Super middleweight Samuel Arnold III recently knocked out Julian Delgado in two rounds, ending a six-month hiatus from the ring that was filled with highs and lows.
Arnold won the fight at the Centre 200 in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada, on December 7. The win over Delgado, 4-1 (1 KO), a 23-year-old from Corpus Christi, Texas, marked Arnold’s second win of the year and his first fight with Three Lions Promotions.
The build-up to the moment was anything but normal for Arnold, a 21-year-old originally from St. Louis but now living in Dallas. Earlier this year, he was forced out of a fight in March after he was involved in a car accident. The Ford Mustang he was in was hit by an 18-wheeler. Then there was the October 26 fight against Mohamed Zawadi that didn’t happen. Arnold detailed the scary experience that led to him being unable to fight after he had a scare during his trip from Atlanta to New York to Toronto.
“I was fine the whole flight,” Arnold said. “I was cool, but I didn’t drink any water during the flight. I was pretty much asleep the whole flight until I woke up and I felt a weird feeling. I was sweating real hard. I had a little chest pain, a little stomach pain, and I wanted to pass out.”
Arnold is coached by his father (of the same name), who sat beside him on the plane.
“I asked my dad to hurry up and give me something to drink,” said the younger Arnold, 11-0 (9 KOs). “The flight attendants just started bringing me a whole bunch of fluids and stuff like that. They wouldn’t let me pass out. They just made me sit up. Then I ended up getting rushed straight off the plane to the hospital in New York.”
This was during fight week for his October bout. Instead of making it to London, Ontario, Canada, he was delayed in New York by his uncertain condition.
“In the ambulance, it seemed like I was having a heart attack because of my EKG level,” Arnold said. “When I saw a cardiologist, he told me nothing was wrong with me. My heart is just thicker than most people because I’ve been doing something active my whole life, since I was a kid, like boxing.”
The official diagnosis was a condition called athlete’s heart. Arnold even conducted the interview for this story via Zoom while wearing a shirt that read: “I survived a heart attack and all I got was this t-shirt.”
Not quite accurate, but fitting enough.
Arnold was cleared to fight after the ordeal, but given that the weigh-in had already taken place, he was unable to compete and left without a fight.
“If I had flown earlier in the week,” he said, “I could have competed in that fight.”
A missed opportunity, but at least Arnold was checked out, deemed healthy and lived to fight another day.
Lucas Ketelle took an unconventional path to boxing, eventually finding his stride in gyms and media. For the past decade, he has hosted the Lukie Boxing podcast, filmed training camps for fighters like Arnold Barboza Jnr, Mikey Garcia, and Caleb Plant, and worked with top professionals like Mike Bazzel. Ketelle is also an author of Inside the Ropes of Boxing, a guide for young fighters, a writer for ProBox TV, BoxingScene, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Find him on X at @LukieBoxing.
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