Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
Yeah, that is a guy named Ross Baines. | ||
He painted that. | ||
He's also painted this. | ||
There's a picture in the green room of me and Daniel Cormier. | ||
There's another one. | ||
I think he sent me the one of Masvidal. | ||
He did an amazing one of Jorge Masvidal when he landed this knee on Ben Askren. | ||
He's a great artist, but that's Richard Pryor. | ||
He painted that for me. | ||
Clearly, my screensaver used to be a collection of mugshots, like Jim Morrison, Frank Sinatra. | ||
I have Morrison out there. | ||
I have Frank Sinatra in the green room. | ||
Okay, so the thing is, I'm not a criminal, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Me neither. | |
I don't aspire to be a criminal. | ||
I don't either. | ||
But what are these, like, these mugshots are so iconic. | ||
Yeah. | ||
What does it mean to you to see, like, your heroes... | ||
Essentially charged with crimes and maybe one of the worst nights there alive. | ||
Well, it didn't start off that way. | ||
This is what happened. | ||
I was in Hawaii and I'm a giant Jimi Hendrix fan. | ||
That's why I named the podcast Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
I ripped off the Jimi Hendrix Experience and I was in Hawaii and I went to this art gallery and they had all this rock and roll art and they had this really dope collaboration of Hendrix, his mugshot was like six, nine. | ||
Nine images? | ||
Nine square images of Hendrix's mugshot. | ||
I go, that looks cool as fuck. | ||
And so I bought it. | ||
And I also bought the Rosa Parks one, and I also bought the Elvis one. | ||
They had three different, just nine squares on one piece of artwork. | ||
And I thought it looked cool. | ||
So I said, oh, that would be a good backdrop for the podcast. | ||
So the old podcast studio, I had those behind me. | ||
And then I started picking up other ones. | ||
I got Janis Joplin in the bathroom. | ||
I got Johnny Cash. | ||
I got James Brown. | ||
I got Pryor on the wall here. | ||
I got Jim Morrison. | ||
I got Steven Tyler on the wall over there. | ||
I just started collecting them. | ||
And there's no real rhyme or reason to it. | ||
I got Lenny Bruce. | ||
I just found mug shots and I just started collecting them. | ||
Like I said, my screensaver was that for like a year. | ||
And I even had Sinatra in my room Big, you know, a big one on the wall and whatnot, and I'm like, you know, what is this shit about? | ||
It occurred to me, like, everybody that became an icon and became a legend, like, you have to break the rules. | ||
There's nobody who just, like, followed every rule and that's what they're famous for. | ||
Like, hey, this guy never stepped out of line, did everything that everyone said he was supposed to do, did it all the ways that you're within the rules, and that's the fucking legend that you love. | ||
unidentified
|
No. | |
It's almost like it's illegal to be exceptional. | ||
You have You have to fucking break the law to make the imprint on the society that you want to make. | ||
Well, particularly in the time where these guys were doing their art. | ||
I mean, we're talking about Morrison and Hendrix. | ||
This is the 70s, the 60s. | ||
It was wild times. | ||
There's a transitionary period between the 50s where everything was like mom and pop and diners and fucking drive-thru movies and shit. | ||
Or drive-in movies, and then all of a sudden you have drugs, and wild rock and roll, and James Brown, and chaos. | ||
Right, but whatever you're not supposed to do, that's the thing you should be doing. | ||
I mean, within reason. | ||
We're not talking about harming other people or whatnot, but the society is like, restrictions? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's the boundary to keep you as a normal person. | ||
I wish I had a better answer. | ||
But if I had to really put my finger on it, I would say that those images represent these moments where society tried to contain these wild people. | ||
These people that were breaking the rules. | ||
These people that were trying to change culture. | ||
These people that were just doing their thing. | ||
And it wasn't like they weren't popular. | ||
I think Jim Morrison pulled his dick out, right? | ||
Didn't he pull his dick out? | ||
I mean, he was insanely popular when he pulled his dick out. | ||
And they're like, enough! | ||
That way he was insanely popular when he got arrested, finally, for pulling his dick out. | ||
But when you get arrested for pulling your dick out, it's never the first time. | ||
No, he's pulled his dick out. | ||
I know a lot of people have pulled their dick out. | ||
It's a weird thing, like that moment where the society that's trying to contain these artists lashes out and captures them briefly, but they don't even realize they're just making them bigger. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And they're making them more accessible. | ||
Hey, I got a mugshot. | ||
I mean, my criminal. | ||
It turned out the one from Hendrix was a bullshit mugshot. | ||
It wasn't a real mugshot. | ||
He never got arrested? | ||
He did get arrested, but the image that I had, some fucking artist took liberties and they decided, well, this is a cooler picture. | ||
Let's put his mugshot logo under that. | ||
So it was the actual words from Toronto where he got arrested for heroin. | ||
Underneath his image, but the image was incorrect. | ||
So then I went out and got the real image. | ||
So now that big... | ||
And I used to have them in the squares, but then I changed the squares to these big metal ones. | ||
See, the one I had is the upper right-hand side. | ||
That's the wrong one. | ||
That's not the real image. | ||
That is a cooler one, because if that went down there... | ||
Yeah, okay. | ||
That's the real mugshot. | ||
But don't do the one with the words behind it. | ||
The one next to it, Jamie. | ||
No, next to it. | ||
Right above, above, right above, right there. | ||
That's it. | ||
That's the actual one. | ||
See that one on the right-hand side? | ||
That's the actual image of Hendrix. | ||
Oh, I didn't know there's a Mick Jagger. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Well, the Yonkers one is Steven Tyler. | ||
I have that one on the wall. | ||
That's the side shot. | ||
But I didn't know Steven. | ||
Did you know that Mick Jagger got arrested, Jamie? | ||
Everybody's been arrested. | ||
Ordered that shit. | ||
Hold on to those and start ordering. | ||
We're going to get some new ones. | ||
Oh, David Bowie? | ||
We got the Janis Joplin in the bathroom. | ||
Fuck, I didn't know David Bowie got arrested. | ||
unidentified
|
Excellent. | |
That's Axl Rose right here. | ||
Axl Rose was a little cutie pie when he was younger. | ||
Look at him. | ||
The David Bowie one is pretty dope. | ||
That actually looks like it could be the cover of an album. | ||
Scroll back down again to that, please. | ||
Yeah, look at that. | ||
Jim Morrison looks like Chris Stapleton. | ||
Look how odd he looks there. | ||
1976. Yeah, he's guilty. | ||
Whatever he got arrested for that night, he was definitely dead. | ||
Arrested for being beautiful. | ||
So, dude, let's just get into this, man. | ||
We had this conversation at the Comedy Store. | ||
I'm like, you gotta come on the podcast. | ||
We gotta talk about this. | ||
Because you are a part of probably the most iconic boxing interview of our day. | ||
You with Deontay Wilder. | ||
When Deontay Wilder freaked out on you, it became this huge, huge fucking thing. | ||
To this day. | ||
He puts it on his Instagram. | ||
He puts it in hashtags. | ||
Till this day. | ||
He sells sweatshirts with till this day on them. | ||
There's a store that's adjacent to the Barclays Center. | ||
It's connected to the Barclays Center and it's full of shit. | ||
It says to this day on it. | ||
He had a grand opening there. | ||
I was invited to it. | ||
So not just an iconic meme, this is now a major part of my identity. | ||
Do people associate you with it though? | ||
Do they like automatically or do they just... | ||
You see the side of your face, but you see him as... | ||
Angry as fuck. | ||
Arguably the scariest heavyweight of all time. | ||
I mean, Mike Tyson's right up there. | ||
See, off ring, outside the ring, Deontay is a sweetheart. | ||
He's a really nice guy. | ||
So to see him angry outside the ring is kind of weird. | ||
Because I had him on the podcast. | ||
He couldn't be a nicer guy. | ||
That's true. | ||
He's a really nice guy. | ||
And so to see him angry at you, to this day! | ||
And like, giving you crazy eyes that was like, and when you explained it, it's like, yeah, that's what you do in an interview. | ||
You want someone to expand and say, what do you mean by that? | ||
And listen, man, this is not like the first day we met. | ||
It's not like I just happened upon this heavyweight champion of the world screaming and decided to piss him off. | ||
We've had multiple conversations. | ||
Sat down for hours at a time. | ||
In fact, in Belfast, in Germany, or Ireland, I'm sorry, we sat down for an hour. | ||
So I'm going to give you the context of what I was thinking in the moment. | ||
He's on stage. | ||
Some people might not be aware of exactly what happened, so just try to... | ||
There it is right there. | ||
In a couple weeks, we're going to see it again. | ||
I don't know if we're going to see the exact same thing happen. | ||
It comes up. | ||
It's seasonal. | ||
Deontay Wilder is facing Tyson Fury. | ||
Tyson Fury is a British gypsy. | ||
He's a boisterous, very animated showman in boxing. | ||
Heavyweights, mind you. | ||
These guys are giants. | ||
First time they met. | ||
This is December 18. So, I travel the world covering boxing. | ||
Everywhere. | ||
Like I said, I sat down with this guy in Ireland. | ||
I've covered Tyson Fury in England. | ||
I've covered him in America. | ||
I've covered boxing literally everywhere. | ||
So I'm familiar with what you also know that fighting, even combat sports, boxing, MMA... There's a regional aspect to it. | ||
Everybody's culture brings something to it. | ||
The Irish fighter feels like he's got a certain style. | ||
He's got a certain history. | ||
He's got a claim to the warrior legacy. | ||
Same for the British fighter. | ||
Of course, the American fighter. | ||
But both of these guys come from what's like an underclass of their society. | ||
Travelers. | ||
Gypsies in England are looked down upon. | ||
These people are cultural fighters. | ||
And I don't mean necessarily just the oppression of being an underclass, but fighting is part of their tradition, almost like it is to Mexicans in Mexico. | ||
It's something that they do that bonds the clan. | ||
They believe in the history of it. | ||
Obviously, Deontay Wilder is from Alabama. | ||
You know, he's as dark as midnight. | ||
He is a descendant of slaves for sure. | ||
Okay? | ||
He's got a history coming to any fight bringing what he experiences in this country to this element of the face-off one man, one man versus one man. | ||
So, When Tyson Fury is on stage during the press conference, it's something that possessed him to say, you know, I'm coming from a fighting people. | ||
My people have been fighting for 200 years. | ||
Well, in context, he means that the culture of travelers, of gypsies, is one of, we're fighting men. | ||
I'm a fighting man. | ||
That's something that they say about themselves and each other. | ||
So that's what he's bringing to this argument. | ||
That's how he's challenging Wilder. | ||
But Wilder takes that and says, 200 years? | ||
My people have been fighting for 400 years! | ||
Of course he's talking about the black experience in America, slavery, all alike. | ||
But mind you, he's talking to a British fighter. | ||
He's talking to a world audience. | ||
It's not like he's fighting Dominic Brazile, you understand, where it's two Americans, probably not going to get that much international attention. | ||
The world's watching, particularly communities that don't necessarily know when a black man says 400 years, you know, I know, you know, because we grew up in America, you know what we're talking about. | ||
The world doesn't know that! | ||
I travel the world, they're not just, they're not steeped in black American history. | ||
I've had conversations with him. | ||
He loves to talk about the plight of the black man in America and how it relates to his career, how he feels, you know, disadvantaged in certain ways and he carries the mantle in other ways. | ||
He's a champion of black America in certain ways and he's a victim of white America in other ways. | ||
So, when I see this argument happening, I'm like, oh, okay, well this is definitely a moment. | ||
But I'm not a pool reporter, right? | ||
So, in this particular instance, it's unusual for me to be part of the scrum, is what they call it. | ||
Collection of reporters, everybody's kind of shouting questions out, just trying to evoke responses. | ||
Usually I'm a one-on-one guy, I'll wait my turn, right? | ||
But on this particular day, I didn't have a haircut, I wasn't really... | ||
I just got back from Dubai. | ||
I went in Dubai with Dave Chappelle. | ||
I'm hanging out. | ||
It's after Thanksgiving. | ||
I'm just like, you know what? | ||
I'm going to kind of mail this one in, to be honest. | ||
I'm thinking, let me throw something out because I know what he's talking about and I also know that the audience around us, in the world especially, may not have caught that reference. | ||
But he is... | ||
It's a high watermark right now. | ||
It's Thursday and the fight's Saturday. | ||
So he's amped up. | ||
Yeah, that's the other thing. | ||
Fight week... | ||
Fighters are not them. | ||
So it's not the guy you were sitting across from doing the experience. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
That guy was having a good day. | ||
This guy's been waiting to fight for at least three months, if not, you know, ten weeks. | ||
Ramped up. | ||
Ramped. | ||
Right? | ||
He comes off stage, he answers a couple of other questions, and then, just to be sure, because I've been doing this a long time, I'm not an idiot, I know he's amped, and I want him to get the question clearly. | ||
Deontay, Radio Raheem, I say my name so he knows who it's coming from. | ||
Not because he doesn't know me, but because he does! | ||
So, Radio Raheem, you just said your people have been fighting for 400 years. | ||
Okay, first of all, I'm in the midst of my question. | ||
I don't do these things haphazardly. | ||
I word my questions very carefully. | ||
Yes. | ||
But in the ears of Black America later in the story, you'll find out that your people, that part of the question, became incredibly important. | ||
And people were very sensitive about that. | ||
Because you said your people instead of our people. | ||
Because I said your people instead of our people. | ||
But I'm fucking quoting the guy! | ||
I'm not speaking for him. | ||
I'm quoting what he said. | ||
He said, my people have been fighting for 400 years. | ||
So, if he had said our people, I would have said our people. | ||
But I can't take possession of your quote. | ||
It's not me saying it. | ||
It's you saying it. | ||
Your people have been fighting for 400 years. | ||
What did you mean by that? | ||
So, I mean, laser focus. | ||
Turns to me, he's already at 10. Like, there's no ramp up at this time. | ||
And he starts, you know, shouting my face. | ||
Like, your people too. | ||
Like, you know what I'm talking about. | ||
He says, don't try to bait. | ||
You know what I'm talking about when I say these things. | ||
I'm like, well, yeah, I do. | ||
Can you tell them what you're talking about? | ||
You're trying to get him to explain. | ||
I'm trying to get him to explain to the world what he's said to me on numerous occasions in different interviews and off camera. | ||
I know exactly what he's talking about, and I know that this is the moment that he finally gets to talk about it to people who have never been listening to him before. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
But... Because... | ||
When he heard your, it was a trigger for him, too. | ||
I'm so oblivious, and even looking back, I'm like, man, how did you miss that? | ||
I swear to God, I didn't know what the fuck was the problem. | ||
He starts saying, shouting your people, and I'm like, well, it took me him... | ||
He needed to keep saying it, because I didn't know why he was saying that. | ||
Yeah, my people, too. | ||
My people, too. | ||
Oh. | ||
There's a moment I'm like, oh, uh-oh. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, no! | |
I thought he's shouting at them! | ||
He's shouting at me! | ||
Oh, no! | ||
You know, our people have been fighting for 400 years. | ||
To this day. | ||
To this day. | ||
And... | ||
So, what I wanted... | ||
What I thought was happening... | ||
Was that... | ||
Okay... | ||
This moment now has become about him attacking me because he thinks I'm attacking him. | ||
He thinks because I do know what he's talking about. | ||
He knows we've spoken about it numerous times. | ||
He thinks I'm pretending. | ||
Not to know, like some, you know, air quotes, Uncle Tom or whatever, you know, the numerous names I've been called on the internet since, as though I'm trying to pretend like, oh, I don't, what 400 years? | ||
unidentified
|
What does that mean? | |
You know what I mean? | ||
I'm like, okay, okay, okay, fine. | ||
unidentified
|
So... | |
So when he's screaming at you, what is going through your mind when he's hitting you with... | ||
Is it to this day or till this day? | ||
Because there is a debate on that. | ||
First of all... | ||
Let's see. | ||
Let's play it. | ||
Play it. | ||
You know what I'm talking about. | ||
Y'all all know what I'm talking about, man. | ||
unidentified
|
Don't sit up here and try to bait and not know what I'm talking about. | |
Y'all know what the fuck I talk about when I say these things. | ||
unidentified
|
You're people too. | |
Explain it. | ||
Not everybody knows what you're talking about. | ||
unidentified
|
Radio Rahim, I don't have to explain what's understood, man. | |
You know what I mean by that. | ||
You know what I said by that. | ||
unidentified
|
I ain't got to go further. | |
And if anybody don't understand that, then God be with them. | ||
Go look up the history. | ||
Go look up the history. | ||
Don't everybody believe in Google? | ||
unidentified
|
Go Google that shit. | |
See what I'm talking about. | ||
You know what I'm talking about, man. | ||
I dare you to sit up there and say, explain. | ||
You know what I'm talking about, man. | ||
He's fighting people. | ||
You know we've been fighting 400 and still fighting to this day! | ||
To this day! | ||
To this day! | ||
unidentified
|
You just sit here and you don't know what I'm talking about? | |
Man, I'm out of here, bro. | ||
Let's go. | ||
unidentified
|
Let's go, man. | |
You don't have to keep playing it, but just so you know, there's more to this video. | ||
In fact, the last guy says, oh, we know what he's talking about. | ||
That's what I just said at the end. | ||
But that clip everyone in the world has seen fits very neatly on Instagram in a minute. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
Right? | ||
So you missed the beginning and the end... | ||
Welcome to 2020, or 19, or welcome to the new age of clips and things being taken out of context. | ||
So listen, this is not the first time I've had an interview that has gotten major attention. | ||
It's not the first time a fighter has been pissed off at me. | ||
I knew that this was going to be a big thing. | ||
I knew people were going to talk about it. | ||
