On the surface, Julian Bridges is no different to the average 23-year-old Californian. He’s a San Francisco 49ers fan. He plays pick-up hoops to break up his routine and clear his mind. He works at Enterprise Rent-A-Car to pay the bills and, when he finds the time, he likes to go camping.
Born in San Jose and raised in the inland Bay Area’s Antioch, Bridges (5-0, 2 KOs) is a young regional junior welterweight branching out to bigger things. On Tuesday, in Nashville, Tennessee, he will face Frank Brown (3-5-2, 1 KO) at the Texas Troubadour Theatre after having hopped on a flight from the west coast on his longest trip away from home. Especially in the mind of a certain graying, middle-aged reporter, he is in many ways still a kid.
But Bridges is also a perfect example of an aphorism that has been true since men began trading punches for profit: fighters are just built differently.
Bridges demonstrated as much when he woke up on April Fool’s last year – a fight day – to find his body playing a dirty trick on him.
“It happened in the morning when I was in the shower,” Bridges said. “I noticed it started to hurt when I breathed, and I was telling everyone about it. They were like, ‘Oh, you’re just probably nervous.’ And I was like, ‘No, I know how being nervous feels.’
“It was hurting and hurting, 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 already too late. Like, I was next up to fight, and I wasn’t gonna tell everyone ‘I can’t fight.’ You know, my family is there. There’s no way I was gonna tell everyone I’m not capable of fighting.”
So instead of bagging the fight and beelining to the nearest ER, Bridges slipped between the ropes at Sacramento’s DoubleTree Hotel that evening and took on another professional fighter in Milton Ramirez with, he would later find out, a hole in his lung.
“I was having, like, air bubbles in my chest – you could pop them,” Bridges said. “So that was scary. That fight, I was kind of in survival mode. Like, ‘I might die today’.”
But Bridges, who had dispatched the first two opponents of his career in first-round knockouts, managed to not only hang on for the scheduled four rounds with Ramirez but also win a unanimous shutout decision (40-36 on all scorecards).
“I got checked by the doctors because it was still hurting, and I was like, ‘Can you ask them to check my heart?,’” he said. “They said it was OK, but I woke up the next morning and I can’t even get out of bed. I was in that much pain. And so we rushed to the doctors, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you have a small 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 young and super healthy that it was gonna heal on its own. But I was still in the hospital for four days.”
Although it’s a stretch to call the episode a blessing in disguise, Bridges says he learned from the Ramirez fight how to push through and adapt to less-than-ideal conditions in the ring. The lesson spilled into his next outings, when he outboxed Miguel Soto-Garcia and then toppled Jabin Chollet in a significant upset.
“I learned I gotta set my punches up,” Bridges said. “You know – fight smarter. Knockouts don’t come as I thought they would come.”
Bridges fought Chollet, a Top Rank fighter who came in at 9-0, in the first six-round fight of his career, on the undercard of the May 4 Saul “Canelo” Alvarez-Jaime Munguia fight at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas – a huge leap for a previously unheralded young club fighter. He says he was given something like a 4 percent chance of winning against Chollet.
“But I did my study, and I saw that he had a really powerful, strong left hook,” Bridges said. “And my whole game plan there was just to box smart. It wasn’t to knock him out, but it was to fight with a higher IQ; fight smarter and stay away from that left hook.”
When Bridges slickly outboxed Chollet for a unanimous decision win – 59-55 twice and 58-56 – it set him up for business outside the Bay Area, central California and America’s west. In Music City on Tuesday, 2,000 miles from home, Bridges will take on Brown, whose record isn’t much but who has never been knocked out. With any luck, he’ll add another notch to his win column – and this time maybe even get a chance to celebrate the feat.
“After the fight, I definitely want to try the Nashville hot chicken,” Bridges said. “That’s what I’m hyped about right now.”
Jason Langendorf is the former Boxing Editor of ESPN.com, has contributed to Ringside Seat and the Queensberry Rules, and has written about boxing for Vice, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times and other publications. A member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, he can be followed on X and LinkedIn, and emailed at [email protected].
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