After out-of-the ring setback, Perez looks to make up for lost time

As a highly successful amateur boxer, Abraham Perez was a jet setter. He fought in Spain, France, Bulgaria and at least nine U.S. states.

He fought opponents from India, France, Spain, Peru and Ukraine.

As a pro, he has yet to have a fight that required a plane ticket.

Now, he’s ready, more than ready, to widen his horizons and catch up with his amateur peers.

Perez is fighting on Saturday in El Paso, performing for the first time as a professional outside his home state of New Mexico. So, yes, it’s a new experience.

Then again, it’s not. Texas is his home state, and El Paso his hometown, as much as New Mexico and Albuquerque are. He was born in “El Chuco” 26 years ago before his family came north — first to Roswell, then to Albuquerque. He still has relatives in El Paso and visits often.

Thus, while he prepared for his eight-round flyweight main event against Mexico’s Ángel Geovanny Meza Morales at the El Paso County Coliseum, Perez said he senses no difference in the process than for any of his previous 11 pro bouts — all victories, six by knockout, seven of them promoted in Albuquerque by his father and head trainer, Aaron Perez.

Saturday’s card is being promoted not by his dad’s company but by Marshall Kauffman, a Pennsylvanian who stages most of his events in his home state.

For Perez, it’s all the same. The promoter could be Kauffman, his father or Hobbs’ Isidro Castillo. The site could be El Paso, Albuquerque or Sofia, Bulgaria.

“To me,” he said in a phone interview, “it’s just, ‘All right, cool. It’s another fight. Let’s get it done.’”

Yet, while the process is the same, he acknowledges there’s a heightened urgency created by time and circumstances, not location or logistics.

A year ago, Perez was preparing for an Aug. 10 fight against fellow Albuquerquean Matt Griego-Ortega at Tingley Coliseum. A victory that night in a fight to be streamed on ESPN+, on a card promoted by Top Rank, Inc., could have taken his pro career to a new level and led to still greater opportunities.

Instead, days earlier, Perez lost consciousness while doing breathing-control exercises in the Perez family swimming pool and nearly died. While he’s grateful to his family and to the medical professionals who saved his life, he’s acutely aware of the career opportunity and the potential career momentum he forfeited.

He’s fought only once since then, a victory by second-round KO over José Rodríguez Montemayor on April 19 at the Embassy Suites. Perez has had only the Montemayor fight in the past 15 months.

“I’m just trying to get back in the swing of things,” he said, “as far as getting those types of fights again, like getting two to three fights within this year.

“Just trying to get back into the motion of that routine I used to be on.”

As an amateur, Perez fought on cards alongside the likes of Ricardo Torrez Jr., Delante “Tiger” Johnson, Keyshawn Davis, Duke Ragan and Bruce Carrington.

Torrez, Davis and Ragan won Olympic silver medals in Tokyo in 2021. Johnson was an Olympian.

Now, all five are Top Rank contract fighters with a combined record of 66-0. They’ve all fought on ESPN and/or ESPN+. Several of them are closing in on world title shots.

Perez is not an Olympic medalist, nor is he an Olympian. But he could have been. He won the flyweight title at the U.S. Olympic Trials in 2019 — only to have USA Boxing replace him with a fighter, Anthony Herrera, whom Perez had beaten twice at the trials.

“I was pretty hurt at the time,” he said. “… All those people that I was with, it feels like at some point I was kind of left behind.”

To this point, Perez has had more and wider exposure as an amateur than as a pro. USA Boxing national events almost always are streamed. International events like the Strandja Cup International Tournament, staged annually in Bulgaria, are streamed and/or televised.

Initially, it was thought that Saturday’s card in El Paso would be carried on DAZN, a popular international streaming service. Instead, Aaron Perez said, promoter Kauffman told him it will be streamed by bxngtv.com, a service with far less penetration than DAZN, on a pay-per-view basis ($19.99).

Even so, given the streaming, Perez’s El Paso roots and the presence of several El Paso fighters on the undercard, Saturday likely will provide more exposure than did any of Perez’s previous 11 pro fights.

Exposure without a victory, of course, is a negative. Meza Morales, Perez’s opponent, presents an undefined but significant threat.

Undefeated through his first nine fights, three of them draws, Meza Morales is 3-3 since then as the level of competition improved. His losses have come against opponents with a combined record of 27-1-1.

Two of those losses were by split decision, and all three were competitive on the scorecards.

Perez said he hasn’t watched video of Meza Morales’ previous fights, relying on his team, and on the resourcefulness and ring intelligence he’s developed over the course of a boxing career that began in the Perez family’s backyard when he was 7 or so.

Should those qualities produce a victory on Saturday, and should it lead to at least one more fight this year, Perez might start catching up to those amateur contemporaries.

“I would like to think so,” he said. “I like to stay optimistic.”