Bro, I had no fucking concept of what was about to happen to my night. | ||
Basically, when you're a reporter like this, you're like, okay, well, that was dramatic. | ||
We got a hot one. | ||
That one might get me a few hundred thousand, if not a million views, maybe. | ||
Yeah, we got the champ. | ||
But also, I'm thinking, it's something of a success. | ||
We got him to express, at least in that moment, something that we don't usually see. | ||
It's fight week. | ||
We talked to this guy a million times. | ||
Everyone's had their interviews. | ||
He's been on every show. | ||
And that was like the realest moment in the whole buildup. | ||
So for me, that in and of itself is something of a victory. | ||
Like you've created a moment here where you got to see inside the champ's heart. | ||
You got to see like his passion. | ||
When I get home though, I gotta take a nap. | ||
It's been a long day. | ||
It's good. | ||
So, as these stories tend to go, I'm woken up by chimes on my phone. | ||
What the fuck's going on? | ||
What's going on? | ||
In the interim, he's posted on Instagram just a minute of what is really like a two and a half minute interview. | ||
Where it looks so... | ||
Bad! | ||
And then he's written, like, a paragraph, essentially, about having to, like, you know, teach people, like, basically not to be Uncle Tom, and how you gotta, like, straighten it out, and, like, there's a whole, like, civil rights diatribe, and I'm the pincushion, right? | ||
Like, I'm the straw man, I'm the guy. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
And I start to, of course, read the comments. | ||
I'm like, well, maybe, is there any possible way this is good? | ||
Bro, everybody's like, fuck that guy! | ||
Uncle Tom! | ||
Uncle Rug is sallow! | ||
You know, I always hated this motherfucker. | ||
Oh no! | ||
Oh no! | ||
I'm also not a stranger to criticism. | ||
I'm not a stranger to YouTube comments. | ||
I live on YouTube. | ||
It's one of the most vicious places on earth. | ||
If you ever want to get humbled, if you're ever feeling too big about yourself, post a YouTube video. | ||
Let it sit there for about an hour and then start reading the comments. | ||
I don't care who you are. | ||
It'll bring you down a notch. | ||
But this is another element. | ||
Bro, Rihanna was upset at me. | ||
I don't want Rihanna mad at me. | ||
I don't even know Rihanna. | ||
Like, why? | ||
How do I want to start our relationship this way? | ||
unidentified
|
Like, what is going on? | |
Snoop Dogg! | ||
Snoop Dogg! | ||
Who we all now know can be incredibly vicious when he's upset at somebody over something. | ||
Like, nobody. | ||
Yo, teach that fella. | ||
Like, yeah, you know, put it inward in his place. | ||
unidentified
|
Like... | |
Bro, Snoop Dogg's mad at me? | ||
How about these things? | ||
What are you feeling when this is going on? | ||
How many knots are in your stomach? | ||
I'm panicking. | ||
I'm panicking! | ||
I'm way more comfortable with him shouting in my face and having no idea whether or not... | ||
This can go any kind of way. | ||
But at least I understand the moment. | ||
At least I'm in control of half of it. | ||
This is a train on fire off the rails. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
And of course, the more people respond to it, celebrities and other fighters and the like... | ||
The more emboldened he is to double down on it. | ||
Like, hell, this is a moment. | ||
The fight's not selling well. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
They've been giving him stick overseas for not being known anywhere. | ||
They're saying you can walk down the street and, you know, Eddie Hearn did this video where he's asking people in New York, like, do they know who Deontay Wilder is? | ||
And he made a whole video of them saying no. | ||
So at this moment, you also have to give context of what's happening in his career. | ||
At this moment, he's knocking everybody out. | ||
He's WBC heavyweight champion. | ||
He can't get the fight to unify with Joshua. | ||
They're saying he's a nobody, essentially. | ||
He's not worth the money, because nobody knows who he is. | ||
He's fighting, arguably, the toughest fight he could have possibly picked. | ||
Tyson Fury is an incredibly technical fighter. | ||
No one thinks of Deontay Wilder as a technical technician. | ||
Like, they're thinking this guy's gonna get outclassed. | ||
He could lose his belts this way and not be making... | ||
He's not like made a shit ton of money for that fight. | ||
So, now that all his attention is on him, and like I said, it's a subject he loves to talk about, he's a hero. | ||
He's like a champion of black America in this moment. | ||
The only... | ||
I'm just like, you know, collateral damage. | ||
It's a casualty. | ||
I had to boost the fuck out of that fight, though. | ||
Take itself through the roof. | ||
The moment's viral. | ||
It's everywhere. | ||
People didn't even know the fight was happening until this meme just is in their inboxes. | ||
People are like... | ||
Look at this. | ||
The to this day meme is taking over the internet and it'll speak to your soul. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh my goodness. | ||
This became, like, the flagship moment for black woke people to tell, like, you know, the black sellout class. | ||
unidentified
|
Look at the meme, too. | |
It's Kermit with a fucking oxygen mask on, and it says, you still on your parents' phone? | ||
Me, dot, with this. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
The fucking internet! | ||
The internet is so goddamn funny. | ||
It's undefeated. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
At this point, it's kicking my ass. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
Goddamn, dude. | ||
Yeah, so... | ||
As this thing gets bigger and bigger, I start to realize that it's well out of my control. | ||
And then I have to start to think about what my role really is. | ||
It's not about me. | ||
It's not what I do isn't so that people can feel one way or another about me. | ||
It's really, again, taking myself back to that initial moment of showing them something about the fighter that they haven't seen. | ||
Let's get a look inside this guy and get him to share something. | ||
Usually... | ||
Just verbally that they didn't know or that he didn't come to the room expecting to share. | ||
And I support People understanding the culture from which he, we, come as black Americans. | ||
I wanted to give him the stage to do exactly that. | ||
Didn't turn out like I expected, but it did become an iconic civil rights, I guess, type of moment. | ||
It became one of those things that people identify with. | ||
Black power, black information being like, yo, this is what we're experiencing. | ||
And this is how deep it still runs at that time in 2018. Did you think about it, like, in retrospect, how could I have phrased that better? | ||
I mean, sure you did, right? | ||
What could you have said? | ||
Because you wanted to get that out of there. | ||
You wanted to get him to expand on it. | ||
I think that it was exactly the right thing at the right time. | ||
I couldn't have predicted in a million years it would have went that way, but that's the way it was supposed to go. | ||
If I had phrased it so-called better, and he had given a more reasoned, thoughtful answer, we wouldn't be sitting here. | ||
He would have made less money, too. | ||
The fight would have sold less tickets, less pay-per-views. | ||
That wouldn't have went viral. | ||
You wouldn't have gave a shit about my side of the story. | ||
Like, the moment doesn't exist! | ||
Right, right. | ||
And that's the beauty of it. | ||
When you were telling me in the back of the Comedy Store, I'm like, oh shit, that's you! | ||
Right. | ||
Oh my god! | ||
So the blessing and the angle on the camera work, in some regard is, some people don't know it's me. | ||
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And I'm so happy for that! | |
Oh my god. | ||
But the ones who do, there's enough who do, so I'm telling you, Joe, every day since then, it's been over a year now, someone, somewhere, every time I've left my home, and sometimes while I'm still in it, has shouted in my face, TO THIS DAY! That's how they say hello! | ||
Some people don't even know my name! | ||
To this day! | ||
To this day! | ||
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Oh my god! | |
Oh my god! | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
But, you know, hey man, it's a godsend, really. | ||
It's something that captured everybody's attention in a moment. | ||
And if it had been anything else, I can't imagine how it would have done that. | ||
It wouldn't have. | ||
No, it had to be that crazy in his eyes because he's so ramped up getting ready for that fight and he's so angry. | ||
He takes the glasses off. | ||
I'm like, I remember watching. | ||
I was nervous. | ||
I was nowhere near him. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You must have been shitting your pants. | ||
Okay. | ||
But you know him, right? | ||
So you probably weren't shitting your pants, but you're probably like very uncomfortable. | ||
I absolutely was not shitting my pants. | ||
In fact, in the exchange, I'm quite calm. | ||
I'm just trying. | ||
On the one hand, I'm trying to figure out, What's happening in the beginning? | ||
Because I didn't understand the rage being directed at me. | ||
I'm telling you, for a minute I thought he was just talking to White America. | ||
I was like, yeah, get him. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
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I'm halfway through this thing. | |
I realize this is my bad. | ||
Oh my goodness. | ||
Yeah, get him. | ||
Once he's like, I'm done. | ||
He walks off in disgust. | ||
I then find him 20 minutes later, and I interview him again. | ||
This time, in much more calm and reasoned fashion, I let him lay out what it was about, what I expected to happen the first time. | ||
A lot of people have seen it. | ||
Not a fraction of the people who've seen that. | ||
I do know the guy, but as you know, these people are warriors, man. | ||
And their blood's running high. | ||
And he saw red. | ||
At that time, we weren't friends. | ||
We weren't homies. | ||
He didn't remember Belfast. | ||
He thought I was coming for him. | ||
So even though I know him... | ||
I don't know him. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
I don't know what's really going to happen in this moment. | ||
Right. | ||
I'm just doing my job. | ||
I can't be afraid to do that. | ||
So whatever happens in this moment, this is what it's going to be. | ||
You've got a great perspective on it, though. | ||
You're so right that without that moment blowing up like that, the fight doesn't become as big as it is. | ||
The meme doesn't exist. | ||
You don't become more popular. | ||
Right. | ||
And he even did a segment before a fight on Showtime where he went through a black history segment. | ||
Because of that. | ||
Because of this! | ||
Like, it actually created a moment that put him in position to be the kind of representative of that issue that he wanted to be. | ||
And it gave me an opportunity to be seen, even though in a lot of quarters initially negatively, I was also seen as a journalist who pulled that out. | ||
Like, I'm the other guy. | ||
I'm the guy on the other side of that camera that, yes, created that moment. | ||
And I've been doing this long enough to where my fan base, people who know my work, who understand me, they know that I think they know I'm not an idiot. | ||
And I like to think they know I'm not a sellout, but they don't really know me because I don't ever make it about me. | ||
This interview we're having is a unicorn. | ||
I've maybe done three or four or five of these in my entire life where I'm talking about my perspective on anything. | ||
I'm entirely showing up at every press conference, every fight, every weigh-in, every media workout, trying to get something out of the fighter to be consumed by the audience in a way that maybe they hadn't seen it before. | ||
Not just for the audience's sake, but I want the fighter to get in touch with something. | ||
There's so many of these platitude questions and the same old shit, and nobody's really digging deep. | ||
These aren't one-dimensional characters. | ||
These aren't actual bulls. | ||
These aren't just gladiators. | ||
They're fathers. | ||
They're sons. | ||
They have civil rights issues. | ||
They have cultural things they're bringing to this thing. | ||
They have depression. | ||
We know all the things that fighters go through, but they only want to show you one side. | ||
Because they don't want to show any vulnerability. | ||
And their fans aren't interested in anything other than who's up and who's down if that's all you're feeding them. | ||
So I try to get out of the way. | ||
I don't want to get in front of the work. | ||
So when people see me in this line, a lot of people are just like, oh, this guy must be a fucking Uncle Tom then. | ||
Wilder, Rihanna, and Snoop Dogg think so. | ||
Clearly, that's who this guy is. | ||
Have you talked to Snoop since? | ||
No! | ||
I didn't talk to Snoop then! | ||
He just put it on Instagram! | ||
That's what I'm saying! | ||
Oh no! | ||
But I have talked to Wilder many times since then. | ||
And to this guy's credit, even the 20 minutes after... | ||
You're right. | ||
We did know each other. | ||
We do have a history. | ||
And he is now knowing the moment that he created and knowing what he did to me in that moment has always been especially gracious. | ||
He's always been especially helpful. | ||
I can always get access to him. | ||
We have a bond now. | ||
We share this thing that's inextricable no matter what happens. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Oh my goodness. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
I don't think there's another boxing interview like that ever. | ||
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Ever. | |
There's nothing like it. | ||
There's nothing like it. | ||
There's one where like, remember when Larry Merchant was talking to Floyd Mayweather, he's like, you were 20 years younger, or if I was 20 years younger, I'd kick your ass. | ||
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Right. | |
To me, with all due respect to Larry Merchant, a legend and an icon on that microphone, shouldn't have said that. | ||
Of course not. | ||
Yeah, that's ridiculous. | ||
It's not always ridiculous. | ||
It's preposterous. | ||
You're talking to the best boxer ever. | ||
You would have kicked his ass when you were younger? | ||
Oh really, Larry? | ||
How old was he going to be at the time? | ||
Because when you were 50, he's probably still an embryo. | ||
At that time, you probably could have kicked his ass. | ||
Yeah, when he was four. | ||
Anything after 10, I'm rooting on Floyd. | ||
But Larry in the moment made it about him. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Yeah, well he did that a lot. | ||
If not made it about him, he insulted fighters. | ||
A lot. | ||
There was a lot of that. | ||
I feel like what Merchant did that people objected to was he had his own standard by which you had to win the fight and by which you had to get his respect even if you won. | ||
That everybody doesn't share. | ||
And it's like there's no... | ||
He existed in a vacuum. | ||
This is before the internet. | ||
And one of the things I think about internet commentary in the age of the internet is you're accountable. | ||
You're accountable in a different way. | ||
Back then... | ||
If you were Howard Cosell or if you were anyone who was commenting on sports, you really could kind of get away with it other than what radio guys would say about you or journalists would say about you. | ||
But the regular person didn't have a say. | ||
Didn't have a voice. | ||
Now the regular person has a fuckload to say. | ||
Trust me, as a commentator, I mean, I know when I've made mistakes. | ||
I don't have to read the comments. | ||
I know if I fuck something up. | ||
But they'll let me know. | ||
I don't mind. | ||
In fact, I encourage a regular person to have something to say. | ||
It's these strange motherfuckers that are like, really should probably pipe down. | ||
If you, and you do, because you're on YouTube and you're on the internet, the amount of comments that are useful or thoughtful or like, eh, okay, interesting. | ||
90%. | ||
Maybe 92%. | ||
But there's like 8%. | ||
That 8% of really just like vitriolic, racist, sexist, like violent trolls. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Shitposters. | ||
That's a good way to put it. | ||
Yeah, that's the expression. | ||
Shitposting. | ||
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You never heard that before? | |
I haven't heard it, but it's wildly accurate. | ||
It's like a Reddit thing. | ||
Right? | ||
4chan? | ||
Reddit? | ||
Yeah. | ||
They call it shitposting. | ||
Guys do it on purpose. | ||
All they're trying to do is get a rise out of you. | ||
They're trying to say the most fucked up thing to you to make other people laugh and to get a rise out of you. | ||
And if you met them in real life, they'd be like, I'm sorry, I'm just bored at work. | ||
Like a lot of them. | ||
Or they're 12. You know Deontay went and beat a guy up that was... | ||
Oh, well that guy that he beat up, that guy is fucking crazy. | ||
That guy would fight every... | ||
You know, Floyd Mayweather Sr. beat his ass. | ||
Did you ever see that? | ||
I didn't see that. | ||
Yeah, what the fuck's his name? | ||
Charlie Zelnoff? | ||
Is that his name? | ||
Ah, yeah, that is his name. | ||
That rings a bell. | ||
When I was watching him box Deontay, I'm like, is this guy out of his fucking mind? | ||
And then Deontay was beating his ass outside the ring. | ||
He wouldn't let him go. | ||
I support that. | ||
I support that too. | ||
That guy's a troll. | ||
And he sucker punches people. | ||
He tried to sucker punch Floyd Sr. Floyd Sr. was beating his ass. | ||
And he got tired and he quit. | ||
And Floyd Sr. moved away and he jumped through the ropes and took a wild haymaker swing at him. | ||
But I think he's legitimately mentally deranged. | ||
There's something wrong with him. | ||
Mmm, I did see that. | ||
Yeah, Deontay beat the fuck out of him. | ||
But those are the people that are like the loudest in the room. | ||
A normal person will post a comment for or against criticism or congratulations and kind of leave it at that. | ||
Maybe like a couple other posts. | ||
But that kind of guy, a shit poster, it's going to be every couple of hours. | ||
He's going to be engaging people. | ||
He's going to be all over your threat. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Look at this. | ||
Imagine he ate that left hook and just sat down. | ||
I mean, he's fortunate he's still alive, but then he still went after him. | ||
That was his thing. | ||
He would go, no, no, no, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done, and then he would run after him. | ||
He basically fights like he comments. | ||
Well, he's just a crazy person. | ||
There's something wrong with him. | ||
I think that the internet now is to a place where you can drag people, you can change their lives, you can actually put them in harm's way by stirring up a fervor around being violent towards them, that everybody should have to be identified on the internet. | ||
I don't believe in this anonymous Posting, shit posters, all this shit. | ||
The problem with that is there's a lot of people that have things to say that are important. | ||
They don't want to suffer consequences at work or their job. | ||
