Kelly Pavlik, a 36-year-old former boxing champ (40-2 record, 34 KOs), revisits his career—retiring at 30 due to health and family—but now considers a comeback in cruiserweight while debunking financial motives. He critiques boxing’s fragmented titles (WBC, WBA, IBF, WBO) and judging inconsistencies, like his disputed loss to Jermaine Taylor or Deontay Wilder vs. Tyson Fury’s knockdowns, blaming promoter bias. Pavlik’s The Punchline podcast thrives on live Q&As with fighters like Mikey Garcia but struggles with YouTube engagement; he warns against PEDs and advocates functional training over traditional weightlifting. The era’s shift to streaming (ESPN+, DAZN) risks losing mainstream fight coverage, though he hopes profitability will revive TV broadcasts. [Automatically generated summary]
As we mentioned earlier, a buddy of mine, Mark LaMica, throwing some ideas around and kind of just taking a week out here in California to, you know, keep moving.
It always weirds me out that the UFC has little padding on the gloves, but there's no padding on your shins, no padding on your elbows, no padding on your knees.
This is something— You just think— I'm really thinking about it, and I'm working out, losing the weight, but at the same time, there's a lot of process behind that, too.
I would have to sit down with the family— Just go over a lot of things, you know.
So that's where it's going, why I don't want people also, the rumor mill starting that, he's broke, he needs the money, because it's absolutely not the case.
A lot of people don't understand any combat sport.
Combat is combat.
I'm not pat myself on the back.
I don't know if it's even good to say, but combat role champion athletes and fighters, mentality-wise, you're always going to have that mentality.
And my only reason why I'm even throwing this around, and I guess that's the right term to use, because if nothing comes of it, I don't want to backlash on that either.
Because I'm still only 36, and I'm at that point where I got that small window still, you know, where I'm not 40, I'm not 38, and, you know, I've been healthy for, you know, four and a half years, and I've been working out.
Yeah, but as I got older, yeah, it started getting a little more difficult to keep that, and I started getting up to like 175, almost 180. So now you're looking at a, and I'm still skinny at that point, so now you're looking at having to lose 20 more pounds again to get down at that age.
And it came to a point which caused a lot of issues for me in one fight with the Martinez fight, and after that, we had to jump up.
I love them guys because, believe it or not, in my opinion, that was a great fight.
And I've seen that they had that fight in the top 10 middleweight, one of the top 10 middleweight fights of all time.
And that's kind of a cool thing.
But also, you know, some of that commentating though really made that fight, especially at the end, in my opinion, made that fight kind of what it was also, you know, besides the fact of me getting dropped and everything.
But I didn't agree with the judging of it.
I still had me ahead.
I went back and watched it.
I'm not one of those egotistical people either.
I like to really break down what happened in that fight.
And if I lost a round, I would say I lost a round.
I was hard on myself with that.
I watched that fight now probably ten times, and I don't see where they had Jermaine winning.
I gave them one round plus the 10-8, so that's a total of three rounds.
Well, you know, I mean, we've had this conversation a hundred times in this podcast, but judging in boxing and judging in MMA, judging is just terrible.
It's sad.
It doesn't make any sense.
There's so many experts out there.
There's so many really reliable people that you can call on that would do a great job of figuring out what's going on in a fight, and for whatever reason, they don't get those jobs.
There's a handful of people I had the argument with that actually thought Charlo lost.
I didn't think that he looked as good as he could have in that fight, but I thought he won the fight, you know, 116 and 112. But I don't know what system they could try to break down for that or try to get to actually start making some of them fights fair, but boxing's doing fantastic the past two years.
I mean, the numbers are crazy.
You've seen what The Zone did with Canelo and So it's there.
The attention's at the sport and the popularity of it's coming back.
But what could eventually hurt it again is things like the judging of the fights and the outcomes.
Well, Teddy Atlas was explaining it too when he was on the podcast.
One of the things that he was saying was that they take these people out to dinner.
Like, they're all in cahoots and friendly with each other.
And if there's a certain result that the promoter would like to see, these judges will lean towards that if they have a good relationship with that promoter.
I mean, it was one of them fights where, yes, you're 100% right, that it could end in a draw, and I think everybody would be kind of satisfied with that.
Unfortunately, with the count knockdown, which I was so frustrated with the comments, and I had to stay away from the social media and the boxing groups and things like that.
There's been thousands of fights in the last 10 years and I've very seldom heard anybody complain about a count.
That fight, they don't do a 10 second count in boxing.
They go by the referee's count.
Right.
Another thing where Wilder kind of hurt himself, the referee tells you in the locker room before the fight, and he explains it to you, go to your neutral corner.
If you come out of your neutral corner, I will stop the count.
You know that.
So the first thing I used to do when I dropped somebody is I ran my ass to that neutral corner so that referee could start counting.
I didn't see any issue with the knockdown.
I even recorded it on my phone, and if you did go by the 10-second count, Tyson Fury still beat it.
I counted it almost right before his back hits the ground until where he got up.
And again, that's only a 10-second count without a referee even coming over to it.
But as far as the fight itself, I gave Wilder, obviously, the two knockdowns.
