynoso’s mother seems assured that her son has given the risks of boxing some thought. But she still worries he’ll be injured, and she still won’t go to his matches.

It’s something Doc Estrada, Reynoso’s manager and owner of Big Six Boxing Gym, can relate to.

“People come to see fights,” he says. “They come to see wars.”

He remembers one night when his son, super heavyweight Jason “Big Six” Estrada, went hard in the ring. The crowd went crazy and he won fight of the night.

“But I called him over and said, ‘This is great, your face is all busted up, but don’t do it again.’ That’s what kills people, the constant getting beaten up. When you go into that ring and it’s a war.”

Estrada mentions his friend, Micky Ward, a light welterweight world champion from Lowell and the subject of the Mark Wahlberg film, The Fighter. Around the time of the movie’s release, in 2010, Ward pledged to donate his brain to Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center. The retired boxer is also participating in behavioral and cognitive studies there.

“He gets headaches every night,” Estrada says. “He paid the ultimate price. I always worried about that with Jason. I love the sport too much to give my son away
to it.”

Estrada is hooked on the rush; who needs drugs, he says, when a good boxing match leaves him high for a week. But he says he would’ve given it all up if Jason got hurt in the ring. Luckily, he says, his son retired before he got punchy — a reference to punch drunk syndrome, an early diagnostic description of CTE that was first reported in the 1920s when the disorder was thought to only affect boxers.

“But now my grandson’s doing it, so here we go again,” he says.

He empathizes with Reynoso’s mom and says boxing legend Vinny Paz’s mother wouldn’t go to her son’s matches, either. When your kid loses, it’s serious pain, Estrada says. But when they win, well, there’s nothing better.