They want to be able to whistle blow and say, hey, there's like some safety problems here or there's some sexual harassment here or there's this or that. | ||
There's benefits to being anonymous and then there's negative aspects of it. | ||
I see both things. | ||
I mean, that person, is that in a comment section though? | ||
This is what I feel like. | ||
I feel like if someone is saying some horrible shit, then yes. | ||
But if someone is just explaining something that's going down, like, there's people that have talked about, like, unfair labor practices or things that are going down at work, and they literally have to be anonymous in order to leak this information. | ||
Particularly if they're talking about someone from another country and they're doing it through a VPN. Like, they have to do it this way. | ||
They have to do it anonymously. | ||
Otherwise their life is in danger. | ||
And they need to get the word out. | ||
There's real crimes taking place. | ||
There's a real issue. | ||
I see your perspective that there's a lot of cunts online and they think it's cute and those fuckers should be outed. | ||
I'm not sure that you should be... | ||
There are times in which people are unjustly punished for having reasonable opinions or going against the grain or something like that. | ||
But, generally, if you say something publicly, for public consumption, you should be willing to accept the consequences of that. | ||
There's no again if it's not something where you are putting yourself in danger to expose a crime Right, but who's doing that? | ||
comment sections are on my Instagram No, that's different. | ||
But here's the thing. | ||
You shouldn't be reading that shit anyway. | ||
Everyone says that. | ||
I say I don't read it. | ||
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Everyone says that. | |
You can't not read it. | ||
I don't read it. | ||
I don't read shit. | ||
Really? | ||
I don't read a goddamn thing. | ||
Okay, when the show goes up, whatever show it is, the next experience, for the first hour or two, you're not scanning it a little bit? | ||
No fucking chance. | ||
No fucking chance. | ||
No, I have discipline. | ||
I mean, I have in the past, like way long ago, but within the last couple years, I don't... | ||
It's a waste of time. | ||
It's not good for you. | ||
And what are you going to learn? | ||
You're awesome? | ||
What are you going to learn? | ||
What are you going to learn? | ||
People love you? | ||
If people don't love me by now, like some people don't love me by now, what am I doing wrong? | ||
I've been doing this fucking show for 10 years. | ||
I'm assuming some people enjoy it. | ||
Yeah, that's true. | ||
I mean, I enjoy talking to regular folks. | ||
Like if you said, hey man, I got a lot out of that episode where that doctor talked about this or something. | ||
Oh, okay, cool. | ||
That's awesome. | ||
I like that. | ||
Those are fun conversations. | ||
But just throwing yourself into the wolves of the comments, covering yourself up with fucking blood and just leaping into the pen of wolves. | ||
I am willing to throw myself on the fire just to pick out the few little pieces of charcoal that I can use to warm my next interview. | ||
I don't consider myself one of these people who come to an interview with an agenda and I've got a point of view and the fighter has to answer to me. | ||
More so, I'm gleaning from the audience what it is that they want to know. | ||
Perspectives that I may disagree with personally, but I want to present their perspective to people they can't get at or talk to. | ||
So I have to be listening to what they're saying and understand how they're consuming information. | ||
You don't have to be listening to what they're saying about you. | ||
Say if you were talking about, you know, you're going to interview Canelo or someone through an interpreter, you would, you know, there's plenty of people with perspectives on Canelo. | ||
You don't have to listen to anything they have to say about you. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's dangerous. | ||
It's not good. | ||
See this wrestling match that you're doing inside your head? | ||
Everybody does this. | ||
Everybody does this. | ||
The solution is don't read the comments. | ||
People saying mean, horrible things about you, don't read it. | ||
Don't read it. | ||
Look, if people are talking about you right now in a barbershop somewhere, you don't know. | ||
Yeah, that's true. | ||
Should you go there so you feel bad? | ||
Should I listen to every word? | ||
That's basically what you're doing if you get it into the comments. | ||
At a certain point in time, it becomes untenable. | ||
And in my life, it's untenable. | ||
The volume is insane. | ||
It's not possible. | ||
And it's not healthy. | ||
And most of it's positive, right? | ||
If I go on my Instagram, if I looked at comments, I'm sure most of it's positive. | ||
But I just post and go. | ||
Post and go. | ||
Do people stop you in the streets to give you their opinion? | ||
Because you call fights, and everybody's got an opinion. | ||
You know what? | ||
Political comments more than anything, man. | ||
I had a fucking guy where I was playing pool, and he wanted to talk to me about an Abby Martin interview that I had. | ||
Yeah, you let her off the hook. | ||
And I go... | ||
I'm here to play pool. | ||
I'm not here to talk fucking Venezuela with you. | ||
I don't know jack shit about Palestine. | ||
Like, just leave me alone. | ||
I'm here to play pool, bro. | ||
I'm like, this is work. | ||
I don't come to your job, right, and then fucking talk to you about some shit. | ||
Like, don't. | ||
Come on. | ||
Or come to you in the street and talk to you about your job. | ||
This is, you know, I'm happy to talk to people, but I'm not going to debate whether or not they're right or I'm wrong. | ||
You put so much more yourself out there. | ||
I'm out there plenty. | ||
I don't need to be out there any more than that. | ||
Yeah, so they don't know me. | ||
I don't put anything out there like that. | ||
Well, you put it out now. | ||
Now people get you. | ||
So here we are. | ||
Well, people get that, you know, the way you explained it backstage when we were at the Comedy Store. | ||
I was laughing so hard because it was so funny. | ||
Like, the emotions of it all. | ||
Like, you explaining what it was like. | ||
Like, of course I fucking know what he's saying. | ||
I was trying to get him to explain it to people who might not understand his personal perspective. | ||
Yeah, and it's still such a big part now of my identity that it can't be understated how big... | ||
One minute! | ||
The thing was one minute on Instagram. | ||
And it's the way that a lot of people identify me. | ||
They say to this day more than they say my name. | ||
And it's also his most famous clip. | ||
Unquestionably. | ||
Knockouts. | ||
Yeah, 40 knockouts. | ||
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Still! | |
They care more about that than those. | ||
But you have to look at it this way, I think. | ||
I mean, you don't have to, but this is my perspective. | ||
This thing that can abuse us, the internet, with comments and 15-year-old assholes saying mean shit to you. | ||
What it also is, is an avenue for you to put your stuff out there that would not have existed before. | ||
Before, you would have had to been hired by CBS or ABC or whoever, name it. | ||
You don't have to be hired by anybody anymore. | ||
But the other side of that is the comment section. | ||
Now, you could be one of those guys that turns the comment section off, but... | ||
Man, I don't think that's a good idea. | ||
I don't think that's a good idea either. | ||
We accidentally had the comment section turned off back when we used to stream... | ||
Because we were streaming live and it wasn't that we turned it off, but we had it off. | ||
We had the chat off on the streaming because people would just like say a bunch of rude shit just so that other people had to read it while the podcast was going on. | ||
I'm like, look at these people are just taking advantage of this. | ||
But something happened when we flipped it over to live. | ||
There was a bug. | ||
And for how long was it that it did that, Jamie, where the comments were turned off? | ||
It wasn't that long, but it was long enough for people to freak the fuck out. | ||
And I'm like, hey, hey, hey, I'm not turning any comments off. | ||
Like, you fucking say whatever you want to say. | ||
I'm not reading it, but you say whatever the fuck you want to say. | ||
Go have fun. | ||
So, this medium, this avenue for putting out content never existed before. | ||
It exists now. | ||
But also, people's ability to comment exists. | ||
And I think most people are rational. | ||
Most people, the vast majority, are just commenting on it. | ||
They might disagree with you, they might think you suck, they might tell you why you suck, but they're pretty rational. | ||
They're like, man, he just talks about himself, or he does this, or he has to bring it back to that, or he blah, blah, blah. | ||
You know, there's going to be people having their perspectives, and then they debate those perspectives with other people in the thread. | ||
There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
But there's going to be a certain percentage that are out of their fucking mind, or they're 15, and they're angry. | ||
And, you know, like, I was just talking about this in the last podcast with my friend Justin Martindale. | ||
I was like, when I was 15, man, thank God Twitter wasn't a thing. | ||
I would have said the dumbest shit. | ||
I would have found celebrities. | ||
I would have said mean shit to them. | ||
I mean, I was a fucked up kid. | ||
And they'd be digging those tweets up now and, like, canceling you today. | ||
Well, they're doing that to kids now that get gigs. | ||
And then they're finding their tweets when they were 17 and 18 years old. | ||
And now they're 24. Like, hey, it's a different fucking human being, man. | ||
Like, we need a path to redemption for people. | ||
And Twitter and Facebook and all these comments that are permanently on the record, they make it really difficult for kids. | ||
I would not want to be in high school today with a Twitter account saying the dumbest fucking shit in the world and then having that come back to haunt me when I want a job someday. | ||
You don't know what the world's going to be like in 15 years. | ||
No one knew. | ||
Hopefully, you're not the same as you were 15 years ago. | ||
If anything, let's commend the person that doesn't look anything like they'd look when they were 15 today. | ||
But we don't want that. | ||
Nobody wants that. | ||
You know, there's a thing with comedy, right? | ||
Where you have to leave your town because they won't appreciate you. | ||
They remember you when you sucked. | ||
Like, when I lived in Boston, when I started out as an open mic, I was fucking terrible. | ||
Everybody's terrible when they start. | ||
I was terrible. | ||
And so, they thought I was terrible. | ||
And then I left. | ||
I had to leave. | ||
I had to leave. | ||
Even though I'd gotten better, they still thought I was terrible. | ||
I had to leave, and I had to get TV shows, and then come back. | ||
And then they're like, oh, yeah, you got better. | ||
He's okay. | ||
Yeah, but... | ||
The people that you would go to Pittsburgh, they never saw you before. | ||
They're like, you're hilarious. | ||
I'm like, thank you. | ||
Tell the people in Boston, would you? | ||
But what about the internet for comedians? | ||
The kind of thing that you do developing bits and having to have an opportunity to put them on stage before everybody sees them. | ||
And like you say, they see the joke at all different stages. | ||
How can you create a bit on the road with as much internet, as many people posting your jokes? | ||
Most people don't. | ||
Believe it or not, most people are cool about it. | ||
Sometimes sets get leaked, like Louis C.K.'s set. | ||
That was a big deal. | ||
He hadn't done stand-up in 10 months. | ||
Most comedy fans don't want to ruin it for everybody else. | ||
Most. | ||
Most. | ||
If you're a real comedy fan, like if you go see Dave and he's working some shit out at the store, you're not going to film it and put it online. | ||
Most people are not going to do that. | ||
Yeah, I mean, there's no better example for me than Dave Chappelle on how to do it. | ||
I mean, that's how he's met at the Comedy Store, you and I. Obviously, Dave's my best friend. | ||
And I've watched him walk through these minefields of all this shit. | ||
And the main thing he likes to say is, you know, live right now. | ||
Live in the moment. | ||
Put your phones away and just be present. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I've never seen a guy other than him be able to convince an entire room of people. | ||
I don't even mean at his own show. | ||
He'll pop up somewhere where everybody's already got their phones out. | ||
They're filming Mayer or The Roots or whatever it is that they came to see. | ||
They will come out and be like, put those damn phones away. | ||
Let's make a memory and put an entire room of people who can stuff those phones in their pockets. | ||
Even Dave, when Dave and I do gigs on the road, we use those Vero bags. | ||
No, what is it called? | ||
Yonder. | ||
Yonder bags. | ||
What is Vero? | ||
But he even started that. | ||
Yeah, Yonder bags. | ||
I've been doing Yonder bags for years. | ||
The first time I ever used them, the Denver Comedy Works actually started using them independently. | ||
And the first time I had heard about them, It's been a few years, but comics, like Ali Wong, she used them at all her shows. | ||
I used them a lot up until my last Netflix special, and then I got tired of using them. | ||
It's just like, I'm like, I don't want to tell people to put their fucking phone away. | ||
You know, the most hilarious thing was Miami, because Miami is such a party town, right? | ||
And half the audience is probably coked up. | ||
And it was the only audience when they had the yonder bags where they just kept getting up and going outside because they wanted to use their phone. | ||
They didn't just sit down and enjoy the show. | ||
Most places, 99.99999%, everybody just sits down. | ||
And they go, alright, my phone's in the bag, now let me just enjoy the show. | ||
And it makes the show better. | ||
In Miami, the whole audience is people getting up and going out and coming back. | ||
Getting up, going out, and coming back. | ||
They go to the bathroom. | ||
They go to the bathroom to either do coke or to fucking get their phone out of their bag. | ||
Right. | ||
Because they're trying to get pussy or whatever the fuck they're trying to do. | ||
They're just wild people. | ||
If they're coming back, you're doing your job. | ||
If Miami keep coming back, you're good. | ||
Well, they would definitely keep coming back, but it was just like, it's hilarious what the culture of Miami is so different than anywhere else. | ||
They're such wild people. | ||
You should have a passport to go to Miami. | ||
And I don't mean because people there are from other countries, and some of them are, but it's because the culture is different. | ||
The white people there, the Latinos, everyone's different there. | ||
Miami is like visiting another country. | ||
It really is. | ||
It's a wild-ass place. | ||
I was in Miami for the, essentially the first time over Super Bowl. | ||
It's like the first time. | ||
Oh, it's a wild place, man. | ||
I didn't actually spend any time there. | ||
Did you go to South Beach? | ||
I went to South Beach. | ||
I went downtown. | ||
It's a wild fucking place, man. | ||
But it's so cool. | ||
I feel like every, and I didn't do like the party party scene, even though it was Super Bowl. | ||
I like went the other way with it. | ||
I was so like, kind of drained already. | ||
I was like, you know what? | ||
I'm just going to relax in Miami while everybody else is turk to like 12. Yeah. | ||
It's one of the coolest places I've ever been. | ||
Great food, man. | ||
The most fantastic Cuban food you'll ever find. | ||
A lot of Caribbean food. | ||
And the women are so beautiful, too. | ||
It's a crazy place. | ||
It's a crazy place. | ||
It really does feel like another country. | ||
I do love about this phone thing and people sharing so much when I talk about the different cultures in combat sports. | ||
That gives me access to everybody being on their phones. | ||
The one thing that's everywhere is YouTube. | ||
I don't know if you know this, but like you said... | ||
There was a time when the only way you could have a voice or certainly comment on boxing or MMA or sports is if you got hired by a major network that had a reach where people could see you. | ||
Somebody has to die before you get that job. | ||
Right. | ||
But Larry March has to retire. | ||
Exactly. | ||
But I came up in an age at the very beginning of YouTube. | ||
I was training at Wild Card Boxing Gym. | ||
I'm a teenager training there. | ||
The gym is fairly new. | ||
It was still like mini DV days. | ||
And I had a camera that I would use to shoot sparring sessions. | ||
And because Freddie has a gym, Where there are world championship fighters preparing for title fights on television. | ||
The class of fighter that's in there on any given day sparring are like main event ticket selling marquee guys. | ||
And I'm in there shooting their sparring session, name anybody versus anybody. | ||
And I'm using the money I'm making selling the sparring footage back to the fighters to pay my gym dues. | ||
That's how I started. | ||
So that's what you're going to do. | ||
Journalism. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
It's an interesting story. | ||
unidentified
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Commentating. | |
Because I was doing broadcasting since 10th grade. | ||
I was at a performing arts high school. | ||
We had a radio station in the basement. | ||
It's like a coming of age, like 80s movie or some shit. | ||
Christian Slater. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
Blow the dust off the equipment. | ||
Ask the faculty, can I Do a show. | ||
And so, I'm covering headline news and whatever a fucking 10th grader thinks is important and who won the football game and this kind of shit. | ||
But I always thought that I'm going to be a talk radio guy. | ||
Never sports though. | ||
I've been training boxing since 5th grade. | ||
But never did I think the two shy would meet. | ||
Except that I've moved to LA right after high school. | ||
I'm in Freddie Roach's boxing gym. | ||
I'm training. | ||
I can't barely afford dudes. | ||
I've got to come up with a way to do that. | ||
I start shooting sparring sessions. | ||
And this is like James Toney is still fighting. | ||
We're getting the sunset of his career, but he's still the man. | ||
And there's a guy named Danny Green, who is an Australian fighter, wildly famous there, but doesn't have a global audience. | ||
He wants to fight James. | ||
There's no real money in it for James. | ||
But if you know James Toney, this is no shrinking violet. | ||
This man is insane. | ||
He was wilder... | ||
If to this day was every day, that was James Toney at Wild Card Boxing Gym, right? | ||
So this guy flies from Australia, walks into the gym, and you know what a sacred place those are. | ||
The main fighter at any gym, the guy who is the representation of the toughest dude in that- The top dog. | ||
Yeah, the top dog. | ||
You don't just walk into that guy's gym and start talking shit. | ||
Especially with James Toney. | ||
Especially with James Toney. | ||
No one talked more shit than James Toney. | ||
He'll talk shit in the middle of a round, right? | ||
Exactly! | ||