That's automatically four rounds.
And I gave him one other round after that.
I thought Tyson Ferry controlled the action, controlled the momentum of the fight.
On the flip side of it, I think that Wilder actually could have made that an easier fight too.
You know, Wilder actually has a hard time with his control.
He don't know how to really work to the body.
I don't want to put it on a trainer.
I don't know what the issue is with that, but he neglected that body a lot throughout the fight.
And I just thought that's why Tyson won most of those rounds.
You know, he just controlled the action, the pace, and was kind of able to do what he wanted to.
And I think that if Wilder went back with his trainer and watched the tape of that fight, they're going to see a lot of opportunities that were missed in that fight.
Usually most of them were football players or something like that.
And they kind of just got into the sport and...
Still, even to this day, you're talking about maybe three heavyweights that really could throw down, as where some of the other guys are just big, sloppy guys that come in.
I think right now, Parker's one of the guys that could actually still upset anybody in the heavyweight division, especially with that style that he has.
It's all about the leverage, how you torque, how you generate that power.
He's just one of them guys.
That's one of the things where you either have it, you got it in the cradle, or you don't.
That's another one you try to explain, even like in baseball.
You're either a home run hitter or you're not.
You could work on it a little bit and maybe knock one or two more home runs out or knock a guy or two out more, but if you don't have it, you're not going to unless you really go back over and find the time and patience to Reprogram that fighter and change the whole style.
Yeah, it feels like one punch knockout power you either have or you don't.
But the guys who can put it on you and stop you, like Julio Cesar Chavez, never had really that one punch knockout power, but he fucked a lot of people up.
When he was in his prime, the way he would fight was constant bobbing, weaving, moving in, and then once he put that pace on you, it was just constant damage, constant punches, the volume, the volume, the accuracy, and the fact that he never got tired.
He would just keep that pace up, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap, and you would see guys just start to wilt, just backing up all the time, just wilt under that pressure.
Well, you know, that comes down to another thing that I was breaking down.
Actually, I touched on it on my show a lot.
A lot of people get mixed up and confused on the fact of footwork with people.
And some of the guys that had the best footwork in boxing were not flashy guys with the footwork, or even like Mikey Garcia now, or like Bernard Hopkins is another one.
But you had the guys, Pranel Whitaker.
I know I'm going to probably get beat up on this.
He had decent footwork.
What I mean by that is because, yeah, he'd make you miss, But Pernell Whitaker a lot of times put himself out of range by moving like that.
You know, he'd make that move or he'd do it too much and then he wasn't there to counter.
So what good did it do?
You get guys like Chavez or Duran or guys like Mikey Garcia now, they take that one little step, inches and angles.
They take that one step and they're right in position for that punch and They take the opposite step to suffocate your punch and throw you off.
They spin you around.
That's where footwork comes in, and Chavez was great at that.
Again, and that was another argument on these that I get a little frustrated reading.
Second pro fight, usually in boxing, it goes like the first year, you're up four, six.
Second year, maybe you start getting up to eight.
But you get a good amount of fights under your belt before you start getting into the 10 rounds and 12 rounds.
You're talking about a kid coming out of the amateurs, fighting three three-minute rounds or four two-minute rounds, depending on whatever tournament or international tournament it is.
And he's going right into a 12-round fight.
I know myself coming up, and the process that Top Rank brought me up, which was a great process, too.
They picked the fights, and they made sure that the fights that they picked for me were the correct fights.
And they groomed me the right way, you know, by rounds and everything else.
And I know just jumping from 6 to 8, the difference in that, you know?
Let alone being a kid, and you're going into your second pro fight, and you're fighting a 12-round fight.
So if he lost that fight, which he came back and he made it a really close fight, I would have to tip my hat to him just on the fact that he was able to go 12 rounds.
People take a lot away from that fighter.
What he accomplished is something that not many can do.
I believe now there was at one point it was seven world champions and just that short period of fights I believe it's around eight now eight world champions he's fought in just that short period three different weight classes I think when he fought Rigondi out, you really got a chance to see how he handles a real world-class, you know, Cuban amateur system-trained, top-of-the-food-chain boxer.
And I thought that, you know, I was like, it's going to be a boring fight for the first, like, four rounds, which I still would have liked because I like watching that type of fights, you know?
And I see I go in there and I'm expecting this fight, you know, the amateur background of both guys, how talented the guys are and the skill level of both guys.
And then next thing I know, I'm two or three rounds into it and I'm going, he's playing with Rigondeau.
I took Lomachenko in that fight, but I thought it was going to be a close fight, a really close fight, and I thought Lomachenko was going to pull ahead in the later rounds and win that fight.
He's such a weird guy, too, because his background, you know the story where his father took him out of boxing and made him do traditional Russian dancing for several years and just made him learn that for footwork.
It seems like his dad was just a mastermind architect of a champion.
And if that really is that dancing background, like learning the footwork and the way he's so agile with the stepping of his feet, I think a lot of people are going to learn and mirror that.
I agree, but that's another touchy subject, because I kind of agree with you, but I also go back, because I'm always trying to really break down and nitpick.
