By Nick Diamantides
Staff Writer
Eleven-year-old Moises “Mighty Mo” Orozco lives a more disciplined life than most adults and it’s already paying off. Out of the hundreds of boys in a six-state western region who competed in boxing matches, he won the championship, giving him the right to fight in the 25th Annual Silver Gloves amateur boxing tournament that will take place in Independence, Missouri, from Jan. 31 to Feb. 3.
“I’m happy that I’m going there,” Mighty Mo said. “I’m just going to do my best to win.”
For almost three years, the young athlete, who now weighs 70 pounds, has spent about two-and-a-half hours, five days a week vigorously working out and training for his boxing matches.
“I’m the one who has been training him,” said Mighty Mo’s father Rudy Orozco, who himself was an amateur boxer in his younger years. “I also used to own a gym where boys trained to be boxers, and I was training one of the boys and traveling with him to different boxing matches.”
Rudy explained that during those years, Mighty Mo traveled with him too and enjoyed watching the competitions.
“The other kid that I was training just kind of faded away,” Rudy noted. “At that point, my son asked me to train him to be a boxer, and it was something that he really wanted to do, so I agreed.”
Since then, Mighty Mo has gone through the rigors of pushups, sit-ups, jumping rope, running on a treadmill, shadow boxing and practicing maneuvers on two different kinds of punching bags every early evening Monday through Friday. He also regularly spars with other boys or an assistant coach.
“I train him every day after work,” said Rudy, who owns and operates Kid Rooter Plumbing. “It’s a two-and-a-half hour ordeal that he goes through, but he wants to do this, and he pretty much knows what he has to do on his own.”
Rudy added that sometimes Mighty Mo, like any normal boy his age, has a tendency to want to slack off on the training. “I have to remind him that there are consequences for every decision that he makes,” he noted. “If he chooses not to get in shape, the consequences are that he will get tired and get beat in the ring. He understands that.”
Mighty Mo’s mother, Lupe, spends several hours every day home schooling him. “We don’t know what’s going to happen when he grows up; maybe he wants to be something else,” she said. “Whatever he decides, we’re going to support him.”
Right now, Mighty Mo has no desire to be a professional boxer.
“I want to win the Gold Medal in the 2016 Olympics and that’s what I am training for,” he said.
“To be honest, I would not want Mighty Mo to be a professional boxer,” Rudy said. “That’s a very brutal sport. Very few professional boxers make money from it and those who do don’t keep it for long because they never learned how to invest their money.”
Rudy added that he would like to see Mighty Mo win the Olympic gold medal in boxing eight years from now because that would open doors of opportunity for him.
“If he was offered a $2-million contract as a professional boxer after that, that would be good,” he said. “He could do that for a while and then be set up for life.”
Mighty Mo has fought in 39 boxing matches in the last few years. He has lost only four of those. His reputation has spread throughout amateur boxing circles among the Western Silver Gloves Region, which includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado.
Meanwhile, by a strange twist of fate, he has become the subject of a documentary DVD produced by a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Monica.
“I was taking a documentary class last quarter and, since I have always been interested in sports, I sent emails to a lot of gyms asking if they had an interesting story for me,” said 27-year-old Hiroshi Komuru. “Several of them emailed me back, but I liked the story of Mighty Mo the best and decided to make my documentary about him.”
Komuru said that when he first found out that Mighty Mo spent so much time training, he worried that the boy’s father was pushing him into something he didn’t really want to do.
“But I found out that this really is what Mighty Mo wants to do and I was very impressed by him,” Komuru explained. “Most boys his age just want to play, but he is totally focused on his training; he has a very disciplined mind.”
Komuru added that he was equally impressed by Rudy’s dedication to his son. “He is a good father and good trainer,” he noted.
The documentary shows Mighty Mo in training and in boxing matches. It also contains brief interviews of the young athlete and his parents.
“There is nothing more difficult than training to be a fighter. It requires discipline, dedication, commitment and focus,” Rudy said. “If Mighty Mo puts all those ingredients into anything else he wants to do in life, he’s going to succeed.”
To obtain a copy of the DVD documentary, contact Komuru at (323) 359-4771 or lionking566@aol.com