Famous for it. | ||
All throughout rounds. | ||
This guy comes to the James gym, starts talking shit. | ||
James is like, get in the ring right now. | ||
The last 10 rounds, I'll fight you anywhere. | ||
You can get the fight. | ||
He takes the challenge, gets in there, gets the shit beat out of him for like 8 rounds. | ||
It's pummeled. | ||
I'm shooting the thing. | ||
Is it right here? | ||
unidentified
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Oh! | |
Look at this. | ||
Okay, first of all, I'm wildly impressed that you came up with this. | ||
I don't even know where to find this. | ||
Look how good he looks, too. | ||
James looks good. | ||
I'm shooting this! | ||
Oh my goodness. | ||
And this is James in his prime. | ||
He looked like he was a fucking heavyweight. | ||
Look at the size of him. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Was James heavyweight at this point? | ||
Was cruiserweight? | ||
I think it was cruiserweight. | ||
He was still cruiserweight. | ||
Goddamn, he's huge. | ||
Right. | ||
He's on all the Mexican supplements. | ||
Look at the size of them. | ||
Oh man, that's so funny. | ||
I haven't seen this footage in I don't even know how many years. | ||
Dude, James is fucking him up. | ||
Okay, but the point being that at this time there really wasn't any... | ||
Keep that plan. | ||
Keep that plan. | ||
This is great. | ||
ESPN might give you a highlight of De La Hoya. | ||
You might get a Mike Tyson knockout clip. | ||
But there's nobody sitting around talking boxing. | ||
There's no place to see fighters training. | ||
There's no websites for fights. | ||
And after this thing got done... | ||
I'm like, hey, you know, Danny Green doesn't want it. | ||
He's got the shipping of him. | ||
James Toney doesn't care about it at all. | ||
So I'm just going to go home and record over it. | ||
Yeah, because this is my side hustle. | ||
Listen, man, I'm a very young man at this time. | ||
I need every VHS tape I can use. | ||
I need every mini DV I can use to keep the money in my pocket. | ||
I can't just be stockpiling footage nobody wants. | ||
But before I get a chance to tape over it, I get a call from a site called Max Boxing. | ||
And at that time, they were pretty much the only boxing website. | ||
What year is this? | ||
I want to say this is probably close to 2000. Wow. | ||
Yeah, 2000. And... | ||
They say, hey, we heard Danny Green came down a wild card and they had this brutal sparring session. | ||
Look how much bigger James is. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He looks so much bigger. | ||
They don't even look like they're nearly in the same weight class. | ||
James looks like he's 20 pounds heavier than him. | ||
Doesn't he? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, of course he does. | ||
But, you know, I mean, by weigh-in day, he'll get down. | ||
But this is how James, like, rocked. | ||
Every day, he'd be just banging guys, talking shit, beating them up, talking shit. | ||
Even though now, looking back, of course, it's amazing footage, but at the time, this could be any given Wednesday. | ||
Right. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Yeah, it happened there all the time. | ||
You know, he used to spar with Mickey Rourke. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
And that's one of the reasons why Mickey Rourke had to get his face worked on, apparently. | ||
Yeah, Mickey Wark used to come in a wild card, and he used to spar James, which is like, someone needed to talk to him. | ||
You're like, what are you thinking? | ||
Hey, Mickey, come here. | ||
Come here. | ||
Look at me. | ||
Oh, there's McAfoli. | ||
Geez, man. | ||
Wow. | ||
God rest his soul. | ||
unidentified
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God rest his soul. | |
So, what ultimately ended up happening was I got a little bidding war going for this video. | ||
It was such like a hot piece. | ||
And I got it up to like... | ||
Looks like Danny's in pretty fucking good shape and James is getting tired. | ||
Was there moments in this where James looked really tired? | ||
The thing about James Toney at this time, he always looked really tired. | ||
He always seemed like he was being lazy. | ||
He's always leaning on fighters. | ||
But what you can't hear is the thud of those shots. | ||
Like, he's just turning shit over. | ||
unidentified
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Can we hear some volume, Jamie? | |
And it's... | ||
unidentified
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Come on, Paper Champ. | |
Come on, Paper Champ. | ||
Is that James? | ||
unidentified
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yeah you hear freddy in the background talking to him she did some camp So they went eight rounds like this? | |
Yeah. | ||
And then what happened at the end of it? | ||
Danny Green still seems like he's kind of in it. | ||
No? | ||
I mean... | ||
In the beginning, it looked like James was fucking him up. | ||
Yeah, I mean, Danny had spots where he's connecting, but at no point during... | ||
And mind you, his face is getting bloodier. | ||
Right. | ||
Like, the shots that James was throwing are consistently heavier, and James is just having an easy time with him. | ||
It's not like anything that Danny's doing is making an impression. | ||
So how did they end it? | ||
It was just over. | ||
Danny had enough. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
And this became Gym Wars. | ||
What I did with this footage, ultimately, was I took it and went to an editor named Brian Hardy, who was the editor for Max Boxing at the time, and he got Doug Fisher, who's now the editor-in-chief of Ring Magazine, and I to commentate that footage as though you're watching it on HBO. Oh, wow. | ||
Right? | ||
So, Doug's doing the color. | ||
I'm calling the fight. | ||
I'm the Lampley, and he's the Kellerman. | ||
And we showed the whole thing. | ||
I talked about the context of what had happened, like I told you. | ||
And we're calling the fight. | ||
And this show, Gym Wars... | ||
It blew up. | ||
It was like the first big boxing thing on the internet at all. | ||
And so I would go around to different gyms and get fighters, and they all started at wildcard, and then I would branch out and get fighters to agree, let me shoot the sessions and turn it into a show called Gym Wars. | ||
And so the way... | ||
These guys now get their phones and their cameras and they go interview fighters and all this shit. | ||
I started that. | ||
That wasn't a thing before I started doing it. | ||
I'm the one who created this medium by which you now receive boxing news. | ||
Wow. | ||
So... | ||
My entire career and trajectory in life was changed at a boxing gym and never to look back. | ||
Were you a fighter at one point, Dom? | ||
Never. | ||
Never. | ||
You just used to train? | ||
Always trained. | ||
Since fifth grade, always trained. | ||
And taken it incredibly seriously. | ||
I've heard you talk about this, too. | ||
And it couldn't be more true. | ||
This was a way for me to release all of those... | ||
Young man angst, all that frustration. | ||
It's really my therapy. | ||
I could barely afford gym dudes. | ||
You know I can't afford therapy. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Boxing was that. | ||
It was like an integral part of my life. | ||
I spent hours in the gym to where I had to figure out a way to make some money there so I could continue to eat and pay for it. | ||
And that was my way of doing it. | ||
unidentified
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Oh. | |
And so interviewing fighters is now my claim to fame because everybody thinks they're reinventing the wheel now. | ||
You can't shoot anybody sparring or anything like that. | ||
So that show had to go away. | ||
But the way that I relate to and understand fighters and what it is that's inside them, that they're experiencing, that's driving them, I think is unique. | ||
Because although I would never, ever classify myself as a fighter, that's such a... | ||
A unique and cherished banner that you can really hold if that's really what you do. | ||
I'm a warrior too. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
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In my own way, I forged a career. | |
I created something that didn't exist and I had to fight every step along the way to make it a thing. | ||
So is this something while you were doing it, you were realizing like, I'm making a career out of talking about boxing. | ||
Were you doing that or were you thinking, well, I'm doing this for now and I'm going to do something else? | ||
I kept doing what was working. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
And at times I thought about doing something else, but never did I spend as much time thinking about or applying myself to anything else. | ||
So yeah, other things would come up, but it all would come back to this. | ||
I would always go back to the gym. | ||
Because Dave is a crazy boxing fan, too. | ||
And I remember Dave talked to me at one point in time about the three of us doing something. | ||
This is a while back, right? | ||
Strap season. | ||
Dave and I have a show called Strap Season. | ||
And the best way I could describe it is it's like the Anthony Bourdain of boxing, if you will. | ||
As I've said, I go all over the world covering fights. | ||
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
Every community of combat sports has its own culture. | ||
Every fighter's got its own story. | ||
Every fight's got its own narrative. | ||
That's connected to another fight. | ||
That's connected to another fight. | ||
That's got a historical point of view. | ||
And that's how I see the world of combat sports. | ||
That's how I see boxing. | ||
It's through that lens that this show exists. | ||
And you're right. | ||
Dave's a phenomenal boxing fan. | ||
He knows his shit. | ||
He goes to the fights. | ||
He takes his whole crew to the fights. | ||
Buys everybody ringside tickets. | ||
We talked for hours on the phone about any and every fight that's upcoming. | ||
And we met in Macau at Pacquiao Rios. | ||
Wow. | ||
Brandon Rios. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That was in Macau. | ||
Yeah, that was in Macau. | ||
It was Rios and then Algeria. | ||
He fought Algeria as well. | ||
That was a mismatch. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Brandon Rios, he was a good fighter. | ||
A tough guy. | ||
But man, that's a fight where you really saw how great Pacquiao was. | ||
Seven knockdowns. | ||
And that's when they let him out of the cage. | ||
Remember that shit? | ||
He just lit him up. | ||
He just lit him up. | ||
That was crazy. | ||
You know, Pacquiao's been doing it. | ||
He just did it recently to Keith Thurman. | ||
You keep wanting to run this guy off. | ||
40 years old. | ||
That's gotta be it. | ||
You can't do that again. | ||
When he did that step in right hook over the shoulder and drop Thurman, I was like, holy shit. | ||
Bro. | ||
And mind you, that guy... | ||
Is why Wild Card Boxing Gym, including Freddie Roach, is the most famous gym, I would say, in the world. | ||
I would say more famous in this day than even Gleason's. | ||
I think you're right. | ||
But the first time I interviewed Manny Pacquiao was at the Vagabond Hotel, which is now torn down because it was condemned, next door to the gym. | ||
On an air conditioner, one of those protruding air conditioners from the wall, with seven other guys in his hotel room, all living in the hotel room. | ||
It's me and Manny Pacquiao on an air conditioner doing a one-on-one. | ||
Doesn't he have that thing where if he has a house out here, he'll have 20 dudes living with him? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, this is the most generous guy I've ever known in my life. | ||
Manny Pacquiao does things that just defy reason. | ||
As nice as it is, you want to shake him. | ||
Like, yo! | ||
Not a hundred people on the private plane! | ||
Buy them normal tickets! | ||
He has to keep fighting, probably, just to keep up that payroll. | ||
Yeah, I guess he's got to keep fighting. | ||
He's got to be a senator. | ||
He's got to endorse pistachio nuts. | ||
He's got to do everything. | ||
Because it's like water. | ||
He wants to feed the people. | ||
He wants to be that guy. | ||
And it's genuine. | ||
And he really is an outlet. | ||
The money will flow through him if he keeps going. | ||
That's right. | ||
That's right. | ||
So you just got to imagine me meeting, of all people, Dave Chappelle, of all places, in China, in Macau, because he's there for a fight. | ||
So Dave flew in for the fight? | ||
Flew in. | ||
Flew his family in. | ||
The Chappelle's were there for the fight. | ||
And now that I know him well, that's not unusual at all. | ||
He does that. | ||
He loves boxing to that degree. | ||
So we spent, like I said, hours just talking about boxing on the phone. | ||
And when we get together, we have these dinners on fight night. | ||
And we're like, you know what? | ||
This is something that could be something. | ||
And we ended up shooting for like two years of following me around. | ||
The dinners we had. | ||
Countless people had these dinners. | ||
Michael Buffer. | ||
We wanted you. | ||
We still want you. | ||
Like these things that you know and I know about combat sports. | ||
About this community of fighters. | ||
Is something I don't think anybody else could do. | ||
You have to be a part of that conversation because you're really the only one who can talk about it from the perspective that you do. | ||
I know a lot of people that comment on MMA, as I'm sure you do. | ||
I know a lot of people that comment on boxing. | ||
I know people who dedicate themselves to the community, to the sport, to the spirit of it, like you do. | ||
Like I do. | ||
And that's what makes it unique. | ||
There's a lens through which you can see this shit that really a very, very few people can show you. | ||
You're that guy. | ||
Well, those people, particularly the MMA people, they demand it. | ||
You can't be a casual observer of MMA. You can't. | ||
They won't allow it If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about You saw what happened with Stephen A. Smith recently? | ||
I did Yeah, that's what happens, man And part of it is like Luke Thomas has an interesting He's a really good MMA journalist He had a really interesting take on it Where he's saying that part of it is that There's a thing in this sport Where they don't want outsiders Like, people that cover other sports, like, no, no, no, you don't know this sport. | ||
But if you do jump in, god damn, you gotta know what the fuck you're talking about. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
You gotta really know what the fuck you're talking about. | ||
And Steven's thing is being entertaining and being dismissive of people and, you know, kind of in an arrogant way and, you know, insulting. | ||
You know, that's his thing. | ||
I mean, he creates controversy. | ||
That controversy creates a lot of people watching and paying attention. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
That shit does not fly in MMA. These guys are literally fighting for their life. | ||
I mean, they literally are moments from death several times in certain fights. | ||
There's moments where guys are out cold and you see a guy dropping an elbow on their face and smashing their orbital bone before the referee can get to them. | ||
You can't make fun of those guys in that way. | ||
You can't talk shit about them. | ||
They're not going to allow it. | ||
That's correct. | ||
Nor should they. | ||
There's five fighters that we know about that have succumbed to injuries in the ring and died just last year. | ||
And you can't bring your shtick to this shit. | ||
And I don't think it's... | ||
Save that for sports with balls. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
Save that for countdown shows. | ||
Well, sports where people hit each other are different, man. | ||
They're just different. | ||
It's a different thing. | ||
The reason why Deontay was so amped up and wild before that fight, you're not going to see a basketball player like that four days before the NBA Finals. | ||
They'll be tuned up and ready to go, but they're not ready to go to war. | ||
They're literally putting their fucking health on the line. | ||
It's a different thing. | ||
Of course, we respect all sports, but this kind of... | ||
The risk that you're taking and the individuality of it. | ||
Even though you got a guy in the ring, got a cut man, you got somebody working your corner, it really is just you out there when that bell rings. | ||
And you're not just fighting the guy you're looking at. | ||
You're fighting the guy inside you that wants to quit. | ||
You're fighting the guy inside you that thinks that last punch really hurt. | ||
You're fighting the guy inside you that's like, you know, I probably made enough money. | ||
I don't probably need to do this shit anymore. | ||
Like, Your own demons. | ||
Everything that goes into not just being a successful fighter, but being a respected fighter, a fighter at all. | ||
Everyone's seen that clip of the guy climb through the ropes, the bell rang, he climbed out of the ropes and walked back into the locker room. | ||
There's a little bit of that in everybody and you're fighting him too. | ||
You know what I'm saying? | ||
What was that about? | ||
Wasn't there like some contract dispute or something though? | ||
They felt like they were fucking him over? | ||
From what I understand, he went back there and asked for his money. | ||
Oh, so he thought that because he got in the ring, he could get paid? | ||
And he got out, he could still get his money. | ||
What? | ||
That's what I heard. | ||
Oh my god, that's hilarious. | ||
But that guy could never fight again. | ||
No. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Nobody would ever trust him again. | ||
Go through a full camp preparing for that guy? | ||
No. | ||
I mean, imagine being his opponent, seeing him walk out. | ||
You're like, what? | ||
Right. | ||
What's happening here? | ||
And you don't even get paid now. | ||
You can't criticize somebody as though they are just doing what you're doing because, oh, I'm talking, I got a job, I'm an important guy, I'm at this level of shit, so... | ||
No. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We're doing the same thing, essentially. | ||
Yeah, we're both on TV. It's not that, man. | ||
It's not. | ||
So the kind of love that you have for combat sports, the kind of love that you have for what it is that you comment on, it comes through because you do it. | ||
But I've been doing it almost half my life now, in terms of commenting on it. | ||
I've been doing martial arts since I was a fucking baby, basically. | ||
And that's it. | ||
But when you see combat sports today, and you see the landscape of boxing, I feel personally that this is an amazing time. | ||
I mean, I feel like the heavyweight division has never been more exciting and more turbulent, because there's so many great fighters now. | ||
To have Andrew Ruiz jump out of nowhere and knock out Anthony Joshua, I think was a godsend for the sport. | ||
Because all of a sudden you see, like, look at this chubby Mexican just fucked up, this dude who looks like a god. | ||
Like, this is crazy. | ||
Like, and this is, for the Mexican community, it's huge, having their first Mexican heavyweight champion, but it's also like, wow, this is a crazy division. | ||
Look, you got Deontay just knocks the fuck out of Luis Ortiz with that one punch to the forehead. | ||
You're like, what the fuck? | ||
You got the rematch with Tyson Fury's coming up in two weeks. | ||