I look at guys like Manny Pacquiao, who came from, I believe, 112 or something like that and went up all the way to junior middleweight.
Yeah, and you know what's even more crazy about it is being the opponent, because usually you go into a fight and you break down film and you're going over to film and you got a good idea of what he does right, what he does wrong, and what you might have to do.
Lomachenko, it's hard to pick up where he's going to go.
Different angles, so you can't...
You can't go, well, you know what?
After he throws the right hand, he likes to move over to the left because he does it one time and then the next time he's totally somewhere opposite.
You know what I mean?
And yeah, the angles, it's really almost impossible to break film down on him.
You know, like this last fight with this Pedrazo, everybody's going, that was the blueprint.
I believe in cross-training, and I think that there's certainly some skills that would make you better at different martial arts.
And I feel like if you have the ability to wrestle guys and move guys' bodies around that you would get from something like Sambo, I just feel like, as an elite boxer, having that extra strength, that extra ability to move your core that way, I think that would be beneficial.
I mean, the thing is, no world-class boxer has the time to also be doing judo and also be doing wrestling.
And I think my personal opinion of what happened, it wasn't fixed, you know, or fake.
I believe that he got hit with that right hand and seeing how strong and how the defensive skills that Mayweather had, and I think he said, you know what, this could be a long-ass night.
And then the next couple punches, he just kind of went down because he's seen what could happen.
Sometimes in a fight, a lot of times in a fight, the whole issue is you get hit with that and you're fighting and somebody taps you with a certain punch.
Your brain, you'll be surprised how fast it works, you know, and all the things that go through that mind.
And I think at that moment right there, he just knew going in, you could feel, just when somebody hits you on the arm or the shoulder, you know, how much power they have.
And I think he was trying to, after that, he knew that was going to be a long night.
I still think that he would win that, but I'm just saying as far as stand up and letting the hands go, I think those are one of the two better ones in the MMA. Yeah, I mean, that guy's got all the right in the world to just keep fighting freak shows.
It's interesting how guys who are really good defensively, they're not just really good longer because they have such good technique, but also they've taken less damage during their career so that they're more durable as they get older as well.
You definitely saw that with Bernard.
Bernard, up until the Joe Smith fight, Joe Smith was the first guy to really put it on him like that and knock him out of the ring.
It was hard to see that they had that ring set up too where he fell and landed on his fucking head.
Then I didn't like, just the way I am, I didn't like having a brace on it or nothing.
So that was an issue.
And there was a lot of things that sometimes if you could go back and you wish you could do it over again, but there was a lot of other things going on why we didn't postpone the fight.
First of all, it was sold out and the Youngstown people bought all the tickets.
We had the issue with the Paul Williams fight that it fell through.
So I just came off fighting Gary Lockett, who was really not a well-known name, a household name.
So if I would have postponed that fight, the backlash on that would have been bad.
Really bad.
It was more the ego thing, I think, and worried about what everybody was going to think.
Taking nothing away at all from, and that's where I wanted to tap into, taking nothing away from Bernard Hopkins.
Unfortunately, against A guy like Bernard Hopkins that had to have that happen to me is what sucks.
And he was a tremendous fighter.
I mean, he did things in there.
A lot of times I've seen him making moves and I knew what he was doing and I just couldn't pull the trigger on it.
And he was fast and he was strong.
And then there was times that He just did some crafty things also that got to me, and his body work in that fight slowed me down a lot.
But it was just one of them fights where I could honestly say that that was not an 80% Kelly Palak.
And I could be honest and say if I was 100%, I don't know if I would have won that fight.
And I'll be honest about it.
I'm not going to be the guy that comes here and says, well, if I was 100%, I would have knocked him out.
When you think about your legacy and you think about looking back at your career, those kind of fights where you had to take it when you were compromised, how do those factor in to you?
Yeah, you know, I got invited to the International Boxing Hall of Fame over the summer, and it was cool as hell to be there.
And you start seeing the inductees and everything, and you start breaking down your career.
Like, am I able to qualify for this, you know?
And is so-and-so going to get pissed off who didn't get in because I got in?
And I look at it, and I break it down a couple ways.
I say...
40-2 with 34 knockouts is a hell of a record.
You know, I held the belts for over three years.
I beat a handful of guys that were legit when I beat them.
And then I look at the fight, though, I fought Bernard Hopkins, and I got my ass whipped in that fight.
And there's no other way of putting it, you know, it's the truth.
So how much did that damage, you know, people remembering that?
Nobody looks at the fact of the two-way class jump.
And then coming back down and defending against a very game Antonio Rubio.
And then, of course, the Martinez fight, which a lot of people, and it was documented on HBO with the commentators, you know, the weight issue in that fight.
Well, it's just one of those things where when you look back and you think of all the great things that you did accomplish, then you realize that you retired at 30. Yeah.
So much room there.
30 is so young.
You're in your athletic prime.
I think they say 32 for a professional fighter they consider most athletic primes at 32. It was, but I look back on it again, the 42 fights.
And I've been fortunate to have what I have to be able to do all this on my own, you know, and go out there and be around everybody.
