At first glance, Julian Bridges is no different from your average 23-year-old Californian. He’s a San Francisco 49ers fan. He plays basketball to escape his routine and clear his mind. He works at Enterprise Rent-A-Car to pay the bills, and when he has time, he likes to go camping.
Born in San Jose and raised in Antioch in the Bay Area, Bridges (5-0, 2 KOs) is a youthful regional junior welterweight who is trying his hand at bigger events. On Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee, he will face Frank Brown (3-5-2, 1 KO) at the Texas Troubadour Theatre after hopping on a plane from the West Coast for his longest trip away from home. In many ways, especially in the mind of a certain graying, middle-aged reporter, he is still a child.
But Bridges is also a perfect example of an aphorism that has held true since men began trading blows for profit: Fighters are simply built differently.
Bridges made that clear when he woke up on April Fools’ Day last year – fight day – to find his body playing nasty tricks on him.
“It happened in the morning when I was in the shower,” Bridges said. “I noticed that it was starting to hurt when I breathed, and I was telling everyone about it. They were like, ‘Oh, you’re probably just nervous.’ And I was like, ‘No, I know what it’s like to be nervous.’”
“It hurt and it hurt and then it got a lot worse. So I started warming up and moving. Then my voice started changing and then it got really scary and then it was too tardy. Like I was next up and I wasn’t going to tell everyone that ‘I can’t fight.’ You know, my family is there. There’s no way I’m going to tell everyone that I’m not fit to fight.”
So instead of forfeiting the fight and heading straight to the nearest emergency room, Bridges stumbled into the DoubleTree Hotel in Sacramento that evening and faced off against another professional boxer, Milton Ramirez, who he later learned had a hole in his lung.
“I had, like, air bubbles in my chest — you could pop them,” Bridges said. “It was terrifying. I was in survival mode during that fight. Like, ‘I could die today.’”
However, Bridges, who had knocked out the first two opponents of his career in the first round, managed not only to last the scheduled four rounds with Ramirez but also to win by unanimous decision (40-36 on all scorecards).
“The doctors checked me out because it was still hurting, and I said, ‘Can you ask them to check my heart?’” he said. “They said everything was fine, but I woke up the next morning and couldn’t even get out of bed. I was in so much pain. So we ran to the doctors and they said, ‘Oh, you have a little tear in your lung.’”
Doctors couldn’t tell Bridges exactly how the tear happened — and no procedure was performed to repair it. “They said because I’m youthful and super hearty, it would heal on its own. But I was in the hospital for four days.”
While it’s a stretch to call the episode a blessing in disguise, Bridges says he learned from the Ramirez fight how to push forward and adapt to less-than-ideal ring conditions, a lesson that carried over into his subsequent fights, when he boxed Miguel Soto-Garcia and then stopped Jabin Chollet in a major upset.
“I learned I had to set up my punches,” Bridges said. “You know, fight smarter. The knockouts aren’t coming the way I thought they were going to come.”
Bridges fought Chollet, a Top Rank fighter who entered with a 9-0 record, in the first six-round fight of his career on the undercard of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s fight with Jaime Munguia on May 4 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas — a huge step for the previously unknown youthful club fighter. He says he was given about a 4 percent chance of beating Chollet.
“But I did my research and saw that he had a really powerful, powerful left hook,” Bridges said. “And my whole game plan was to box intelligent. It wasn’t about knocking him out, but to fight with a higher IQ; fight smarter and stay away from that left hook.”
When Bridges handily outboxed Chollet, winning by unanimous decision — 59-55 twice and 58-56 — it opened up avenues for business beyond the Bay Area, central California and the American West. On Tuesday in Music City, 2,000 miles from home, Bridges will face Brown, whose record is not impressive but who has never been knocked out. If he’s lucky, he’ll add another point to his list of victories — and this time, he might even get to celebrate that feat.
“After the fight, I definitely want to try some Nashville sizzling chicken,” Bridges said. “That’s what’s thrilling me right now.”
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