Right. | ||
Not even, right? | ||
Less than two weeks. | ||
Yeah, 22nd. | ||
Oh my goodness. | ||
Now, what you're talking about earlier is exemplified in what happened after the Ruiz fight, where you see, like you say, a chubby guy, that's fair, the guy's chubby! | ||
But, he's a fucking fighter! | ||
Oh my god. | ||
He's a heavyweight for real! | ||
His hand speed's tremendous. | ||
And if you think just because he's chubby, you can take a knock at the guy, especially after he won the title, as though he won the lottery or he won a scratch-off, and this shit just happens, it doesn't. | ||
It reminded people of what the heavyweight division is. | ||
One punch can change the fight. | ||
It's a real thing. | ||
It is a real thing. | ||
He fucked up, though, in that rematch. | ||
That rematch was a disaster. | ||
He was so clearly unprepared. | ||
When he weighed 280, I was like, oh my god. | ||
And what was the rumors like? | ||
And I fell into them too. | ||
Everybody was talking about how he was getting thinner. | ||
No, it was one Instagram picture. | ||
He did what chubby girls do. | ||
He held that camera up. | ||
He did one of these things. | ||
He got a good angle. | ||
He catfished us. | ||
He catfished us. | ||
Well, you know, he lost, he wasn't training with his trainer and he was partying a lot. | ||
You know, I knew he was partying a lot. | ||
I heard from people that knew him. | ||
They're like, man, I don't know. | ||
I heard whispers of that and didn't believe it. | ||
I was like, no fucking way. | ||
I believed it. | ||
I believed it. | ||
You know why I believed it? | ||
Because it's so hard not to. | ||
All of a sudden, you're the fucking man out of nowhere. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And maybe he was convinced that he could do it again. | ||
You know, he's hitting the pads, it looked pretty good. | ||
Hitting the bag, it looked pretty good. | ||
He's like, I'll fuck that guy up again. | ||
But Anthony Joshua had a totally different game plan this time. | ||
And to see Anthony Joshua stick and move like that was interesting. | ||
I was like, wow. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
It's a cliche, but again, losing might have been the best thing that ever happened to him. | ||
I don't know about that. | ||
I don't know about that. | ||
I think it's great that he got his title back, but I felt like one thing that happened in that fight that disturbed me was even though Ruiz came in out of shape and clearly didn't look like he was prepared correctly, Joshua did never really enforce his will on him. | ||
He never really had a moment where he was beating the fuck out of him. | ||
Where he was like, you know, I trained hard for this fight. | ||
I'm gonna dominate you now. | ||
Now I'm gonna take you out the way you took me out. | ||
There was none of that. | ||
It was boxing. | ||
Just stick and move. | ||
Make sure you get the decision. | ||
Make sure you get the decision. | ||
That is in stark contrast to the way Deontay finishes fights. | ||
Which is why that matchup is so intriguing, which is why no matter what happens between the two of them, hopefully they remain undefeated for their own sakes and can make that unification fight. | ||
I saw his commitment to discipline, Joshua I'm talking about, as a good thing. | ||
Oh, it's definitely a good thing because he won the title back. | ||
But when you make the argument who's the best heavyweight in the world, if you have to look at it on paper, I don't think it's him right now. | ||
I think it's Tyson Fury or Deontay Wilder, depending on what happens on the 22nd. | ||
I lean towards Deontay because he can close the show at any moment. | ||
That 12th round, I was in bed and I was watching the fight and I went, Oh, shit! | ||
I popped up. | ||
Oh, shit! | ||
He knocked him out! | ||
unidentified
|
He knocked... | |
And then... | ||
Whoop! | ||
Tyson Fury rises. | ||
I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
He rises. | ||
He gets through the barrage. | ||
And then he wins the remainder of the round. | ||
I'm like, this is insane! | ||
And he even rocked Deontay at one point in time. | ||
I'm like... | ||
This is an insane fight. | ||
And then it was a draw. | ||
And I don't think on paper it's really a draw. | ||
I think that's horseshit. | ||
I think on paper Tyson Fury won more rounds. | ||
But I'm not upset with the draw. | ||
Because the way Deontay knocked him down and then knocked him down... | ||
The way he knocked him down in the 12th round should almost count for three points. | ||
It was so crazy. | ||
Just about any... | ||
This is not a criticism of Jack Reese. | ||
The guy did get up. | ||
So you can't say he... | ||
Did something wrong, but most referees of that would have just waved it off. | ||
Most referees. | ||
Like, there's no way. | ||
His arms were flat. | ||
He was laying on his back. | ||
It looked like he was in another dimension. | ||
Can you think of any other fight in the countless fights that you've covered where the main highlight of the fight is just the guy getting up? | ||
Crazy. | ||
Crazy. | ||
Well that punch too. | ||
The right hand and the left hook behind it and then him walking off like this. | ||
He thought he had him. | ||
He thought it was over. | ||
Crazy. | ||
Tyson Fury is something special, man, but so is Deontay. | ||
And so is Joshua. | ||
I think all three of those guys, they're so uniquely different that I can't say... | ||
I mean, the argument about who's best can rage for days. | ||
But I don't know that for sure this guy beats that guy or that guy beats the other guy. | ||
Or if this guy beats that guy, then that guy... | ||
You don't. | ||
You won't know until they face each other. | ||
And what I'm saying is even if Deontay were to lose to Tyson Fury, I still want to see... | ||
Joshua Wilder more than... | ||
Oh, 100%. | ||
100%. | ||
That is the fight I want to see. | ||
That is the fight I want to see. | ||
Well, the rematch is the first fight I want to see. | ||
The next fight I want to see, regardless of the outcome, is I want to see... | ||
Well, unless Tyson Fury KO's Wilder. | ||
If Tyson Fury KO's Wilder and he's like, Anthony Joshua, Anthony Joshua, you dosa... | ||
If he gets on the mic and starts talking that kind of shit, then I want to see that fight. | ||
But my dream matchup right now is the rematch. | ||
That's the dream matchup. | ||
The dream matchup is the 22nd. | ||
I am so fucking pumped for that rematch. | ||
I'm not doing jack shit. | ||
I'm taking the night off. | ||
I'm sitting right in front of the fucking TV. Sweaty palms. | ||
Now see, for you to say that about a boxing match... | ||
That's a huge thing! | ||
I love boxing, though. | ||
I do. | ||
I mean, I call combat sports. | ||
You know, I call MMA, but I do love boxing. | ||
You know, I love the Canelo-Kovalev fight. | ||
I thought that was fascinating. | ||
To watch Canelo KO-Kovalev fight that, I was like, God damn! | ||
What did he have? | ||
Six minutes? | ||
I thought Kovalev was winning that fight. | ||
He was winning the fight. | ||
If he could have stayed on his feet for six more minutes, he beats Canelo! | ||
Canelo looked like he had a plan to do that. | ||
It looks like he planned for Kovalev to fade. | ||
Because Kovalev, he's not the same guy he used to be. | ||
After Andre Ward knocked him out in the second fight, he just seems like a different guy. | ||
He just seems like he doesn't. | ||
And he's also had a lot of legal troubles outside the ring. | ||
Rumors of booze and abuse and all kinds of other shit. | ||
Sometimes fighters, they hit this point in their career where they don't have the same level of commitment that they did when they first started fighting. | ||
And when Kovalev, in the early days, man, when he was the crusher, you know, he was fucking everybody up, man. | ||
He was a terrifying force. | ||
Fantastic amateur record. | ||
You know, amazing technical boxing skills. | ||
Vicious right hand. | ||
I mean, he was something special. | ||
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But... | |
But to your point, it's those kind of experiences. | ||
Getting stopped by Ward, I think, was more of a mental thing for him. | ||
I think that it's a hurdle that he couldn't get over mentally and the physical followed suit. | ||
Which is why I say it would have been easy for Joshua... | ||
To get bogged down in the disappointment of that moment. | ||
Right. | ||
And not ever really recover from the lack of invincibility that he found himself in on a fight like everybody thought he was going to win going away. | ||
Now you're deep in boxing circles. | ||
Had you heard the rumor that Joshua had been knocked out in training? | ||
I've heard all the rumors, yeah. | ||
But that was apparently from enough people that I was taking it seriously. | ||
The two weeks before the fight he had got KO'd really bad in training. | ||
Yeah, I heard it. | ||
I just don't know. | ||
Do you know who supposedly KO'd him? | ||
I have no idea. | ||
Nor do I know that it's true at all. | ||
I don't know if it's true either. | ||
Even though that kind of thing is salacious, and I would love to know for sure, I feel like if you turn up on the night, and you get to that first bell ringing, we're in a fight. | ||
Everybody's struggling with something. | ||
You know, my hand hurts, I pulled a hamstring I'm not telling you about. | ||
The other thing they said, and this is even more widely reported, is that Joshua had a bit of a panic attack in the dressing room before the fight. | ||
That I find harder to believe. | ||
The sparring thing, I think, could happen to anybody, and then it's a question like, do we go on? | ||
But here's the thing, if he was suffering from the residual effects of being KO'd, and then he's like, I really shouldn't be fighting right now, fuck, I can't believe I have to fight right now, and then he's starting to freak out. | ||
Because I know that's happened in MMA. In MMA, that's definitely happened, where guys have been KO'd badly in the training before the fight, and then they get to the fight and they really shouldn't be fighting, and they know it. | ||
And they kind of freak out. | ||
What do you do, though? | ||
Who do you blame? | ||
Let's say that all that's true. | ||
This is just hypothetical. | ||
Let's say that these are true stories. | ||
Then it comes down to the date set. | ||
You have an opponent that should be easy to beat. | ||
Everybody thinks this guy is an easy replacement. | ||
Don't forget, this was his American debut. | ||
This wasn't just some fight. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Another one at the O2. This is the Garden. | ||
His first fight in America. | ||
That Wilder fight's still looming. | ||
Josh was supposed to take over the world in June. | ||
Big Baby Muller tested positive when? | ||
Well, what do we have? | ||
I think we were like... | ||
Three weeks? | ||
Three weeks out. | ||
Three weeks out. | ||
And then it was like officially, okay, like two weeks is what Ruiz had. | ||
So he tests positive for steroids, and then Ruiz comes in somewhere two and a half, three weeks in. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, man. | ||
It's just like... | ||
Crazy can of worms. | ||
What do you do? | ||
What do you do? | ||
Do you strap the fight? | ||
Do you cancel that date? | ||
Right. | ||
But here's the thing. | ||
I mean, I bet he wished he canceled it after it was over. | ||
I bet he wished he canceled it. | ||
Sure. | ||
If that was the case. | ||
But we don't even know if that was the case. | ||
So we're just talking shit. | ||
Yeah. | ||
To that point, what does that experience with Joshua do for him against Wilder? | ||
The biggest knockout puncher in heavyweight boxing, to be sure. | ||
If not history, certainly. | ||
40 wins by knockout. | ||
One decision, one draw. | ||
What the fuck? | ||
Who the hell does that? | ||
And even that decision... | ||
Nobody ever. | ||
He avenged. | ||
The guy he got, he got a decision with, he ultimately knocked him out. | ||
Yeah, it's Tavern. | ||
Yeah, but that record is unchallenged. | ||
There's no one like that. | ||
I don't think in any fucking division. | ||
Even you go back to the KO punches like Julian Jackson, right? | ||
The old school one-punch destroyers. | ||
He beat people by decision and... | ||
Deontay knocks everybody out! | ||
At heavyweight! | ||
It's crazy! | ||
And he knocks them out with, like, forehead punches. | ||
That forehead punch to Ruiz just... | ||
And he just walks away. | ||
Ruiz is laying on the ropes like, what in the fuck just hit me? | ||
He's flouting convention. | ||
Like, you're not supposed to be able to do that! | ||
Everybody talks so much shit about his skills. | ||
Right! | ||
That's what the science is built on! | ||
Yeah, but it's nonsense. | ||
Because the way he's built, first of all, 6'9", 209 pounds. | ||
That's what he weighed when he fought Tyson Fury. | ||
209. I mean, he's probably like 218 when he fought Ruiz. | ||
Gained 9 pounds or so. | ||
Not that much. | ||
He's a very light heavyweight. | ||
But also, because of that, doesn't get tired like those bigger guys. | ||
He doesn't have as much body mass where his blood is flowing through. | ||
But he also has... | ||
Fucking ridiculous power. | ||
And he keeps that power later than any of them. | ||
And to your point, now I think he'll keep that power longer. | ||
He does get tired when he chases the knockout. | ||
He can get winded. | ||
But he recovers. | ||
But his patience. | ||
He'll tell me. | ||
Skills don't pay the bills. | ||
I got my own style. | ||
You gotta stop saying that shit. | ||
But what we saw in the Ruiz for the Luis Ortiz fight Was that he started to use the discipline of patience. | ||
He wasn't chasing the knockout anymore. | ||
He was relying on it, which is a taboo, but he knew when that moment came, he'd be in position to fire, and he believed when he fired, he'd win. | ||
He'd get it. | ||
And the patience in not chasing the knockout, that's science too. | ||
It is science. | ||
That's technique too. | ||
Two. | ||
Because he knows that he has this preposterous power. | ||
I mean, he knows. | ||
And he's right. | ||
He's been right 40 fucking times. | ||
He's going to have to get right one more time. | ||
Yeah, he's right. | ||
He's right. | ||
But the thing is, man, the Tyson Fury fight showed that some people can survive. | ||
And that was what was so fascinating about that fight. | ||
Because Tyson was the only guy that could survive. | ||
And he survived it twice. | ||
He got dropped earlier in the fight. | ||
Was it like the fifth round or something like that? | ||
I don't remember what round it was. | ||
It was the ninth. | ||
Was it the 9th he got dropped? | ||
So he got dropped earlier in the fight and then the big one in the 12th. | ||
And still survived. | ||
I mean, just crazy. | ||
I don't think Wilder thinks he survived. | ||
I think Wilder thinks he got jobbed. | ||
Well, we talked about it. | ||
He said, look, if you look at the clock, it's like the fucking dude was down for 10 seconds. | ||
The fucking guy was like, if you count to 10. And that has always drive me crazy about boxing. | ||
Why don't they have a goddamn digital clock? | ||
Why are they relying on this guy to go, one, two? | ||
That shit is crazy because they're just counting? | ||
They're just counting? | ||
What are we, in the dark ages? | ||
Throw a fucking digital clock up. | ||
When the guy goes down at 10 seconds, the fight is over. | ||
If that's the case, that fight is over. | ||
Tyson Fury is down for like 12 seconds. | ||
I don't know why so many things in sports aren't automated at this point. | ||
I don't deal with this nostalgic human error bullshit. | ||
I don't believe in any of it. | ||
Including the judging. | ||
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What do we do about the judging? | |
What's the solution to that though? | ||
I don't know, man. | ||
Well, look, boxing has experienced some fucking significant levels of bribery and corruption. | ||
And, you know, there's been people that have actually been forced out of boxing, right? | ||
They don't judge fights anymore, like Manny Pacquiao. | ||
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Not enough. | |
Manny Pacquiao, Tim Bradley. | ||
Remember that one? | ||
Of course. | ||
That one was like, what in the fuck did you people watch? | ||
Like, what is this? | ||
Right. | ||
You know, Triple G Canelo, the first fighter. | ||
Adelaide Byrne. | ||
She's a nice lady. | ||
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Yeah. | |
She does MMA too. | ||
And DC, Daniel Cormier, one of the fights he looked at, he goes, Oh no! | ||
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Adelaide Byrd's here! | |
And I'm like, she's a nice lady. | ||
She's a wonderful lady. | ||
But to be fair, most of the fights I watch are ringside, right? | ||
And I'll be on my phone texting my friends, hey, you know, this fight, I got it this way. | ||
People watching it at home will have it in an entirely different way. | ||
I'll go home and see what they're talking about. | ||
I don't think sitting ringside from one angle all night... | ||
Gives you a perspective enough to judge the fight properly. | ||
Agreed. | ||
And then comparing it to the other guy... | ||
Do boxing guys have monitors? | ||
Because UFC people have monitors. | ||
No, the judges don't. | ||
They should. | ||
They didn't have it for a long time. | ||
We asked for it. | ||
We eventually got it. | ||
We complained forever. | ||
In most commissions, the judges have ringside monitors. | ||
But they should have more judges, too. | ||
Three judges is ridiculous. | ||
Why are we leaving on three people? | ||
There's four sides of the ring, by the way. | ||
Well, there's eight sides of the octagon. | ||
And by the way, there's a fucking million people that would love to judge. | ||
It doesn't make any sense. | ||
It's not like we're short of people that understand it. | ||
In MMA, we have an additional problem, is that we go to places like we were in Texas this past weekend, and we had terrible judging. | ||
And those people weren't even, some of them weren't even MMA judges. | ||
They had backgrounds in boxing, and they transitioned over to MMA. And some of them really didn't understand what was going on, and there was really, really bad decisions. | ||
And that's the other thing. | ||
The raging debate, boxing versus UFC and all this shit, it is the silliest debate I've ever heard as far as combat sports goes. | ||
It's just not the same thing. | ||
The idea that you can judge boxing and MMA and think that, well, everybody's hitting everybody. | ||
I've got the same skill set here as I do in the other one. | ||
Doesn't make any sense. | ||
There's a lot of legit MMA judges now. | ||
It's much less of a problem than it used to be. | ||
But when we travel to places like Texas, where we were this past weekend, and you run into problems where they just don't get world title fights very often. | ||
And then the main event was a very controversial decision, but close enough that it wasn't. | ||
I don't think it was a robbery. | ||
Close enough. | ||
Close enough. | ||
And you know, I think you give it to the champion. | ||
He dominated the last two rounds clearly in my eyes and could have won the third. | ||
You know, I watched it again today actually. | ||
But some of the earlier fights were fucking preposterous. | ||
Just watch it. | ||
I don't even need judges ringside. | ||
Just watch the shit on TV. Like, give me an extra two, three minutes if we have to wait for the decision to figure it out properly. | ||
Right. | ||
Let's wait. | ||
Better than, like, two or three decades of arguing about the shit. | ||