But yeah, so when I was fighting, you know, there was a lot of rumors around of the retirement, this, that.
And I think the final icing on the cake was we were supposed to fight Andre Ward.
And that's when Andre Ward ended up getting a shoulder surgery.
And that fight fell through.
And I've been out in California training or in Oxnard training for almost a year, which most fighters leave at the beginning of their career.
You know, when they don't have a family, when they're not making the money, that's their opportunity to try and go and make money.
Not when you're 12 years into it, you know.
And so I went out there and that kind of took a little bit...
From here, as far as the sport, even though I loved it and it was great training with Robert Garcia, I learned so much that I didn't think I could learn at that point in my career.
And when that Andre Ward fight fell through, I was done.
I mean, I rolled over, I never forget, I rolled over and told my wife, I said, I think I'm done.
She goes, what are you talking about?
I said, I think I'm retiring.
She started crying tears of joy because she wanted me to be done even before that.
She don't know the sport or what prime age is or not.
I hung them up.
Over the years, as we talked earlier, hearing her, I would get the itch.
That could have been just going to the gym and doing a round on the pads.
I just never wanted to keep doing it.
My health, believe it or not, is more important than anything else.
Because you're not fighting guys that are getting off work at 3 o'clock.
Right.
You're fighting guys that are legit athletes and skilled professionals at fighting.
And it's dangerous.
Unfortunately, we've seen, and you know, when we're talking about this with me getting the itch earlier, there's a lot of things I take into consideration.
Like, I'm really into it, and I'm really debating on it, and I'm hitting the gym working boxing.
Then I see things like this Adonis-Stevenson situation, you know?
And those are the things where I say, I've got to sit back and talk.
Yeah, and then to see him when he fought Nigel Benn, same situation, laps into that coma.
We don't know how Adonis Stevenson is going to come out of this, but a lot of times when a guy does have a traumatic brain injury like that, they're never the same again.
And it's weird because I'm in my gym and there's people lifting weights and I'm in the back.
I got a couple bags back there and you start hearing the bags popping and everybody, they're not used to seeing it.
So everybody gets curious and they come back and you see them peeking around the corner and watching me hit the bag and Then I get a little embarrassed.
I'm like, alright, you know what?
I'm going to chill with it right now.
So, yeah, it's fun.
It is.
It's a thought, again, and we'll see.
But a lot of that plays in my mind because the one thing is it becomes very selfish, too, at a point.
I got two young kids at home.
You know, that's going to be 13 and 10. They're involved in sports and a lot of activities.
That kind of format is, well, boxing fans in particular, well, I should say, just combat sports fans in particular, they love to comment on things, love to get in on it.
I mean, whenever there's a big fight, social media just lights up, both with boxing and with MMA. And the ability to go back and forth with a guy like you and get your questions answered and stuff like that has got to be huge.
He could have told me everything he wanted in the road.
He could have sat down for an hour with me, and I wouldn't have remembered what he said.
I was, you know, everybody's seen the fight, so I need not to say much more on that.
But a little bit of it, because my trainer was there, it was, you know, keep your head up.
You're a hell of a fighter, you know, and, you know, I'm experienced, and go back, go back to the drawing board, don't get too down on this, and come back strong.
He goes, you're a champ, and that was what he said.
I mean, he had so many great performances late in his career, the Tito Trinidad fight in particular, because nobody thought he was going to win that fight.
He was a big underdog in that fight.
Trinidad was the up-and-coming, rising Puerto Rican superstar, was fucking everybody up, and Bernard put on a show.
People say the—a lot of folks—I actually bought some—I never tried it, but I bought some nicotine gum to try to see if I would write on it, like if it would help me writing.
Because apparently it works as a nootropic, as a cognitive enhancer.
Nicotine is actually an effective cognitive enhancer.
And when he filed the civil suit a couple months into this, the criminal charges were supposed to be dropped at that point because the prosecutor and everybody knew that it was all about money.
Harry Arroyo actually held the title in the same weight class around the same exact time that Mancini did.
You had Jeff Lampkin, Greg Richardson, and then you had a handful of other guys like Roland Cummings and fighters out there that were making noise out of Youngstown.
A guy, Ken Signorani, who fought Chavez and Camacho out of Youngstown.
But, um, Being there like that, it brought a lot of attention and people wanted.
Is it, I mean, it's got to be strange to have grown up there, been a child there, and then become an internationally famous world champion boxer and celebrity and still stay there.
And they also now have a deal with the UFC. So into 2019, now the first UFC event is going to be January 19th, which is TJ Dillashaw versus Henry Cejudo for the flyweight title.
And they're really putting on some great fights on ESPN. It's just exciting to see MMA being recognized by ESPN. But it's exciting to see ESPN put Lomachenko fights on.
Because ESPN used to be kind of more so the prospects.
The Friday Night Fights were the up-and-coming guys.
And they were putting that on.
And that was great for the prospects.
I think they need to actually keep doing that maybe on a different night.
But now they're putting the Lomachenkos and they're putting the world-class fighters on ESPN. Was Terrence Crawford's last fight on ESPN? I believe it was.
