From Dreamland to reality: Mark Salgado’s boxing odyssey

Every weekend, millions of fans worldwide tune into broadcasts to watch world-class boxing, fixating on the top bouts while relegating undercards to the shadows. Among those bouts, often dismissed as unworthy or unwatchable, are fighters who remain among the best in the world.

Mark Salgado briefly walked among them.

Now retired from boxing at the age of 25, Salgado had a lot of local support during his career, but a modest amateur pedigree followed by a handful of fights – almost all of them on the club circuit. Salgado is a case study in just how hard it is to make it as a professional boxer without a clear path and the financial backing to set up the exact fights to develop a prospect into a contender, especially at the highest levels of the sport.

Salgado (1-2-2, 1 KO), a lightweight, began training at Dreamland Boxing Center in San Jose, California, in 2018. While working as part of Dreamland Boxing’s fight team, he also held down odd jobs to make a living. He got a degree in environmental studies from UC Santa Cruz.

But much of Salgado’s family, as well as his girlfriend, were back in Los Angeles. His coaches expressed concern that distance from his family and girlfriend would burden him – and it did. Salgado, however, was determined. He compiled experience in amateur fights with Dreamland before the pandemic, with a pro career as his firm goal.

“I had heard what people said about professional boxing – that it is a business first,” he said. “But I just thought it was a sport.”

Salgado’s coach, Jesse Huerta, who runs Dreamland with his wife, Gina, recalled a conversation he had with Salgado right before he turned professional in 2021.

“I sat down with him and told him, this is a really tough business,” Huerta said. “You got to sell tickets, you got to train hard, all these things. But he said he wanted to come here and he wanted to train with me. He wanted to train with this gym. I guess he convinced his parents that he was going to give it two years or something like that, and if nothing panned out then he’d go back home.”

With just fewer than 30 amateur fights and no national titles to his record, the recent college graduate Salgado embarked on his pro boxing odyssey. At the same time, he got a first-hand lesson in fighting through life while working jobs at UPS, at a warehouse, as a teacher’s aide, a substitute teacher and a P.E. teacher – maintaining a 40-hour work week while also carrying a part-time, 20-hours-a-week job and trying to launch his boxing career. It wasn’t always that demanding of a grind, but it gradually turned into Salgado’s day-to-day and week-to-week.

“He got an apartment in downtown San Jose and started training with us,” Huerta said. “When he first started, it was OK. He only had a part-time job at a furniture store, so he had the time in the morning to train. So we were able to do the sparring in the morning. We were able to train in the mornings, and then he came back in the evenings to do strength and conditioning.”

Huerta noted that the first camp went really well. It resulted in a fourth-round knockout win over Cmaje Ramseur at the DoubleTree in Sacramento, California. It was both fighters’ pro debut – essentially the club show version of a regional 50-50 fight. For that camp, Salgado sparred Top Rank lightweight Charlie Sheehy and went to Las Vegas to train around Ruben Guerrero and his fighters, including Robert Guerrero, and also sparred Jerry Perez in Los Angeles.

“The training was still going pretty good, but I can see that things were going different as far as his mentality,” Huerta said of Salgado then. “So he was carrying a lot, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I don’t know if it was, now it’s starting to take a toll on him being away from his family, if it’s working a part-time job – you’re not getting paid that much. We’re not getting big fights that will pay a whole lot.”

Despite an unrelenting schedule and minimal progress, Salgado’s lasting memory of boxing is one of joy. He liked entertaining the crowd.

“The experience of being a fighter and people behind them getting ready for a fight,” Salgado said. “I don’t think there’s any better or favorite season for a fighter than pre-fight, those six weeks before a fight – that’s what I love. I love the training and getting ready and going out there and putting on a show for people.”

Eric Bauerle, who has been training at Dreamland since 2004, had gotten to know Salgado well in recent years. Bauerle became a coach in the gym after working with at-risk youth and incorporating boxing into his practice. Though Bauerle never trained Salgado or worked his corner in a professional fight, the two were learning a craft at the same time and shared a common bond.