Well, I really think they need more people choosing. | ||
I think there should be a large group of people. | ||
You know, maybe even ten people. | ||
Maybe even people at home and there in person. | ||
And then you tally up the scorecards. | ||
Like, people that are respected. | ||
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Right. | |
Like, respected world-class trainers, respected fighters, respected experts in martial arts that watch these fights or boxing matches, and then tally it up. | ||
Then you would never have a... | ||
Triple G vs. | ||
Canelo first fight. | ||
Because 90% of the people thought that Triple G won that first fight. | ||
Which is interesting that Canelo won the second fight. | ||
Because Canelo fought very differently in the second fight. | ||
He was a better fighter. | ||
He was a better fighter in the second fight. | ||
Yeah, and I think the criticism he took in the first fight enraged him. | ||
He played it cool. | ||
I think that really pissed him off. | ||
He's like, okay, well, let me show you what I can do. | ||
He came back better. | ||
He came back better. | ||
The fact that he went all the way up to fucking light heavyweight and knocked out Sergei Kovalev is amazing. | ||
What does he do now? | ||
Does he stay at light heavyweight? | ||
Does he go back to super middleweight? | ||
I don't know that he makes middleweight again. | ||
He probably could if he gave him enough time. | ||
But then he might be drained. | ||
But he's too small for light heavyweight. | ||
It seems like it. | ||
Yeah, I mean, obviously 68 might be there. | ||
68 is probably the sweet spot for him. | ||
But how? | ||
I mean, he's not a kid anymore either. | ||
It's not like he's 22, like fluctuating in weight like that. | ||
But didn't he fight Floyd at 52? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's nuts. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's nuts. | ||
Yeah. | ||
75? | ||
Now that's crazy. | ||
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That's so much weight. | |
That's so much fuck. | ||
23 goddamn pounds? | ||
That's crazy. | ||
And then probably weighed a lot more than that before he cut weight to make the weights. | ||
And given a guy 24 hours between the weigh-in, sometimes more than 24 hours, in fact, most times more than 24 hours. | ||
They blow up. | ||
What kind of testing are they doing? | ||
That dude's gone through so many weight classes and he's just jacked as fuck. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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He's suspicious as fuck. | |
I'm not a doctor. | ||
You're not a doctor. | ||
I'm not a doctor. | ||
I'm not a doctor either. | ||
At this point it probably seems like I am. | ||
I'm suspicious, though. | ||
There's so many things about Baltimore sports that could be easily corrected if the motivation was there to even the playing field. | ||
Well, the USADA program in the UFC has evened the playing field considerably. | ||
A lot of people fell off. | ||
A lot of physiques changed. | ||
A lot of people just lost all their muscle mass. | ||
But only one entity has to make a decision in MMA, essentially. | ||
For UFC, particularly. | ||
Yeah, right. | ||
The decision comes down and then everybody's got to do it. | ||
Period. | ||
Exactly. | ||
Boxing does not enjoy that kind of dictatorship. | ||
Right. | ||
And there's also been instances in boxing where guys have said, no, I don't want Vata testing. | ||
I don't want it. | ||
They got to pay for it themselves. | ||
Right. | ||
Right. | ||
Why should they? | ||
Why should they? | ||
And then imagine if you're the guy who this is his big fight. | ||
This is his first time even making any money. | ||
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Right. | |
Now I gotta spend all this dough on Vata and whatnot? | ||
No. | ||
What is the status of Adonis Stevenson? | ||
Did he recover? | ||
Yeah, he's recovered. | ||
Is he okay now? | ||
I mean, he's not his former self, but he's certainly, I think, living a good life. | ||
Because I know that was one of the more recent superstar guys. | ||
That wound up having a significant brain injury. | ||
Survived and didn't succumb to those injuries, but it's life-changing. | ||
Like, this guy will never be the Adion Stevenson he was before the fight. | ||
He's always going to now, for the rest of his life, deal with those injuries and have challenges. | ||
Have you seen him? | ||
Is there videos of him talking about it or anything? | ||
Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen him talk about it in depth, but we've seen him, like his motor skills are coming back, he's smiling, he's able to speak. | ||
So it's not like Gerald McClellan? | ||
No. | ||
The Gerald McClellan fight, it's interesting, it kind of in many ways changed Roy Jones Jr.'s thoughts on the sport. | ||
You know, and that he never wanted to turn out like that. | ||
But then Roy gets older and he's still fighting. | ||
Fighting people like deep into his 40s. | ||
And you're like, this is crazy. | ||
Like, this is the same guy that after Gerald McClellan got hurt said he would never want to go out like that. | ||
And he's fighting like young badasses in Russia and shit. | ||
But you still think you can do it? | ||
It's hard to stop doing it. | ||
It's easy for me to say, hey man, that was your last fight. | ||
Let's take it easy. | ||
Look at Bernard, right? | ||
He's the best example. | ||
Fought into his 50s. | ||
But he had a style that was crafty enough to have some longevity in it without taking that kind of damage. | ||
Like, Roy will embarrass you. | ||
But he's still there in front of you, which is what's the embarrassing part. | ||
So if your motor skills slow down, if your reflexes slow down, you're going to get hit. | ||
He ain't knocked out. | ||
He ain't even fucked up. | ||
But what he told me in an interview, and it might be one of those moments when I was talking to a guy and he said something that was like, I thought I should have known until I heard it. | ||
And then I was like, oh, I can't believe I didn't realize that. | ||
He said, it's not the fights that destroy you. | ||
It's the gym that destroys you. | ||
It's the sparring. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Those are the rounds that destroy fighters. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
And it's like... | ||
The hundreds and hundreds of rounds to thousands of rounds that you're fighting that nobody sees, that you're not getting paid for, you're taking that punishment, headgear or not, that's what you're seeing at the end of a fighter's career. | ||
Do you remember, was it Danny Jacobs Jr.? | ||
Who was it that someone... | ||
No. | ||
No, it wasn't him. | ||
No, it wasn't Danny Jacobs. | ||
It was someone else. | ||
Someone that said that they stopped sparring. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Who the fuck was that? | ||
Well, he was fighting Kovalev, and that was Anthony Yard. | ||
That's right. | ||
That's right. | ||
Not that he stopped sparring. | ||
He said he never sparred. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
And no one believes him. | ||
And then anyone who does is like, well, he probably should have been sparring. | ||
Yeah, he looked great in moments in that fight. | ||
It was like the eighth round where he had Kovalev in deep shit. | ||
That was a crazy thing. | ||
His philosophy, if I remember correctly, Yard's philosophy was if you don't get hit at all in training, you will be so much fresher when you get to the ring. | ||
So he was doing just ridiculous mitt work and bag work and drills, and he already knew how to box. | ||
So his idea was that he will have some sort of an advantage. | ||
And he was a really fairly green guy, right? | ||
In terms of world-class competition. | ||
Yeah, I mean, this was his first really big fight. | ||
Yeah, but really physically talented and just built like a brick shithouse. | ||
And still is all those things. | ||
Yes. | ||
But I think the rub is that you do have to spar. | ||
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Right. | |
You know, you have to feel shots. | ||
That no trainer... | ||
That I've ever had this discussion with, and right after the fight, plenty of people wanted to talk about it. | ||
I didn't hear anybody be like, yeah, that made sense. | ||
No, it's just part of it. | ||
You find that a little bit in MMA now. | ||
Donald Cerrone was doing that for a while. | ||
He wasn't sparring at all. | ||
He was just doing pad work and just doing wrestling drills and stuff like that, kickboxing drills. | ||
Yeah, listen, if pad work and, like, a really good workout could make you world champion, I'd be, like, three-time world champion by now. | ||
That's not it. | ||
Sparring is a reality check. | ||
Yeah, you need it. | ||
You need it. | ||
Otherwise, you're just, like, doing aerobics. | ||
Yeah, you need to be tuned in to movement, to people, and also to danger, to be able to exist and to be able to fire under pressure. | ||
You have to take shots. | ||
You have to absorb those shots. | ||
Keep your eyes open. | ||
Like, all of these things. | ||
You can't... | ||
You can't download them. | ||
You can't simulate them. | ||
But you can only do that so many times. | ||
That's the other thing. | ||
There's only so many times you can survive it. | ||
And gym wars are real. | ||
They take a toll on people. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I wish that we could shoot that show still. | ||
People wouldn't let you? | ||
No, everybody... | ||
They hide things now? | ||
Yeah, everybody thinks that they've got the secret. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There's a story that Klitschko knocked out Deontay in training. | ||
Dylan Weil was talking about that recently. | ||
And I don't make much of that because I think it's unfair. | ||
I am one of these guys like, yeah, what happens in the gym stays in there. | ||
If I'm in there with a camera and it's a setup thing, well then, okay, we know what's going on. | ||
Right. | ||
But the point of sparring is that you're working on shit. | ||
You're trying things. | ||
You know you have weaknesses and you're going to lean on trying to... | ||
You're opening up your game. | ||
You're opening it up and you're trusting the guy that you're sparring with to help you work on those things and catch you if you're slipping. | ||
So then if the guy catches you when you're slipping, then a month later he's like, yeah, I caught that motherfucker slipping. | ||
It's like, yo, that's what I was paying you to do, man. | ||
What are you talking about? | ||
I flew you in. | ||
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Yeah. | |
So, I try not to make much of that. | ||
You know what's the craziest story in boxing of the year is Errol Spence Jr. surviving that fucking Ferrari crash. | ||
That's the craziest story of the year. | ||
When you see that car flip like that and the fact that he got out of that with like a chipped tooth. | ||
I mean... | ||
That's bonkers. | ||
Thank God he didn't have a seatbelt on. | ||
I never say that. | ||
Thank God he didn't have a fucking seatbelt on. | ||
Because if he did... | ||
There's no way. | ||
He would be dead. | ||
Probably. | ||
Or fucking severely injured. | ||
You know? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And, you know, I was in Chicago and it was the Usyk fight that week when that happened. | ||
And it was one of those things where it reminded me when I first heard the news of Paul Williams. | ||
Yes. | ||
And you realize, like, yo, yeah, these guys are warriors. | ||
They put their life on the line. | ||
Like, people die in the ring and all that shit. | ||
But there's also real life, too. | ||
Like, there's a whole other life with all its dangers and all the other ways that people can meet tragedy and hurdles you have to overcome. | ||
And that's the point. | ||
You almost want to... | ||
Keep them sheltered in a box between fights so that nothing happens. | ||
Nothing can taint what's going to happen in the ring. | ||
But these guys are just like everybody else to that degree. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
He's young. | ||
He's rich. | ||
He's in this town where he grew up. | ||
And one night you make a bad decision, changes everything. | ||
And so now, until we see him in the ring again... | ||
We don't know how that affects him. | ||
You just can't. | ||
You can't know if we'll ever see the Errol Spence that we saw before. | ||
Hopefully we do and better. | ||
How badly was he injured? | ||
From what I understood, and I follow this very closely, not badly at all. | ||
You're not wrong. | ||
From what I understand, he had issues like teeth being knocked out, lacerations on his face, no broken bones, no concussions. | ||
I mean, I don't know if he had no concussion, but he had no serious brain injury. | ||
He had no permanent injury whatsoever. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
But the mental side of it is that to each individual to handle, to be faced with death like that, at that age, whatever the moment was when you were flying through the air, not knowing if you're going to live. | ||
Right. | ||
You don't know how people adjust to that. | ||
It's so bad because him and Crawford. | ||
Goddamn what a fight that would be. | ||
Goddamn. | ||
That is the fight. | ||
It's almost like I wish Lomachenko was taller. | ||
I wish he was a bigger fighter. | ||
Because Lomachenko versus Crawford was really the fight that I would want to see. | ||
I believe Errol Spence Jr. is right there with them. | ||
He's a phenomenal fighter. | ||
Particularly what he did with Garcia. | ||
But Lomachenko and Terence Crawford are two masters. | ||
When I look at them in terms of what they do to their opponents, they're the two. | ||
Lomachenko with that crazy movement and footwork, but Terence Crawford just figures people out. | ||
He finds a way. | ||
He switches stances. | ||
He'll start out Southpaw or start out Orthodox, then he'll switch up on you and start boxing you up. | ||
He puts all the data into that computer and then starts finding your weaknesses and then he gets nasty with you. | ||
And I love the... | ||
I mean, one of the things I like about him is how fucking mean he is. | ||
And he's another guy who's like a sweetheart. | ||
The nicest guy. | ||
I've had him in here. | ||
Incredible. | ||
I've had him in here. | ||
He was great. | ||
He was a great podcast guest. | ||
But once he starts putting it on dudes, man, there's like a meanness to him, you know? | ||
It's like you see he relishes in it. | ||
When the dudes go down, he gets a kick out of it. | ||
Yeah, there's that killer instinct. | ||
But these fights, there's no replacement for them. | ||
You can see Terrence in a great fight. | ||
You can see Lomachenko in a great fight. | ||
Spence in a great fight. | ||
But if they're not fighting each other, we just won't know. | ||
Because once you get to an elite level, everybody's so good, you can't say you know how this is going to turn out. | ||
Right, right. | ||
Lomachenko's too small. | ||
I mean, I don't think he's ever going to fight Terrence. | ||
I mean, there was a time when the Mikey Garcia fight could have happened with Lomachenko at 35. I don't think he should ever fight at 40 or above. | ||
I think he'd say the same. | ||
But when you see what Mikey Garcia would happen to him when he went up against Errol Spence, you go, oh, Errol's just way bigger and stronger and better. | ||
Yeah, I mean, it's a 147 pound division. | ||
Yeah, and he's jacked. | ||
Errol Spence is just jacked at 47, like ripped and shredded. | ||
And at the weigh-in, when I looked at two of them, I was like, wow, that's a difference. | ||
Right. | ||
That's a difference there. | ||
Again, by the time Fight Night's on... | ||
He's fighting a middleweight! | ||
Yeah, Earl's even bigger. | ||
I think him, and hopefully he's okay. | ||
Hopefully he's okay. | ||
And he said he's getting back to the gym and getting back after it. | ||
Him and Terrence is the fight. | ||
That is the fight. | ||
It's the fight, and it's gotta happen. | ||
It's gotta happen. | ||
And neither one of them fighting anybody else will tell us more about what's gonna happen when they fight each other. | ||
Errol Spence is back in training, right? | ||
He's training, isn't he? | ||
Yeah, and has been for a while, at least. | ||
That's what the reports say. | ||
So are they trying to make something happen soon? | ||
Is there an idea of a timeline? | ||
I believe... | ||
I think he's thinking May? | ||
Really? | ||
Again, this is the talk. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah, I know. | |
I'm very excited. | ||
And he's the kind of guy that's going to want to jump right back into the deep water. | ||
I don't think he's a tune-up fight type of dude. | ||
No. | ||
Not after the Garcia fight. | ||
I'd like to see that one live. | ||
That's when I might go see that one live. | ||
Yeah. | ||
If it's a T-Mobile or something, or MGM, I might fly in to see that one. | ||
That's a very, very, very interesting fight to me. | ||
Oh! | ||
unidentified
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Oh. | |
Okay, so this morning, I went and floated. | ||
Ah, I have a tank here. | ||
unidentified
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Shut the fuck up. | |
Yeah. | ||
Okay, first of all, I only did it because you suggested it. | ||
And I was like, okay, well, you're so adamant about how dope it is that I was like, let me see if this guy's onto something. | ||
A phenomenal experience. | ||
It's amazing, right? | ||
It's amazing. | ||
It's therapeutic. | ||
I felt like I was meditating and then somehow having a muscle relaxing massage at the same time. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I couldn't tell at some point whether my eyes were open or closed. | ||
I tried to keep my eyes open instead of closing and falling asleep. | ||
But I couldn't tell between daydreaming and sleep dreaming. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's such a crazy experience. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
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Just be like in the pitch back, just like floating. | |
Bro. | ||
Yeah, I love it. | ||
I mean, I should do this, like, because I'm a guy's guy. | ||
Like, you know, even massages sometimes, I'm just like, I don't know. | ||
Too manly for massages. | ||
Especially because you're in such a macho business, right? | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
Exactly. | ||
And this is perfect for guys like, you know, meditating seems a little too, like, you know. | ||
It's great for your muscles, too, man. | ||
All that Epsom salts. | ||
It's really good. | ||
It loosens everything up. | ||
My bones got to crack in. | ||
I felt like I had a massage when I got out. | ||
Looses you up. | ||
Yeah, so kudos to you for finding that. | ||
That's awesome, man. | ||
I'm glad. | ||
I'm really excited. | ||
I try to tell more people about it. | ||
Did you go to the float lab? | ||
Which place did you go to? | ||
I went to Just Float. | ||
Where's that at? | ||
In Pasadena. | ||
That's the biggest place in the world, apparently. | ||
Is it? | ||
Yes. | ||
Because people were talking about how they get claustrophobic and it's like a constricted tube, but this place, It's like a spa. | ||
It's a big room. | ||
The tub's big. | ||
You're not enclosed at all. | ||
You've got your own room. | ||
They use Float Lab stuff. | ||
They use all the Float Lab stuff. | ||
I'm pretty sure. | ||
Don't they? | ||
Pretty sure. | ||
Float Lab, my friend Crash, who started and runs the Float Lab, he built my tank. | ||