I was even thinking about that at my gym, because I know how it is with business and ordering pay-per-view fights.
There was actually a funny story about that in Youngstown with that, too, where everybody thought it was My fault.
But yeah, you could get that.
I could have 40 people there on a big fight night, UFC fight night or a boxing fight night, and I could just put that phone right up to the smart TV and we could watch it on there instead of paying...
Last thing on my mind that I was worried about was who was ordering fights in Youngstown when I'm here in Atlantic City or Vegas right now fighting, getting ready, trying to make weight.
And doing the interviews and the press conference and everything else.
And as we just, what happened earlier, we don't know what's legal and what's not either anymore with all the different internet stuff and apps that you have with the smart TVs.
And WWE knows how to make the money, as we can all see.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, I think what's also great is some of these inside stations, you know, local stations and inside putting these fights on also, like they used to do back in the day, you know, the ABC fights.
You get a lot of guys in their 40s and 50s who don't want to have to watch an app on their TV. So I think if they start bringing back just a little more variety of shows or something.
Because when you get a guy that hits as hard as Triple G does, and you get a guy that's as good as Canelo, and even though they're not getting dropped and they're not getting knocked out, Them type of fights take a lot out of you.
They really do.
And they shared a lot in those two fights.
And we don't know, even right now, if the next fight or the fight after that Canelo starts showing some of the effects from those first two fights.
Two guys that hit that hard and they're in there fighting like that, eventually it does drain you a little bit.
And that will catch up.
I think a third fight will shorten the career of Canelo.
I'm not going to say Triple G because Triple G is my age now and I... I have a feeling that his might be getting short here pretty soon anyways, just due to age.
Did you think that, some people thought that Triple G won the second fight as well.
I thought it was a much closer fight than the first fight.
But did you think that Canelo or Triple G, I think Canelo showed some improvement, but it's also possible that Triple G might have slowed down a little bit.
The first half of the fight, I gave Canelo a lot of rounds because I thought he controlled the fight with the body shots.
Everybody thought Triple G was controlling it with the jab, but the reason why Triple G wasn't using his size and strength and was using his jab was because of the body shots that Canelo was landing.
I mean, they were brutal, and I just thought Canelo dictated the pace of those first couple rounds.
I thought he won enough of the early rounds, and obviously Triple G won most of the second half of the fight.
But I thought it was a little too late, you know, and I had Canelo up by a round or two.
Yeah, those are two fighters that really sort of epitomize what people like to see when they like to see these classic rivalries, right?
Like a guy like Triple G who's just forward pressure, constant, throwing bombs, knockout puncher.
A guy like Canelo who's just one of those classic Mexican fighters that has incredible heart, wants to fight the best of the best, like really takes it...
He might have got touched, like I said, even with the tension in that Mayweather fight.
The whole brain might have just started going 1,000 miles an hour trying to figure out, okay, this ain't going to probably work tonight with this guy because he's a lot stronger than I expected.
And he was just trying to maybe tire him out.
The only issue is now when you're on the ropes like that and you're getting hit by a guy that hits that hard in the delts, in the elbow, in the forearms, and to the body.
And then you're tightening up and you're tensing up really hard and you're cutting the oxygen off to the blood.
It tires you out quicker and it wears you down, you know, more than what he was doing in the middle of the ring by pop-shotting and counter-punching.
And he could have dictated how fast he wanted, you know, how much he wanted to punch, how hard he wanted to punch.
You know, and again, I don't know how long Triple G's going to fight because, as you mentioned, and I agree with you, I think he's starting to—his age is showing up a little bit with him.
Well, I mean, he got avoided by a lot of people, and we— You know, when he had a pay-per-view a couple years back that only got 150,000 buys, and I remember thinking, that is a damn shame.
Just them two guys right there, I would have to take.
Not so much overall skill-wise, just size and being at that weight.
And, you know, you got guys coming down like B-Vol from 175 to 168. I think that his better days are going to be at 160. Does he have a hard time making 60, or did he just have an opportunity to fight 68 and he took it?
I think it's the trophies.
And I don't blame him for that either.
He had the right fight to go up to 168, so he'll get another weight division under his belt.
That fight was, to me, well, it was a good learning experience for him to be in there with a guy who's as slick as Floyd is, but also a good learning experience that you're not supposed to suck that much weight out of your body.
What I do like about boxing that is missing in MMA is more weight classes.
I really think that, and that's one of the things that people have a problem with in boxing.
They think there's too many weight classes.
I don't agree with that.
I think, if anything, there's too many world champions.
I think it's ridiculous that in any organization that one guy could be a WBC world champion, the other guy could be a WA, there's an IBF, there's a WBO. I mean, like, that's crazy.
It's crazy to have that many world champions.
It should be a world champion.
But how do you decide what organization is the real sanctioning body?
So, like, how long can you stay undefeated until you finally get that chance to fight the top guy, the top dog?
And anything can happen in boxing, too.
You know, I kind of like maybe knocking down a three.
But I think when you have the different weight classes, now you got four people.
Just say one person has each belt.
You've got four world champs.
