Their baby was in trouble – no, trouble is too tame a word. That’s something that gets you sent to the principal’s office, and this wouldn’t be that kind of kid.
Their baby was in danger.
Meconium aspiration syndrome. What they call it when an infant’s stool that typically passes a few hours after birth is instead ingested in utero, and that black and tarry substance coats the air sacs of her lungs and blocks her airway.
This little girl – or not so little, Guadalupe Ruiz was late-arriving, delivered via emergency C-section, 10 pounds with a bushel of black hair – had only just joined us, and already she was in a fight for her life.
It was so touch and go, they actually lost her. Twice, her dad said.
I won’t lie; once you know that, it hits different, talking with her now. Listening to this talented Garden Grove Santiago High School freshman share her hopes and dreams. Watching her beat the meconium out of people, this 12-time national boxing champion who has never lost a bout.
Take your most-tread sports clichés – never give up! refuse to lose! – and apply them to her baby pictures. Because I’m telling you, in them she looks like she looks when she’s in the boxing ring. And, well, yeah. She’s fighting in those photos. Fighting with every fiber of her being.
Apply it to the people in her corner. Her parents Cinthia and Erasmo, so steadfast, and so loving and warm that the nurse who helped them during those difficult first 10 weeks at Children’s Hospital Orange County wouldn’t let go, either; to this day, Jami Aukerman remains a friend and a fan.
Thank goodness for the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, the ECMO. The apparatus functioned as Lupita’s external heart and lungs in her hospital room, because she was so very sick – “the sickest a baby could be,” Aukerman said – that she wouldn’t have survived a trip to the operating room.
So Guadalupe – or “Lupita,” to the people in her camp – stayed put, with Cinthia at her side all day, every day. Mom couldn’t stay at night, so she went home and hardly slept, wracked with worry and guilt while her first baby lay with tubes implanted all over her body. Devices pumping in medicine and nourishment and blood. Leaving scars all over the newborn’s midsection and neck – a vampire’s lingering kiss; look closely and you can see it still.
A modern medical miracle, sweet like the science of boxing.
But boxing? Really, Lupita?
We would have understood if Cinthia and Erasmo – a cashier and a cook who work opposite shifts so one of them is always around for Lupita and her younger sister, Issabela – had swaddled their miracle baby in extra layers of bubble wrap.
We would get it if they anointed themselves Lupita’s security detail after bringing her home from the hospital on Dec. 24, a Christmas blessing.
We would understand if they had avoided the risk inherent in any sport after Lupita’s first two years on this planet, when they fed her through a tube and put her through physical therapy to teach her how to eat and how to use her hands – those hands, those powerful, pain-inflicting pistons, slow to grasp at the outset.
Doctors had warned that if Lupita hung on through those first days, she likely wouldn’t walk or talk like a normal kid. But here she is, a well-adjusted 15-year-old, healthy, happy, getting good grades and telling us matter-of-factly: “I survived, and I’m a normal kid.”
But that depends on your definition of “normal,” doesn’t it?
Because 40-0? That’s not normal.
Those 12 national championships? Extraordinary, actually.
And those dreams: To be a world champion, an Olympian. Just your run-of-the-mill-conquer-the-world stuff.
Of course, normally, 6-year-old girls don’t just randomly start begging their parents to let them in the boxing ring.
Normally, teen girls’ Instagram accounts don’t feature videos of their 6-year-old selves whaling on poor little boys.
Kids these days normally don’t just “come out doing boxing” like Lupita did.
Erasmo has a theory: “She had a lot of blood transfusions. Maybe they put a boxer’s blood in her, so that’s why she likes the boxing.”
Or what if there’s something to those urban legends, sci-fi about people who survived near-death experiences and then found themselves walking around with otherwise unforetold talents? Singing, piano-playing, painting … fighting?
Lupita’s explanation: “I like to, well, not hit people but, yeah, hit people.” And she laughs. She really does love to hit people.
“You’re crazy,” Cinthia remembers telling little Lupita when she kept pestering them about boxing. Because Cinthia had been thinking, if anything, her daughter would play soccer like she did. She was already eyeing some little cleats.
But Lupita was – is? always will be? – relentless. So, fine. Sure. Erasmo brought his little girl to a boxing gym expecting that once Lupita saw how hard the training was, how grueling the sport was, she wouldn’t want any part of it.
She had been a timid kid; loud noises could make her cry, and I hear she still isn’t a big fan of dogs, especially little ones. So they figured she would last, what, three days and then get discouraged or bored or otherwise turned off.
“But I didn’t,” Lupita said. “I loved it. I loved it right away.”
That was nine years ago.
About four years after that, her first gym in Garden Grove – where the nickname, “La Abeja,” or “The Bee,” stuck … or stung – closed down during COVID-19. That’s when she and Erasmo found their way to James at Anaheim’s Downtown Youth Center.
James is a generous, no-nonsense coach. Retired from his job at UPS, he is employed part-time by the city. He runs Anaheim’s boxing program along with his Team PunchOut nonprofit, keeping an eye on dozens of local youth who show up to exercise and sample the sport there, in the same bright space where he has trained Lupita and his other elite boxers.