I met him, actually, when I had an old tank, a different tank. | ||
There was a friend of mine who was a tank repair guy. | ||
He was doing repair on my tank. | ||
And I said, you know, these tanks are good, but there's a guy in Venice that makes the best tanks ever. | ||
He's like a mad scientist. | ||
He goes, you should talk to him. | ||
Like, you know, you have some money. | ||
Get a better tank. | ||
I'm like, really? | ||
He's like, yeah, get a better tank. | ||
And I'm like, wow. | ||
So I contacted this dude. | ||
I went to see his shit. | ||
And I was like, I mean, he makes them, they look like built in, they're like walk-in freezers. | ||
Like, mine is seven feet tall. | ||
It's nine feet long. | ||
It's huge. | ||
unidentified
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Ah. | |
They're giant. | ||
I mean, it's got a big fucking heavy door and shit. | ||
It's fully insulated. | ||
Yeah, he's got like... | ||
Commercial water filtration system filters. | ||
So you use that for a town's water supply. | ||
It's ridiculous. | ||
You see the equipment back there. | ||
It's fucking bonkers. | ||
How often do you do it? | ||
I have been slacking. | ||
I haven't been in it lately. | ||
I haven't been in it over a month. | ||
But that's just because the last month I've been so fucking busy. | ||
But I'm actually planning on getting in there tomorrow. | ||
I'm excited. | ||
See, alright, so you are a man of many hats, right? | ||
Obviously, you do so many things, but is there an overriding passion? | ||
Like, because I only have, like, the one thing. | ||
Like, you asked me if I do other stuff, whatever. | ||
Yeah, on the margins. | ||
But this boxing, this world is my world. | ||
Like, everything else is just, should I do in between? | ||
Is one of the things you do, like... | ||
I don't think I'd get rid of stand-up. | ||
If I had to choose one thing, I would keep doing stand-up because it's probably the most challenging. | ||
Podcasts are probably the easiest, but they're challenging too, depending upon the guest, especially if it's a really intricate subject. | ||
You know, it's about physics or history or something where I have to do some reading and really try to keep up with it. | ||
But podcasts are fun because I like talking to people. | ||
To me, it's like the easiest job because I've always loved conversations. | ||
I've always loved like, tell me how you do that. | ||
What are you thinking when you're doing that? | ||
Like what's going on? | ||
Like I'm always trying to figure out my own mind. | ||
What are my own motivations and how do I get better at things? | ||
How do I get better at being a person? | ||
And one of the best ways is to talk to people that are exceptional and try to figure out, how are you doing that? | ||
What is your approach? | ||
How do you prepare? | ||
What's your thought process? | ||
What are you eating? | ||
How are you sleeping? | ||
That kind of stuff. | ||
So to me, I've always been curious. | ||
So it almost becomes natural. | ||
And then I've been doing it so long, even though it doesn't seem like it should be, conversation does become a skill. | ||
It's something you get better at not being annoying. | ||
You get better at not talking over people. | ||
You get better at formulating sentences and being inquisitive. | ||
The UFC is just a massive passion of mine from, you know, the time I've been a martial artist for as long as I can remember. | ||
So for me, and like dedicated from the time I was 15 on, like dedicated, like my whole life. | ||
I didn't do any partying in high school. | ||
All I did was fight. | ||
All I did was compete, travel all over the country, and compete in Taekwondo tournaments. | ||
That was my whole life. | ||
So My life has been deeply enriched by martial arts. | ||
So then when the UFC came around and I realized, like, oh, this is the future. | ||
This is what martial arts really should be. | ||
This is the stuff that really works. | ||
We didn't really know before that. | ||
Before the UFC came along, there was all speculation. | ||
What's better? | ||
Is judo better? | ||
Is boxing better? | ||
Is wrestling better? | ||
And then when you see them go after it, you're like, oh, it's a combination of things. | ||
And everybody has their own unique way of implementing this combination of things. | ||
And then you get to the highest levels of the game and you find some constant variables, but things change and the sport's ever evolving and shifting and the new guys now in 2020 are so much better than the guys in 2010 and way better than the guys in 2000 and way better than the guys in 1993 when the first... | ||
UFC was held. | ||
So for me, that is like a hobby, I would have to say, or just a thing that is a constant part of my life. | ||
But that's one of the easiest jobs, because all I have to do is be interested in it, and I'm already interested in it. | ||
So I'm already watching fights. | ||
And then before the fights, I'll re-watch certain important championship fights. | ||
And I'll re-watch fights where fighters had difficulty and stuff like that. | ||
But I do that because I love it. | ||
I might do that anyway, even if it wasn't my job. | ||
So by the time I get to a John Jones-Dominic Reyes fight this past weekend, I've watched hours of footage of those guys just that week. | ||
Just because I'm interested. | ||
I just keep watching stuff, and I keep watching difficult fights, and easy fights, and dominant fights, and I watch training footage. | ||
But that's like, I probably would do that anyway, if I had the time. | ||
Like, if I'm sitting in my computer and, you know, I don't have shit to do, I'll watch some training footage, I'll watch a countdown show, I'll watch, I want to see what's going on. | ||
I'm excited for the fight, so I'll get pumped. | ||
I'll do that for this Wilder Fury fight. | ||
I'm going to watch all kinds of shit. | ||
I want to hear them talk. | ||
I want to see the training. | ||
I want to see them running and hitting the bag. | ||
I want to see all that stuff. | ||
Yeah, see, I'm the same in that everything that I do somehow informs that single passion that I have. | ||
Like, talking to fighters... | ||
Looking into a fight and figuring out what the narrative really is, how many things hang in the balance, not just a championship belt or somebody's bragging rights, but all the things that they bring to it personally and the communities that they represent and all the things that are on the line down the line. | ||
I get caught up in that shit. | ||
But when I'm working out my mind, I'm in the gym. | ||
When I'm hitting the bag, when I'm sparring other guys, even conversations can be sparring sessions. | ||
I gotta be prepared for that kind of back and forth. | ||
And I use that information I collect about myself and how to react and respond to other people. | ||
In a boxing gym. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So I ask this because my other thing as a hobby or a fascination, something I would never do, is I'm a huge stand-up fan. | ||
A huge stand-up fan. | ||
I will watch stand-up comedy guys I've never heard of. | ||
I go to the clubs, all this stuff. | ||
How much does the judo, the martial arts, the discipline inform... | ||
The craft on the stage for you. | ||
I think all three things work together in some strange way. | ||
They all work together. | ||
Doing live stand-up makes doing podcasts easier. | ||
Because live stand-up is, you need a reaction. | ||
There's so much preparation. | ||
There's writing. | ||
There's thinking about subjects. | ||
There's listening to recordings. | ||
There's going over them. | ||
There's multiple reps. | ||
You have to do, like, I'm doing two sets tonight. | ||
I'll do two sets tomorrow. | ||
I got one on Thursday, two Friday, two Saturday, and this is a normal week. | ||
That's normal. | ||
You have to do those reps. | ||
If you don't do those reps, you won't be sharp. | ||
You have to be sharp if you want to do shows, especially now I'm doing arenas, like a lot of these arenas. | ||
It's a lot of fucking people, man. | ||
You gotta be ready. | ||
You can't be, I'm pretty ready. | ||
You've got to be ready, right? | ||
So there's a lot of discipline involved in that. | ||
And then the podcast expands my perspective. | ||
Just being able to talk to people and see the way people think. | ||
Just talking to you about your experience with Deontay Wilder, the way that you framed that in an incredibly positive way, that it helped you and helped everybody. | ||
There's a lot of people that would have been tortured by that moment, and it would have fucked them up, but you became empowered by it. | ||
And you looked at it as a growing, learning opportunity, but also an opportunity for the growth of, like, you as a broadcaster, for the fight, for everything. | ||
And then it becomes this crazy meme, who's ultimately only positive, although in the moment, you know, you're tied up in knots, reading the comments, like, fucking Beyoncé's mad at me. | ||
All these people are mad at me. | ||
Snoop's mad at me. | ||
This whole thing, they all work together, you know? | ||
And then the UFC, being able to have the honor of calling these fights live with the greatest fighters in the world and being able to put words to their performance and give a description of the heart and the courage and the skill that these guys exhibit and the discipline involved in getting to this state as a mixed martial artist. | ||
Like, how... | ||
What an epic commitment you have to have to excellence to become a John Jones. | ||
To become a Henry Cejudo or fill in the blank. | ||
It's a special type of human. | ||
So I think when you're around those special types of humans, you have a higher appreciation for excellence. | ||
You have a higher appreciation for discipline. | ||
And I think just seeing what they do and watching it manifest itself in real life, a Conor McGregor or Max Holloway or Alex Volkanovsky, all these different killers that I've had this opportunity to call their fights, it makes me appreciate excellence. it makes me appreciate excellence. | ||
And that's why I get pissed off when someone dismisses that kind of excellence with a shtick. | ||
Yes, yes, yes. | ||
I also think... | ||
It has to be your thing. | ||
You can't bullshit. | ||
You can't just go by some stats that you read online or that a producer gives you. | ||
You have to understand the complexities because if you don't, people will know. | ||
It's like if you try to talk shit to someone in French and you only know 20 words... | ||
You can say those 20 words good, but then someone goes, oh, wee-wee. | ||
And they start busting out other words you don't know. | ||
You're like, oh, no. | ||
I done fucked up. | ||
Got myself in a quagmire. | ||
That's it. | ||
That's what it's like if you're talking shit about MMA, if you don't really understand the sport. | ||
I've been involved in the sport in one way or another professionally since 1997. That's when I first started working for the UFC. So it's been... | ||
That's a long fucking time, man. | ||
You know, that's a long fucking time. | ||
I keep hearing rumors that Dana White is going to become a boxing promoter. | ||
I've heard for like five years. | ||
unidentified
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He is. | |
He is. | ||
Yeah, they are. | ||
Yeah, they're working on some shit. | ||
I can't really tell you much, but they're definitely working on some shit. | ||
Yeah, they put together the Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight, of course, with TME. With Floyd's company, TBE, rather. | ||
What is it called? | ||
The Money Team? | ||
TMT. That's what his promotion team is called, right? | ||
TMT? Mayweather Promotions. | ||
His crew, I guess. | ||
TMT, yeah. | ||
So he and they did this sort of co-promotion for that big fight, and then they're working on some other thing with Floyd, where Floyd wants to get involved with them to promote something else. | ||
It might involve MMA fighters, it might involve boxers, and they've actively talked to a bunch of other boxers, and they're trying to put some stuff together. | ||
But yeah, Zufa boxing is a real thing. | ||
UFC wants to put together some boxing matches, and maybe even some crossover fights. | ||
I just wonder how that works, because the UFC model, just won't exist in the boxing world. | ||
You won't have enough control. | ||
You don't have to. | ||
You just have to schedule a couple big fights. | ||
They're not going to do it like they do the UFC. The UFC literally has a fight every week right now. | ||
For the next five weeks, there's a fight every weekend. | ||
And people are hitting pay-per-view dollars. | ||
Well, it's ESPN Plus or ESPN and sometimes pay-per-view dollars. | ||
Some of the fights are free. | ||
I thought the ESPN, because I have ESPN Plus, and I was like, oh, great, should I get to watch these UFC fights for like $5.99 a month? | ||
Nope. | ||
Yeah, no. | ||
Nope. | ||
It's still... | ||
It's still like $65. | ||
Yeah, I bought it on my TV this morning. | ||
I watched it again when I was lifting this morning, and I had to pay $65. | ||
You know, but it's... | ||
It's a weird thing, right? | ||
You can't really do it where it's just $5.99 and don't have pay-per-view because then the big fights won't be big fights. | ||
They want... | ||
How does DAZN have it? | ||
Do you have to pay? | ||
No! | ||
You don't. | ||
That's their whole thing. | ||
Oh, so Tyson Fury and Deontay, that's going to be on DAZN. No, no, no. | ||
Tyson Fury and Deontay, I think, is a simulcast between Fox, if simulcast is the right word, and ESPN. In other words, they're going to have their own separate pay-per-views that you can watch whichever production you like, which is going to be something like... | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
So who's the commentators? | ||
Then it becomes those are the commentators. | ||
It depends on where you tune in. | ||
If you go to ESPN, you'll hear their people. | ||
I think they have their own broadcast. | ||
Why don't they use Max Kellerman? | ||
I am so confused. | ||
I loved his boxing commentary, and he doesn't comment on live fights anymore. | ||
I think that's got to be his own choice. | ||
I mean, I can't imagine that they don't want it. | ||
How the fuck would he not want to do that? | ||
He was so good at it. | ||
I don't know. | ||
He was one of my favorite guys. | ||
Andre Ward was also one of my favorite guys. | ||
I love Andre Ward for a bunch of reasons, but one for the fact that that guy undefeated, gold medalist, two division world champion, goes, you know what? | ||
We're good. | ||
Just walked away. | ||
And I sense that he will stay away. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
He's going to stay away. | ||
You know, they talked to him about Canelo after Canelo knocked out Kovalev. | ||
And he made this long statement that he's better off for boxing, even for boxing, outside of fighting. | ||
He knows. | ||
He's so smart, man. | ||
He's so smart and so disciplined. | ||
He's just so disciplined. | ||
He knows. | ||
There's no reason. | ||
There's no reason to come back. | ||
This is the right way to do it. | ||
There's big money in coming back, but there's also big brain damage. | ||
The ego after you retire is the biggest fight of your life. | ||
You're exactly right. | ||
This guy's undefeated. | ||
I'm sure if you're going to talk to him off camera, I could beat Canelo. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Of course he must think that just because of who he is. | ||
You've got to think that. | ||
So to stop yourself from the money, the glory one more time, the possibility, could you imagine coming out of retirement and beating Canelo Alvarez? | ||
To be able to be like, you know what, it's better for me and it's better for boxing if I stay retired and keep sitting ringside and talking about these fights in the way I do. | ||
That's a special kind of character. | ||
He's a special person. | ||
But he also has this issue with his right shoulder. | ||
You know, his right shoulder was basically broken most of his career, and he got it fixed before the second Kovalev fight, and he actually wound up hurting Kovalev real bad with a right hand. | ||
If you watch his career, he was like a left-handed fighter. | ||
His super spinatus was ripped off. | ||
Like, it was really fucked up, and he tried to rehab it with bands instead of going through surgery when he was young. | ||
And so most of his career, he beat the best fighters in the world, Carl Frotch, all those guys, one-handed, which is even more insane. | ||
Even more insane. | ||
And then, you know, had the surgery, rehabbed it, but he said it's still not 100%. | ||
It's never going to be 100%. | ||
Right, which is why people are afraid of surgery. | ||
It's like, you know, I'd rather do the bands or anything than take the chance. | ||
But it's better than it was before. | ||
I think before he had like 40% use of his shoulder, which is crazy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He said he never felt like he could throw a good punch. | ||
He always felt like it was going to blow out on him. | ||
Geez. | ||
Isn't that nuts? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Fucked everybody up with one hand. | ||
That's how you make yourself a legend. | ||
He's definitely a legend. | ||
But maybe an underappreciated legend. | ||
In terms of mainstream boxing viewpoint, I don't think the mainstream public really appreciates how great he was. | ||
No. | ||
In his time or after. | ||
It will take people reflecting on history, I think. | ||
Unfortunately for him, his kids and their kids might get the benefit of who their dad or grandfather was more so than he's getting it now. | ||
Well, there's certain great fighters that for whatever reason, they never really captured the public's imagination, even though they were great. | ||
You know, like Marlon Starling, who's a fantastic welterweight, knocked out Mark Breland, who was actually now Deontay Wilder's trainer. | ||
But I remember when Mark Breland was coming from the Olympics, and he was this really long, tall welterweight, and he fought Starling, and Starling wasn't really appreciated enough. | ||
And Starling put it on them. | ||
And you realize that there's guys out there that for whatever reason, people don't appreciate them as much as they should. | ||
Yeah, timing's everything. | ||
It's unfortunate, but as much as we hate just guys putting on an act or hyping themselves up with these characters they create, that is bankable. | ||
We all know guys who don't deserve the shots that they continue to get, but because they bring an audience with their shit-talking or with their antics and all the show that they put on, it's better than the fight! | ||
You know who's the most confusing to me? | ||
It's Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. He's confusing to me. | ||
Like that last fight, I'm like, what are you doing? | ||
Like you're saying, the guy head-butted me, my nose is broken, I'm quitting. | ||
I was like, what are you doing? | ||
Do you not understand? | ||
You're Mexican. | ||
Those are the hardest motherfuckers on earth when it comes to boxing. | ||
You're not just Mexican. | ||
You are the son of the man. | ||
You're the son of the guy. | ||
He won something like 31 world title fights. | ||
Some insane number. | ||
He has the record of world title wins. | ||
Which is also an unattainable goal. | ||
If you decide to go into boxing and your father is Julio Cesar Chavez. | ||
Dude, one of the goats. | ||
What do you hope? | ||
How far can you hope to get? | ||
In legacy. | ||