Now you're looking at these four guys, and you can start taking these prospects and start saying, this would be an interesting fight with this guy and this guy.
And then I do believe that they should make happen one undisputed champ.
Yep, they should have a fight off or a box off and the four champions, or maybe that way, keep the prospects in line and have the four champions fight off.
Then you know who's the undisputed champion and then your prospects get their shot.
I was a Hagler fan, but that's another one that's actually weird with me.
Even having guys like Mancini and Arroyo from Youngstown and guys like that, I never really had this one person that I was like, Or a poster in my bedroom, you know, like Deloy or something.
And I think that's what helped me get as far as I did in my career.
I mean, even when I was 16, I could watch a 9-year-old sparring and see him do something cool and hit a guy and I'd be like, damn, you know, I'm going to try that.
That actually might work.
I followed it and I was just a big fan of the sport overall.
Of course I had guys that like Gotti because of his style coming up and De La Hoya.
Sugar Ray Leonard, in my opinion, is probably one of the best fighters pound for pound of all time.
And it's arguable.
I mean, if somebody says Mayweather, I'm not going to say...
Yeah, I'm not going to say you're stupid for having a number one.
It's a great debate.
But yeah, so I followed it more as a fan, you know, and I watched, and I took from this person, I took from that person.
We had, as I mentioned, we had some prospects in the amateurs coming up that train in the same gym, and I would kind of copy their style, you know, coming up.
So I was always trying to keep learning.
Like, I even do, and working out now, I find different things that work, you know, and what don't work.
And that's what I did as far as boxing.
I just watched guys.
Here and there, I would copy for like two days, De La Hoya style.
You know, he'd be there with the hands up and picking them off with the hands.
I'd go in sparring.
I didn't try it in a fight.
I did it in sparring.
And I would copy his style a little bit to see how it works or how I could add it to my arsenal.
Well, what I'm hoping is more emerging talent in the heavyweight division will sort of take a little bit of this spotlight that you're seeing now that's going on.
Fury and Wilder and Joshua and a little bit of Ortiz.
I'd like to see more guys get in the mix there and have it be Like it used to be back then, where there are a bunch of really exciting contenders.
And you look forward to these big fights.
Because right now, there's like four guys, five, six guys at most, that are going to fight each other.
And hopefully what it does is it gets these other bigger guys, these athletic athletes and skilled athletes, and hopefully it brings them into the boxing again.
And no matter if it's heavyweight or not, at that level, you know, after being out, I tell people all the time with even young kids that are 21 and 22, when sometimes these promoters freeze their contract or there's a dispute going on and they sit out two years, sometimes...
Well, I think with things like Netflix and Amazon Prime, they're making these television shows now that are so popular and they're such high budget, but you get things like Game of Thrones.
It costs so much money to make, but so many people watch it.
I think they're concentrating on those kind of things because they're so profitable.
You know, again, these apps, people, I think that ESPN Plus had over 7 million-some subscribers when it came out because of the boxing and everything else.
Yeah.
And DAZN does the fights on there and boxing.
So you're going to have these coming out, and people are going to get into it.
You know, I think when the fans like to watch and see, you know, they want to hear from the historian or the guy that's the other commentator who just knows the sport and who can speak well.
Actually, it's funny, and I'm going to have to talk about it a little bit.
I was covering a fight, the Lomachenko-Perdraza fight, and he comes up to me out of nowhere, and he's like, hey!
Damn, you're getting big.
And he's smiling, he shakes my hand, and he walks down to cover the fight.
And I'm sitting there, and Look at watching the fights, and then I'm getting ready to head out after, you know, the fight's about over, and he comes walking up, and he goes, hey, if they offered you $10 million, would you make a comeback?
I'm like, I couldn't find a reason why I wouldn't.
I don't know.
And he smiled and he walked away and I was going, I'm scratching my head, I'm going, I wonder why, you know, why he would ask me a question like that.
And I seen recently that he's looking at certain fighters as a possible comeback.
And unfortunately, sometimes you get it when it's too late.
You know what I mean?
You really grasp it.
And it's just one of them things.
Even I was talking with a guy last night, and he brought up, he was originally from South Korea.
And he was talking about, he goes there all the time, big business guy.
And he says...
They actually studied my fight down there.
Something on how you can get knocked down.
This is more in your field, up your alley.
How you get knocked down and what gets a guy to get back up and recover, the recovery, the endurance, to pretty much have your brains rattle but be able to come back that strong rounds later and knock somebody out.
And for me, the simple answer is, of course, training hard.
Making sure I'm in shape.
But I guess what he's trying to figure out is, like, what's the brainwave?
What's the mindset?
What's the drive that gets you to do that?
What is the endurance of the muscles?
And, you know, that's pretty deep thinking, Lopez.
When you were talking about that, as far as what's going through your head, it's crazy because when I got knocked down, it was more of an equilibrium shot.
But I could hear, my legs were gone, but I could hear certain people in the stands, and I knew what was going on, and the first thing that was in my head was, man, you worked way too hard to go out like this.
I mean, what does that show, the Ninja Warrior or whatever?
I truly believe that he could go into that and do very well in that.