Those star pupils have included Caitlin Orosco, a Youth World Champion, and Jonathan Esquivel, winner of the 2016 USA Olympic Trials. Antonio Garcia, Olympic alternate in 2020. And Diego Aviles, Lupita’s now-18-year-old training partner, an eight-time national champion who this year won the National Golden Gloves Championships. A flyweight, he’s just turned pro and won his first two bouts by knockout.
In Aviles, Lupita found a boxing shadow – another quiet, courteous kid who, like her, will gladly knock your block off. And who, like her, is loath to take any days off.
He too trains like he desperately wants to be great, and so he pushed her when they went running, when they did bag work, when they sparred – and she’s been happy to return the favor.
“When I first saw her, I was like, ‘Oh, damn. Tough little girl,’” Aviles said. “She was smaller back then, she’s my height now. But she would go in there mean, you know?”
James has a story about how quickly, how angrily little Lupita bounced up after a body blow sent her to the canvas one day. How this girl – who’s especially inspired by fighters who share her Mexican background – ignored his advice to take her time, get her wind back. How before anyone could stop her, she was up and unleashing a torrent of punches. How another boy’s dad sidled up afterward and told James: “I wish my son had that.”
“Lupita, she’s not a normal girl,” said Daniel Rosales, an Anaheim-based nutritionist who has worked with NFL players and a host of combat sport athletes, and who tries to help out however he can with James’ students.
“She’s super-disciplined about everything. Already eating clean at 10 years old; just straight discipline. You don’t see that everywhere. Even the best kids will miss here and there, and I never saw that from either of them.”
As James put it: “Those kids are invaluable for each other.”
Among 1,000 fighters who entered last week’s USA Boxing National Championships in Richmond, Virginia, anyone else who came in with an undefeated record had wins that numbered, at most, in the teens. No one else had stacked 30-plus victories like Lupita, who tried on the 114-pound division because she and James wanted to match up with bigger, stronger girls. A shame, then, that some of them chose to cut weight and fight in lighter divisions, missing their chance to dance with Lupita.
As the top seed in her bracket, Lupita automatically advanced to the semifinals, so she got only two three-round fights out of her week in Virginia. But she walked away grinning, clutching another belt to display in the living room. Her 12th national title came Friday in a no-doubt-about-it decision in the final against Faith Gomez, a firecracker from Stockton who hoped to “make history” but took to Instagram afterward to post a picture with Lupita and give props where it was due: “There’s a reason she’s undefeated.” (In her own caption, Lupita thanked Gomez for “doing a great fight.”)
“Lupita hasn’t lost a round at nationals for a couple years,” James said. “But undefeated doesn’t mean anything to me. The goal is to move up into the 17-18 (age division) and compete against the big girls, so the goal now is just to improve. Because I know what’s coming.”
I wish I knew what was coming.
There’s no denying the fire inside this kid. How strong she is. How great already.
But she is a kid. A humble kid from a humble family in a punishing, taxing business. A political, punishing, taxing business.
Take the Olympics. Even as Lupita spends her days trying to sweat that dream into existence, forces are working against her.
Nevermind all the hoops and hurdles any newcomer trying to make an American Olympic boxing team encounters, for now boxing isn’t even on the itinerary at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Earlier this year, the International Olympic Committee said that in order for the sport to be staged in L.A., a new international boxing body needs to emerge that will serve as a suitable alternative to the IBA, the traditional outfit whose governance and integrity the IOC has long questioned.
And after that? “I tell Erasmo, ‘A girl that can put people away, people will pay to see,’” James said. And people tell James that Lupita reminds them of a “young Amanda Serrano.” And if you were among the record 74 million live viewers who were riveted watching Serrano’s rematch with Irish legend Katie Taylor, that bloody exhilarating women’s undercard that preceded Netflix’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fiasco last month, you can see the potential. Taylor and Serrano both saw seven-figure paydays for their fights, and good. They earned it.
But that’s not normal. Or it’s not normal yet.
More typical is Claressa Shields’ story. The first American to win consecutive Olympic gold medals in men’s or women’s boxing, she’s the inspiration for director Rachel Morrison’s film, “The Fire Inside,” hitting theaters on Christmas. But Shields has struggled to earn close to what her male counterparts make.
There are other women’s world champions with hundreds of thousands of social media followers who say they’ve been offered just a few thousand dollars for title fights.
Oh, and it’s also expensive! Especially for a California kid who is always having to travel to Texas or even farther east for guaranteed bouts in these national tournaments. Lupita’s crew will do fundraisers and raffles, and they’ve gotten some help from a few local sponsors, Profinish Auto Paint Supply and Los Sanchez Mexican Food. James jokes that he’s not just a boxing coach but a budget travel agent, he’s so adept at finding deals for him and his fighters, including Lupita and Erasmo, who always goes along.
They always find a way, but they also attend only half of the events that Lupita should be competing in, James said.
So, no, none of this is easy. And it will never be easy.
But when you consider how life started for Lupita, nothing seems insurmountable either. Not even remotely.
It’s somehow both hard to believe that this is that baby’s life – I mean, a boxer!? – but also hard to imagine someone who’d had to survive on arrival would be destined to do anything that wasn’t incredibly hard.
“God put her on that path to make her stronger,” Cinthia said. “To be ready to go through something big in her life.”
And why not? Why wouldn’t Lupita crave the adrenaline? Why wouldn’t she be able to take a punch? Why wouldn’t she want to push herself to her limits?
Why wouldn’t we be watching a legend in the making?
