Eric Gomez toiled to become Golden Boy president

Eric Gomez laughed when recalling his first fight-night duties at Golden Boy Promotions.

“One of my jobs was unfolding the chairs,” he said. “Putting the chairs on the floor, putting the little stickers with the numbers on the chairs, picking up the managers, picking up the fighters from the airport, renting the van. I’d do the travel, I used to do the hotel reservations, I used to do the medical certifiers, I used to do the licensing.”

That was 2002, the year Golden Boy opened its doors. Fourteen years later, on Sept. 7, Gomez was promoted to president of the company owned by childhood friend and Hall of Fame fighter Oscar De La Hoya.

Gomez on Thursday spoke in prideful tones about his move up the ladder of one of boxing’s top promotional companies. He went from chair unfolder to matchmaker to senior vice president to el presidente.

“It’s a validation of all the hard work, all the travel, all the sleepless nights, all the negotiations,” said Gomez, a 13-year resident of Temple City who graduated with De La Hoya from Garfield High in East L.A. in 1991.

Gomez admitted he was a little surprised at the promotion, but he has no doubt he deserved it.

“I’m a firm believer of, you work hard, good things are going to come,” he said. “That is something my parents instilled in me. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Now the burden is on Gomez to perform because, friend or not, De La Hoya isn’t going to let anyone take his prized company down the drain.

“It’s a lot more pressure because now, in many ways, you know, Oscar’s the chairman and CEO, but I’m running the day-to-day operations,” Gomez said. “So it all starts and ends with me. When we’re going good, I get the credit. When it’s going bad, I’m going to get the dirt.

“It’s a big, big responsibility.”

He knows he can do it, though.

“It’s kind of like a fighter,” Gomez said. “When a fighter goes into a fight confident, the fighter knows that he put in the hard work in training camp. He knows that he ran all those miles, he knows that he sparred all those rounds.

“And it’s funny, but it’s a little bit of the same thing here. I did my time here. I started from the bottom.”

Now he wants to take not just Golden Boy but all of boxing as high as he can. To Gomez, making the fights fans want is the only way to fly.

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“You’re not going to satisfy everybody,” Gomez said. “That’s never going to happen. Even in our heyday of making those great fights with Oscar, making the fight with (Floyd) Mayweather (Jr.), we were still getting criticized. People weren’t happy, for whatever reason.

“But it is important to listen to them and to try to accomplish what the majority of the fans want. They’re not always going to get it when they want it.”

Gomez used the highly anticipated fight between Golden Boy’s Canelo Alvarez and middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin as an example. Fans were hopeful it would happen this year. As it stands, it won’t take place until September 2017 at the earliest.

“But when it finally does happen, that’s when they come back,” Gomez said. “Another prime example is the Mayweather-(Manny) Pacquiao fight. That fight took what, six, seven years to get made? But what happened when it finally got made? It broke records. Four million buys, a record gate, sponsors.

“When you make the fights that the people want to see, they’ll come out. You build it, they’ll come.”

Kevin Costner would be proud of that analogy.

Shelestyuk vs. Herrera

Undefeated welterweight contender Taras Shelestyuk of the Ukraine will take on Jaime Herrera (15-3-1, 8 KOs) of Franklin Park, Ill., in the main event Nov. 4 at Omega Products International Event Center in Corona. It is part of a tripleheader that will be televised by Showtime.

Shelestyuk (14-0, 9 KOs) is ranked as high as No. 9 by one organization. He won a bronze medal in the 2012 London Games for Ukraine.

Shelestyuk, 30, did not make his pro debut until he was 27, so time is of the essence if he’s going to make a big splash in the pro ranks.

“My training is going great, I am more powerful and my speed is better,” said Shelestyuk, who is trained by Eric Brown at the Wild Card gym in Hollywood. “Herrera is a rough fighter, but it doesn’t matter to me because I am looking to step up and get into championship-level fights.”

ETC

Welterweight champion Danny Garcia (32-0, 18 KOs) of Philadelphia on Nov. 12 will take on Samuel Vargas (25-2-1, 13 KOs) of Colombia in a non-title, stay-busy fight at Liacouras Center on the campus of Temple University in Philadelphia (on Spike TV). Garcia is hopeful of tangling with Keith “One Time” Thurman (27-0, 22 KOs) in a title-unification bout in March. ... One of the three fights to be shown on that Shelestyuk-Herrera card will feature Vitor Jones Freitas (13-0, 7 KOs) against Manuel Mendez (12-1-2, 8 KOs) of Indio in the lightweight division. Freitas is the nephew of former super featherweight/lightweight world champion Acelino “Popo” Freitas of Brazil.