I mean he at the Ironman warehouse they have the little balls and he swings from each one up there.
He takes the 45 pound plates and he throws them up in the air and catches them back coming down.
Just crazy things like that and that's where I went to train after the Miranda fight.
I was doing all that shit on my own for the Miranda fight.
And then after the Miranda, he had told me, he goes, Kel, I got this place down here.
Come down and try it out.
And I was doing all that crazy stuff, man.
And it worked.
Again, it was strong.
The only thing that I wish I could have went back with that, now as time goes on and I'm training some athletes at my gym, is we have this machine called a Vertimax PC equipment.
And it's amazing.
I mean, it truly is.
You can emulate, more so than you can with the bands, what you're doing.
If you're a football player, you know, you can come up.
With the rubber band, your tension is usually gone at the beginning, and then you have to get to a certain point to get it, as where this has resistance all the way through.
So I wish they had that because adding that in with the functional strength training could have definitely made me a lot better than I think it could for a lot of athletes.
Now, when you were training and you were fighting, did you have a specific schedule of when you would do strength and conditioning and how many days a week you would run, how many days a week you would do physical exercises?
It worked for me for what I did when I was fighting, and I would totally have changed it now, knowing the stuff that I know and being involved in it and researching.
We used to run Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday three miles, and then take Thursday off, and then Friday and Saturday.
On top of that, I would do my strength and conditioning training, and then I would be at the boxing gym.
I took my Sundays off and I rested all day Sunday and I kind of ate a good amount of carbs and kind of what I wanted to on Sundays, depending on where the weight was out and how far out we were from the fight.
But I really don't believe in the theory of you've got to wake your guy up at 4 in the morning and make him run.
I don't.
If I was training guys, I want my guy to run out whatever I'm going to get the best run out of.
That's the time I want him to run.
He'll adapt, and especially after he keeps fighting, he'll adapt.
It's more mind over body.
But I think the gym is non-negotiable.
At 3 o'clock I like to train.
And if I was training guys, my gym hours would be between 3 and 7. Why do you like late afternoons?
Because it gets you closer to the fight night.
Especially closer to a fight, I would like actually for my guys to train about 8 o'clock at night, 9 o'clock.
Depending on what they have going on in their personal life.
And we have, yeah, Youngstown State University in Youngstown.
And I got one side that's pretty big.
It's steep.
You know, and it goes up.
And I would do that probably about three times at camp.
For a unbeliever, you've got to watch how many times you do that throughout a camp because it builds muscle, especially running that high, doing the steps.
And then when you start cutting the weight and you've got to get down, it's going to be hard to lose that extra pound, which can make a big difference come fight night.
Then I had sprints on the hills, and I did regular sprints because regular sprints is firing that fast twitch muscle, and it's also hitting that big muscle, and it's building the legs and strength.
um distance was was important but still another big one to me is the pad work you know the training at the gym i'm not a big fan of bag work anybody hitting the punching bag how come because uh you learn how to manipulate the bag and you learn how to uh trick your your trainer and everybody else i could go hit a bag right now and probably do 10 rounds on it you know just because i know how hard to punch it's hard to tell as to where when you're hitting pads i know how hard my guys punch and And I'm giving him the combos and
Do you remember when they didn't want you to lift weights?
They didn't want boxers to lift weights?
Like before Mackie Shillstone, before he worked with Michael Spinks, when he moved up to heavyweight and fought Larry Holmes.
I mean, remember people were saying like, they don't want...
Boxers to lift weights, that it's going to tighten you up and slow you down.
That was the thought process behind it.
And then from him, and then in particular Holyfield, when Holyfield went from cruiserweight to heavyweight, and he put on a lot of mass, that was Mackie Shilstone too, right?
You know, Tim Sylvia, or not Tim Sylvia, Tim Kennedy, who's a big, who was for one time, at one point, he retired now, but he was one of the top middleweight contenders.
He went through two camps in a row because one of his fights got canceled, rolled right into his camp and then fought, and then had no endurance in his fight.
You could kind of tell that he was drained.
It was just too long.
It was like six or seven months of really being in camp, something along those lines.
Because if I go in, I see guys all the time, not knocking at everybody, but I see them come in with their little notepad, and they have what they got, and I see them go over and they do literally only four sets on the bench, and they write down what they did, and then they go over and do some dumbbells, or same with the squats.
I feel you're limiting yourself.
I mean, you didn't work that muscle To, you know, failure.
And you should most of the time.
Because if not, that becomes maintaining.
You're not breaking down the muscle fibers, you know, and for it to recoup.
I feel, you know, when you go and lift, I'm not saying every exact time you have to kill it.
But when I go in, I want to do either a little bit heavier or more reps than I did last time.
You know what I mean?
For me to get to the point where I want to get and it has worked for me.
I do.
I feel like when you write down, the only time I do write things down is if I'm doing a chart.
I'll go through that chart and then when I finish with it, I finish out with so many reps in that same percentile of my PR. You know what I mean?
And I'll go down.
Now, then I have a speed day, an endurance day.
And that's when I rep out and I do sometimes up to 300 reps, you know, on the body part and speed and endurance.
