Kent Cruz started boxing not to cause harm, but to protect.

Cruz, 32, has been fighting for 20 years. When he was a child, his father was physically abusive to his mother. It lit a fire under Cruz to learn how to defend his loved ones.

“He’d go off, do drugs, he was off drugs. When he would come home, he’d end up beating my mom,” Cruz told BoxingScene. “I wanted to protect her, so I wanted to learn how to fight, to be that protective person for her. That was a big factor in me getting into boxing.”

Now a veteran professional with a record of 17-1-3 and 11 knockouts, he will feature against pressure fighter Ricardo Salas in Saturday’s main event on a ProBox TV card at the 2300 Arena in Philadelphia.

Cruz is still protecting the people he loves. He has two children and a girlfriend. He delivers tires in St. Louis, where he was initially driven so his mother could escape his father’s physical violence. He has since made it a home. He has aspirations of starting his own business – something outside of boxing – and training fighters on the side. In his hotel room Friday night, Cruz kept one eye on a muted HBO show on the television while speaking to a reporter without seeming disengaged. Food and bills came up, as did Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s crusade to slash government employment, which has put Cruz’s girlfriend’s job at risk.

A 25-minute conversation with Cruz and his brother DJ is enough to say it: Cruz is a normal guy.

Any judgment that could be held against him for weighing in 3.6lbs overweight for his bout with Salas evaporated quickly. Cruz admitted that he was too confident he could make 147lbs and arrived in Philly earlier in the week still in the shade of 160lbs. He described trying to shed the weight through workouts and soaks in hot baths, how he deprived himself of food and water. For all the dangers an overweight fighter can create for their opponent, Cruz’s instincts here seemed more a miscalculation than malicious.

“I don’t wish it on nobody,” Cruz said of the torturous process of trying to cut weight. “My son tells me he wants to box, and my brother. I tell them this is the part of boxing I don’t want none of you guys to go through.”

The best fighters in the world are wholly committed to the sport, often to the point of it being inseparable from their personality. Cruz is a more representative sample of the fight game. Because he can’t count on money coming in between fights, Cruz gets right back to work after the final bell rings. The stories of fighters being doubled over or bedridden in the days after a bruising battle are legendary. Now imagine having no choice but to get up and go punch the clock.

“Oh, dude!” Cruz exclaimed. “It’s hard, it’s hard. I always tell my boss, ‘Hey, I probably won’t be in Monday, but I’ll see how I feel on Tuesday!’ I always give them a heads-up. But I’ve been blessed. No crazy injuries or anything like that. Everything's still the same. Tuesday, hopefully I’m right back after this fight.”

Cruz wants all he can get out of his boxing career – but he draws the line at needing it.

“I always tell myself, and tell my family, I don’t want to do this for long,” Cruz said. “I want to stay sharp, keep my mind. I don’t want to do it for too long. The people that get greedy for money, end up just taking fights for money, I never wanted to be that fighter. Of course we fight for the prize – we’re prizefighters – but I never wanted to be that guy that is just literally fighting for a check.

“I care for myself, and I care for my health more than anything. If I get to that point where I feel desperate for money, I’d rather work a job, even though we can’t make the same money that we make in boxing. I’d rather be healthy and do that than have to get hit upside the head to make thousands of dollars.”

The most difficult part of boxing for Cruz isn’t the fight, but the camp to condition himself for the bout: runs of five or six miles, sparring, cutting weight. The hardest work is done behind the scenes. But Saturday brings fight night and Mexico’s 26-year-old Salas, for which Cruz is legitimately excited. Salas last ran through the tough-as-hell Roiman Villa, a Colombian who proved a nightmare opponent for all comers until Jaron “Boots” Ennis punished, stopped and possibly ruined him in July 2023.

“Did we watch that fight?” Cruz asked DJ, who sat in the corner of the room.

“I did,” DJ said, somewhat ruefully.

“He’s gonna have that Mexican style, where he’s gonna be in my face, looping shots, stuff like that,” Cruz said of Salas. “But I think I’m gonna stop him in his tracks and just have an answer for everything he does the whole night.”

DJ offered a more technical analysis of Salas’ game: “He fights just like Isaac Cruz. He’s a pressure fighter. Even if he’s on his back foot, he’s up against the ropes, he’s gonna play possum. He’s gonna wait for you to make a mistake so he can counter. And he explodes a lot off the ropes. So that’s what I told Kent: ‘Just be cautious with him. Take your time.’”

After the interview, Cruz exchanged phone numbers with the reporter and asked if writing was fun. As the door closed, he had one more person hoping quietly that he wouldn’t be too beat up when he went back to work the next week.

Disclosure: ProBox TV and BoxingScene are both owned by Garry Jonas.

Owen Lewis is a former intern at Defector media and writes and edits for BoxingScene. His beats are tennis, boxing, books, travel and anything else that satisfies his meager attention span. He is on Bluesky.