I almost feel bad for the guy because there's got to be so much going on in his head to put him in the place where he's at. | ||
But yet he's talented. | ||
He's a good fighter. | ||
His skills, his ability to put hands on people are very good. | ||
But I think also there's something about growing up wealthy. | ||
unidentified
|
It's just almost impossible. | |
Like, you kind of have to have some part of your life that was fucked up, and you didn't think it was gonna work out. | ||
Where you didn't think there was a future, and there's a burn that never goes out. | ||
There's like a little fire that never goes out. | ||
Ease is a greater challenge than adversity. | ||
Yes, it is, man. | ||
There's something about comfort that just makes bitches out of people. | ||
unidentified
|
It's just... | |
It just does. | ||
It's so hard to overcome that. | ||
You can't even forcibly remove yourself from that comfort. | ||
It's very few human beings are able to really achieve greatness when they grow up with great wealth and privilege. | ||
There's something about that, that life of leisure and knowing that everything's going to be okay. | ||
You know, like your dad made $50 million. | ||
You're going to be fine. | ||
There's something about that that just... | ||
For whatever reason, it just haunts people. | ||
Yeah, I mean, there'd be something burning brightly inside him, almost like a resentment for his father, unfortunately. | ||
I don't think love could propel you to even come anywhere near his legacy. | ||
You'd actually have to hate the guy just to be fire-burning bright enough to attain anything close to what he did. | ||
And I feel bad for his dad, too. | ||
You know, his dad watching him quit. | ||
I'm like, oh no. | ||
But he's a loving father, man. | ||
It's not the first time he's been embarrassed. | ||
He keeps coming back like, alright, this is the one. | ||
This is the time. | ||
One more. | ||
The Canelo fight was a rough one, too. | ||
But Canelo outclassed him, you know? | ||
Canelo was just... | ||
Just a better fighter. | ||
And Chavez is not a quitter. | ||
At least this last time, he may have had a point. | ||
Maybe he was headbutt, maybe the elbows, but quitting in boxing obviously is the cardinal sin. | ||
He wasn't that fucked up. | ||
It wasn't like his nose was pouring blood and he couldn't breathe out of it anymore and it was from a blatant foul. | ||
He looked okay, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Maybe there was something going on that we couldn't see. | ||
But he looked okay. | ||
And then he took videos from the hospital the next day with tape on his nose. | ||
He was not healthy. | ||
Lay low for a while, bro. | ||
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Yeah. | |
What else is exciting for you on the horizon, boxing-wise? | ||
What are you looking at that's interesting? | ||
I'm anticipating and eagerly awaiting the return of Manny Pacquiao. | ||
Hmm. | ||
Listen, we can't not talk about Pacquiao when we talk about the welterweight division. | ||
Because he's 40 and he's not in the news all the time, he's not at press conference, and we only talk about him when he's got a fight sign, that sometimes in these conversations we forget, yo, he's a world title holder. | ||
He just dominated a guy that there's no way at his age he should have been able to dominate, considering who Keith Thurman was. | ||
Two years prior, before his surgery, Pacquiao could ruin everybody's shit. | ||
Like, you know what I mean? | ||
But what do you think about, do you think that he would ever step up and fight Terrence Crawford at this stage of his career? | ||
I don't think that fight happens for multiple reasons. | ||
I wouldn't suggest it if I was in his camp. | ||
Also, I don't think that any more than they want to make the Spence-Croffer fight, do they want to put Pacquiao in that kind of harm's way and give top-ranking ESPN an opportunity to dethrone him. | ||
Like, you know, he's with the Heyman camp now. | ||
It's the same with Spence. | ||
So... | ||
That is going to protect him. | ||
He's not going to have to say whether or not he really wants to fight because I don't think he can get it. | ||
Manny Pacquiao inks deal with Paradigm Sports Manager who represent Conor McGregor. | ||
Oh, Jesus. | ||
That's probably what they're going to do. | ||
Manny Pacquiao, Conor McGregor. | ||
No thanks. | ||
That's probably what the UFC wants to try to do. | ||
Is that the thing? | ||
Maybe they heard you talking about it. | ||
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Just got posted a half hour ago. | |
Oh shit. | ||
While we were talking. | ||
Oh shit. | ||
I gotta tell you, if that's the thing, all that anticipation and eagerly awaiting shit just flew out the window. | ||
Well, here it is, an opportunity for Manny Pacquiao to make a fuckload of money. | ||
I mean, that's how I'd look at it. | ||
I'd look at it for Manny to make a hundred million bucks. | ||
But you'd have to sell the public. | ||
I mean, they already watched Floyd Mayweather box circles around them. | ||
They're going to sell it. | ||
Of course it's going to. | ||
That's why it's going to be $100 million. | ||
But I'm going to be irritated by every single brown penny that's spent on that fight. | ||
It's going to be my nemesis. | ||
You know what you're really going to be irritated by? | ||
The people that think that Conor has a chance. | ||
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It's easy. | |
What are you doing?! | ||
Come on, guys! | ||
What if they give him six months? | ||
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What if he fights Paulie Malignaggi first? | |
I'll tell you what, I would pay for Manny Pacquiao versus either Errol Spence or Crawford. | ||
I would pay for either one of those fights. | ||
I would like that. | ||
That's what I would like to see. | ||
I think while Manny's 40, I mean, after the Keith Thurman fight, he has shown that he's still a legit world beater. | ||
And Terrence Crawford is the cream of the crop, in my opinion. | ||
I want to see that. | ||
You know what would be more exciting? | ||
Exciting! | ||
Than both of those fights? | ||
Sean Porter. | ||
Ooh, that's a good fight, too. | ||
Manny Pacquiao versus Sean Porter would be a hell of a nine-a-box. | ||
Very good fight, too. | ||
Very good fight, too. | ||
I believe in world champions, although there's way too many of them in every weight division. | ||
This fucking, like, oh, undefeated fighters are the only ones that are worth talking about. | ||
If there's one thing I love about the UFC and MMA culture, period, is that losing a fight doesn't mean losing your whole fucking brand. | ||
If you go out there, comport yourself well, leave it all in the octagon, you live to fight another day and people still respect the effort you put forward. | ||
They recognize that if you're fighting guys at your level, you'll win some and you'll lose some and hopefully you'll win more than you lose and that's how you become the man. | ||
But losing some doesn't make you a bitch. | ||
Doesn't make you like a bum. | ||
Well, I think Manny's kind of proven that. | ||
I mean, remember when Manuel Marquez put him in an orbit? | ||
Yeah. | ||
He just put him in an orbit around Jupiter. | ||
Took him four times to do it. | ||
But I'll tell you what. | ||
I said it on the night, too. | ||
By the way, that is the most electric... | ||
Boxing atmosphere I've ever been a part of. | ||
I've been covering fights my entire adult life. | ||
They knew, when they were singing the anthem, the Mexicans were singing the Mexican anthem before the fight, and I was sitting there with a friend of mine, also a fellow journalist, Sean Zattel, and we were sitting up in the rafters. | ||
We weren't even sitting in the press row. | ||
We were sitting like... | ||
I didn't want to be bothered with all the yammering that goes on in the press row, so I found seats up above the ring. | ||
And when they were singing that anthem, we looked at each other and we're like, uh-oh. | ||
Something is about to happen here tonight. | ||
We knew it was a special night. | ||
And bro, when he knocked out Manny Pacquiao, he should have crowd surfed to Mexico and never ever laced up a pair of boxing gloves again. | ||
Right. | ||
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Yeah. | |
And he never fought him again. | ||
That's what's really interesting. | ||
I thought they would have had another one. | ||
He should have never fought anybody again. | ||
It's never going to get ever better than that night in that moment. | ||
Yeah, but he'll still always have that forever. | ||
And there's something about, especially Latino fighters, it's like they almost kind of have to keep going. | ||
Like, all the greats kept going. | ||
All the greats. | ||
Chavez kept going way past he should have. | ||
You know, and then, you know, I mean, so many of them just keep going. | ||
Roberto Duran, you know, kept going forever. | ||
Yo, I mean, it's an addiction. | ||
It's a lifestyle. | ||
And if you still believe you can do it, like, I'm still better than most of those guys, why not keep doing it? | ||
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One more W? Who doesn't want one more W? Mm-hmm. | |
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, so I decided to pick a career with a little bit more longevity in it. | ||
And no physical downside. | ||
Exactly. | ||
We're going to talk everybody right into the grave. | ||
That's the thing about what you're doing. | ||
You get to see the real consequences that some of these guys face. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And it is a dark thing to see a fight where you see a guy get beaten down and the referee stops the fight and they see him slump into the corner and collapse. | ||
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Yeah. | |
You know, and I've seen that only on television. | ||
I haven't seen that live. | ||
When the stretcher comes out. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Because sometimes the knockout doesn't look that vicious. | ||
Like, I mean, it's a knockout. | ||
But as soon as a guy goes down, you're not gasping. | ||
Then the guy's not moving. | ||
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Right. | |
The guy's not responding. | ||
Well, you remember the Gerald McClellan fight? | ||
He took a knee. | ||
And then people were questioning him, you know? | ||
And then he slumped and collapsed in his corner. | ||
Yeah, I mean, combat sports are the most brutal of all contests. | ||
I mean, football's probably next, but the difference is, with combat sports, there's a guy doing it to you, and you're trying to do it to him. | ||
I mean, it's the only thing that's happening there. | ||
There's not a ball going across a line. | ||
There's only a guy trying to fuck you up, and you're trying to fuck him up. | ||
And the lack of protective equipment is part of the fight. | ||
You're in your underwear. | ||
You're basically in your underwear with shoes on. | ||
In an MMA, you don't even have shoes on. | ||
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Correct. | |
And your fingertips are showing. | ||
You're about as naked as you can get legally and compete in something. | ||
I mean, thank God, obviously. | ||
But I am surprised that there hasn't been more serious injury in MMA. I don't know if that's just because of how long we've been paying attention. | ||
I don't know. | ||
What do you... | ||
I don't know. | ||
I think it's good refereeing. | ||
You know, MMA has some pretty exceptional referees that are very aware of the dangers of guys taking extra shots. | ||
There's also a thing where they don't get a chance to recover like they do in boxing, where a guy gets knocked down and then they give him an eight count. | ||
There's none of that shit. | ||
When you get knocked down in MMA, if the referee thinks it's over, they just wave it off because there's too many weapons. | ||
You're elbowing people in the face. | ||
You're kicking them. | ||
If they think you're done, you're done. | ||
They don't give you that chance. | ||
The standing eight counts. | ||
That ten count, there's something about that ten count. | ||
It's great because it makes for moments like Tyson Fury rising off the deck to win the rest of the round with Deontay Wilder in that twelfth. | ||
But it also gives your brain a false sense of recovery. | ||
Like, you're fucked up, man. | ||
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Right. | |
You really probably shouldn't be going on. | ||
In MMA, you really don't get a chance to go on. | ||
When they stop it, they stop it. | ||
If the referee's in front of you, the fight's over. | ||
When I first started watching MMA, there was no UFC, right? | ||
I had the bootleg box in my room, and we'd get the fuzzy channel, and people were getting their fucking arms broken and shit, and head-butted and blood all over it. | ||
Between you and I. Which one did you like better? | ||
Did you like the first iteration of pretty much everything? | ||
No. | ||
I like skills better now. | ||
The guys are way more skillful and that's what's interesting to me. | ||
What's interesting to me more than anything is the growth of the understanding of what works and what doesn't work. | ||
Of skill, of technique. | ||
That's the most important thing to me. | ||
Guys like Mighty Mouse. | ||
He was one of my favorite fighters to watch because he would fuck people up and not even get hit. | ||
He'd be moving on people in ways where they didn't even know what was happening until he was doing it. | ||
It was too late. | ||
He'd already hit you. | ||
He was moving these different angles. | ||
He'd catch people with arm bars. | ||
He'd fuck you up with knees in the clinch. | ||
He was, in my opinion, the greatest expression of mixed martial arts talent. | ||
And because he was so next level in terms of his ability to implement his strategy on you, and you couldn't do shit to him. | ||
But he didn't get a chance to fight the level of talent as a guy like Jon Jones. | ||
Jon Jones is fascinating to me because he's been able to stay on top for almost a fucking decade, only fighting world-class, top of the food chain, world championship caliber fighters, which is just amazing. | ||
No one's been able to do that. | ||
Jon's undefeated. | ||
He has one loss by disqualification. | ||
It's a bullshit loss that was from a bullshit rule where you're not supposed to elbow like this. | ||
Elbow from 12 to 6. It's supposed to come down at an angle, which makes no sense, and I've described it too many times to go into details. | ||
It's an ignorant rule. | ||
It shouldn't exist. | ||
But he beat the fuck out of Matt Hamill winning that fight. | ||
There was no way Matt Hamill was winning that fight. | ||
John dominated him. | ||
So John's undefeated, and he's been undefeated, youngest ever world champion, 23 years old, won the world championship in the UFC, and has dominated ever since. | ||
I mean, that's insane. | ||
That, to me... | ||
Is one of the most impressive things in all of sports. | ||
Watching that guy achieve a record that might never be achieved again. | ||
The thing about boxing that has my imagination and my fascination continually spark is the finite nature of the tools and the weapons that you have to use. | ||
Right? | ||
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Mm-hmm. | |
I respect and appreciate MMA, but it's almost like the antithesis of that in that they have so many things they can use and whatnot. | ||
It's an entirely different discipline. | ||
But you're coming from a martial arts background. | ||
So I grew up on kung fu movies, right? | ||
And so when I started watching this shit, these guys were in geese. | ||
They were like, you know, I said, like, it's the Gracie's breaking arms, whatnot, and that made sense to me. | ||
And I understood why a boxer wouldn't fight a karate man or a judo guy or whatever. | ||
Because that's what the science is for me. | ||
Like what you can do with these two hands and your two feet are the only way you can evade and all of that. | ||
But why can't the karate man? | ||
Why isn't there like a Bruce Lee of MMA? As a martial artist, can you still believe in like one discipline after all this MMA is proven it doesn't work? | ||
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Yeah. | |
There's no real one discipline that will work best in MMA. You have to know everything. | ||
But if I was going to say what discipline is the most important, I would say wrestling. | ||
Because if you can't keep a guy from taking you down, he's going to be on top of you, he's going to hold you down, he's going to punch you in the face. | ||
It's a giant advantage to be able to hold a guy down, be able to punch his face in, and you can't really do much when a guy's on top of you. | ||
That said, from there, you have to understand jiu-jitsu. | ||
Because if you don't, you could hold a guy down, then all of a sudden he wraps his legs around your neck and you caught a triangle and you go to sleep. | ||
And every fight starts standing. | ||
So you have to have some understanding of striking. | ||
Because you have to be able to close the distance. | ||
But There's no one way to do it. | ||
That's what's interesting to me. | ||
It's like there's Anderson Silva's way to do it, who's the greatest middleweight of all time, and his way to do it was through striking. | ||
He would just stay up with guys and just fuck them up with timing and precision and Muay Thai. | ||
But then there's guys like Daniel Cormier who'd take guys down and beat the fuck out of them, choke them, you know? | ||
And there's a bunch of different people with a bunch of different styles in between. | ||
But if you look at the majority of world champions, The majority, except maybe a couple weight classes, they're dominated by wrestlers. | ||
There's a lot of pictures on the internet, by the way, of me with Anderson Silva's tag They think you're Anderson Silva? | ||
You don't look anything like Anderson Silva. | ||
You wouldn't believe how many people stop me, especially if I'm in Vegas when there's a UFC event. | ||
And they think you're Anderson Silva? | ||
They think I'm Anderson Silva. | ||
That's ridiculous. | ||
You don't look like Anderson Silva, man. | ||
I'm telling you. | ||
I don't think so either. | ||
But I'm telling you, I get it. | ||
A lot. | ||
Well, people, yeah, people are weird. | ||
I mean, I even dressed up for him, like, as him on Halloween, and it went over like gangbusters. | ||
That's funny. | ||
Oh, did you wear the Bruce Lee outfit? | ||
Yeah, of course! | ||
I wore the Bruce Lee outfit. | ||
I had a beanie, but it was Wu-Tang. | ||
I will find that picture and show it to you afterwards. | ||
Well, listen, man, I'm glad we had this conversation. | ||
It was a lot of fun. | ||
It was brilliant. | ||
By the way, I hope at some point every single 30 million people that watch your shit get a chance to stop by the studio personally. | ||
This is the dopest studio I've ever been in. | ||
You must live here. | ||
I would just live here. | ||
I don't know what is going on, but everything in here feels like the dude I'm talking to, and so kudos to you. | ||
Thanks for having me. | ||
Thanks, brother. | ||
My pleasure. | ||
I really appreciate it. | ||
I appreciate it. | ||
It's a lot of fun talking to you. | ||
I'm glad we got a chance to air that story out, too. | ||
unidentified
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To this day! | |
Tell people your Instagram and all your jazz. | ||
Oh, yeah, my Instagram, Radio Raheem Boxing, R-A-H-I-M, Radio Raheem on Facebook. | ||
And on YouTube, you can find my content at Seconds Out TV. Beautiful. | ||
Thank you, brother. | ||
Bye, everybody. | ||
See you. |