And then before I even do that, I work on, say, if it's bench or squats, I get the bands.
And I have my guys do no more than six reps and it all got to be explosion because that helps in powerlifting for that one rep max, you know, the explosion off.
So it comes down, you know, and that's my theory on it.
He's got some interesting thoughts about strength training in particular because he's one of those guys, he believes you should do more rest in between reps, less reps, and you should do it more often.
So instead of like one brutal workout a week where you break your body down and you walk like you're getting fucked in the ass by a rhino for two days, instead of that...
You work out with less repetitions.
Don't go to failure, but do it two or three times a week.
You get more repetitions overall over the end of the week, but you'll be able to recover better, and you never get that full breakdown, but your body gets just as strong or stronger.
And I got guys who I got involved with, a buddy of mine, actually a coach, on, you know, certain days of the week.
We work on the heavy.
Lonnie Atkins, he's great.
He's a...
Six, seven-time world champion, powerlifting, drug-free, you know, federations like RAW and WMPF. And that's what I'm in because I feel like, you know, I'm not knocking the other people that use the steroids and stuff, but for me, I like going the natural route and, you know, it's funner.
I don't want to make anybody too mad, but when people use it, I feel like you're taken away, and I do feel like it's cheating.
I tell people in the gym, my gym, you know, there are certain people in there that do it, and they try to come over and tell people how to work out, and it's kind of like, listen, your working out is totally different than this guy's, and what you do to get big is totally different, all because of that reason.
And I got guys right now that are freaks of nature that do it, and you can tell that they're not on it because if they are, then they have to have a long talk with their dealer.
You know what I mean?
One of those type things.
But I like doing it because, for me, it's not cheating.
And also, I like the fact of when I hit a plateau...
I look, it's more fun for me to go through and research things and look at like, how do I get out of that?
And what's good nutrition that helps naturally raise this or raise that, you know what I mean?
And different workout routines, like the board work chains, you know, add that all in.
It's more difficult to get your body fat-adapted, but once your body does get fat-adapted, what I've found is I'm not on a ketogenic diet right now, but when I've been on it, I can get back in it pretty quick.
But it takes a while.
The first time I did it, It took a solid two weeks before I felt normal.
For two weeks, I was dragging ass.
It was hard to stick through it.
I didn't want to stick through it.
I'm just going to have a fucking apple and a bowl of pasta and blow this diet off.
But if you get through it, then you feel your body switch over.
When you feel your body switch over, what happens is...
You have more even energy throughout the day, less tired, no crash in the middle of the day.
But I do have to say it took a long time before my workouts felt like I could have the same intensity.
Yeah, and then the one meet, I was doing a 220-pound weight class.
I was 232. And my guy was like, you ain't going to make it in six days to get down to 220. And I kind of like, I chuckled at that because I had to make 160 before.
So I got all this fat sitting on me.
You're going to tell me I can't lose that in six days.
I watched what I, I didn't even do hardly any cardio for that.
And I still got down fairly easy to 220. Then, now where I'm falling into this bad habit is I'll have like a piece of cheesecake sitting in the refrigerator.
Because there's only one piece left and I don't want to do that.
And then the next thing I know, my sister-in-law, who's a hell of a baker, she makes something for the kids or makes me a homemade cheesecake.
And the next thing I know, I'm back into the same thing again.
Now, let me tell you something else that contributes to this.
I think all the years of fighting and having to watch my weight, especially for me to get down to 160, and even when I was fighting at 47 in the amateurs, my life was pretty much running.
It was a job.
It was time.
Somebody was there.
I just couldn't go run.
I had to run it so fast, and I was being timed for it in the distance.
I had to watch what I was eating.
I had people over me watching what I was eating.
And when I retired, I was like, fuck this, man.
I'm free.
You know what I mean?
And I sometimes put that in the back of my head.
I shouldn't, but I put it in the back of my head like, man, you deserve this, man.
Screw it.
You did that all these years.
But now it's coming to the point, too, like, You are getting a little older.
You look a little bit like shit other than your arms.
Like, you're going to have to start hitting a treadmill.
So I'm eventually, you know, I said when I get home from this trip, because like last night I went out with my buddy and we ate pizzas and stuff like that.
So, you know, I don't have the access to healthy food right now.
Chances are, if I didn't have to do it like that, I didn't have somebody hounding me or over me while I was running, chances are I would actually like running and I would like doing cardio and adding that into my training.
But because it was a job for all the mirrors from nine years old to 30 years old, It was like, screw this, man.
I don't want to run.
The only way you'll get me to run is if there's a fire or a big-ass dog behind me.
I love hearing when I was playing football and when I was in high school, when you're watching these big games, and you'll see it on social, or I'll be at a buddy's house and I see, yeah, well, I would have made that.
You know, we're through the social media, so I have to.
And these boxing groups, or even on our own fight, or punchline boxing group, you see the comments, and I'm just going, I'm like, I can't really answer that, though, because I'd look corny as shit if I answer that one.
Yeah, but yeah, punchline.live, and then, you know, or you go to YouTube, The Punchline with Kelly Pavlik and James Dominguez, and that's the way to get to it.