“He was going through a phase of his career that was difficult, where he was working all the time, and he had all night shifts,” Bauerle said of Salgado. “So he would work all night long, and then he would try and come in and train, and I could see that it was depleting him. He wasn’t training his hardest. He was tired. And I was talking to Jesse, who just said, ‘Yeah, it’s not working for him.’ We’re not sure what to do for him, right? He needs to find a different type of job.”

Bauerle, who works for a charter school as a counselor, came up with a solution. He helped Salgado get a day job.

“I was working out of school, and we hired paraprofessionals, which basically are aides that work with kids,” Bauerle said. “So I was like, ‘Well, why don’t you come work here at my school? That way you can work during the day. You’ll be off by 3 p.m., you can get the training.’ So then he started working at my school. And by the way, he was a natural at it. I knew he was going to be, because that’s just his personality – a really good, humble, kind, compassionate person.”

Huerta had a slightly different perspective: Salgado was too nice. In some of his biggest fights, he appeared to prioritize pleasing the crowd at least as much as winning. A January 2022 defeat against Luciano Ramos in Sacramento, in Salgado’s second professional fight, was a prime example of Huerta’s critique.

“So when he fought his second fight with Luciano again, we knew that was a tough fight, but I felt it was a very winnable fight for him,” Huerta said of Salgado. “But he just didn’t fight the fight that he was supposed to and outbox him. He wanted to brawl with this guy. That’s good that you want to make everybody happy, but you also better be smart in the ring. You got to fight your fight and show them that you have a lot of skills, and you could have beaten this kid easily.”

Four months later, Salgado competed in his only televised fight, in which he was stopped in one round by Emiliano Vargas on a Triller pay-per-view undercard.

“What I saw were two things that really impacted him, probably emotionally,” Bauerle said. “One is, any boxer – and I’m sure this is all pro boxers – you got to find a gym that matches your temperament, right? You have to find the right gym culture. There’s so many gym cultures. You have to find a gym that matches your values, both as a boxer and as a person, and Mark definitely found that. He was like the poster child of Dreamland. We loved him. He loved the gym, but he found a home of a gym that was so far away from his actual home, away from his family and his friends and his girlfriend. So that was always pulling against each other. There was some loneliness from being that far away from what is his main support network.

“The other strain is, he is making sacrifices, but everybody is making sacrifices with him as well, right? He’s got a girlfriend that loves him back home. She’s got to make the sacrifice that she didn’t sign up for, that the person that she’s in love with is all the way over here, never seen, right? His family’s not seeing him, his friends not seeing him.”

After the loss to Vargas, Salgado fought regionally in hotel ballrooms. To get on those cards, he had to sell tickets to pay for the fees associated with his fights. Salgado had a strong support system, but the boxing struggle was punishing. Meanwhile, lives were moving on around him while his own seemed stuck in neutral.

Salgado fought two more fights, both of them ending in draws with Christian Avalos at the DoubleTree Hotel in Sacramento. Although he wanted to continue on, Salgado’s team urged the fighter to start his career outside of boxing.

“I said to him, ‘Look, we really don’t have the time to do it,’” Huerta said. “I mean, can you really train? Nothing has changed with the training schedule. He understood, and I said, ‘I wouldn’t recommend another fight.’”

Most of us seek clean transitions in life, craving closure and a clear conclusion. But life doesn’t always offer that. A draw in the ring is rare. Two consecutive draws against the same opponent? That’s a crossroads. As a young man, Mark Salgado faced an adult decision, torn between the lure of the ring and the pull of home – perhaps even a calling beyond the ropes. He made his choice.

Not long after the second draw with Avalos, on Aug. 8, 2023, Salgado moved back to Southern California. It wasn’t easy to leave San Jose or set down his career ambitions. (After all, who walks away from Dreamland?) But after weighing the risks, rewards and continued sacrifices he would need to make, Salgado realized that he had heard the bell ring for him for the final time.

“Boxing wasn’t my sole way of providing for myself,” he said. “For a lot of people, it is.”

Lucas Ketelle is a proud member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and author of “Inside The Ropes of Boxing” (available on Amazon). Contact him on X @LukieBoxing.