Oct. 13, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:57:14
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Roy Jones Jr., ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| How's up, my brother? | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| I'm honored to have you in here. | ||
| I've been a fan forever. | ||
| I know this, and I was going to tell you that I am very happy to be here for you and for me because I've been a fan of yours as well, but I always love the support that you give me. | ||
| You've always supported me since day one. | ||
| You've been one of the best people that I could hear talk about me since day one, so I just want to say thank you, man, for all the support, for being a brother. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| I feel like we're brothers now, you know? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I've been a fan forever. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Like, from way back in the day, you know, your song, Y'all Must Have Forgot. | ||
| I didn't forget shit. | ||
| I remember all of it, man. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I remember when your fights were basically executions. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| There was some years, man, where you would just like, see, how is this guy going to survive and how long? | ||
| And you had... | ||
| There was a time in your career when you were at your peak where you had devised this style that was so different than anyone else's. | ||
| Very few jabs. | ||
| You would throw a lead hook. | ||
| No one knew how to prepare for it because there was no sparring partners that could emulate it. | ||
| Your speed was off the charts. | ||
| Your movement was off the charts. | ||
| I think to this day, you're the only person in CompuBox history that won a full round without having a single punch scored on them. | ||
| And they say I'm not the best defensive fighter ever. | ||
| Listen, that's, that's, no one's ever, I mean, maybe Willie Pett might have done that back in the day. | ||
| Before CompuBox. | ||
| Since CompuBox era, nobody has ever gone a complete round without getting a punch scored on him. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| And you tell me he ain't the best pound for pound, or he ain't the best, at least defensive fighter, and we know about the offense. | ||
| But I don't argue. | ||
| I just listen to what people say. | ||
| No, there was a time where I always said, like, people would say, oh, but he didn't fight anybody. | ||
| I'm like, the fuck he didn't? | ||
| They just couldn't compete. | ||
| That's all it was. | ||
| You fought world champions. | ||
| Like the song say, I just make them look like nobody. | ||
| Y'all must have forgot. | ||
| You had such a strange style, man. | ||
| How did you devise that style? | ||
| Honestly, man, it was a lot. | ||
| My father was a fighter who was trained by Sarge Johnson in the, I think, some part of the armed services. | ||
| Anyway, my father learned a lot, but he also learned a lot of things not to do. | ||
| So by learning those things, he was able to give me a very good foundation. | ||
| With that foundation, my father had roosters, fighting roosters when I was young. | ||
| So I would watch the roosters all the time because roosters develop a pecking order. | ||
| And people always talk about, you know, fighting animals, this, that they develop a pecking order on their own anyway. | ||
| They're going to do that anyway. | ||
| So I would always watch them to figure out what made one the king of the pecking order, what made him better than the rest. | ||
| And when I learned what that was, it was a few things I figured out. | ||
| Once I would figure them out, I started emulating those things in my boxing style. | ||
| So from fighting chickens? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What was the thing that you noticed? | ||
| Well, first of all, the one that usually was on top, he knew and he cared himself for the era of confidence that... | ||
| He wasn't going to be messed with. | ||
| So when he fight, he do a lot more faking, a lot more fainting, never let him know when he coming. | ||
| All of a sudden, day goes. | ||
| And he stayed powerful. | ||
| He stayed the same the whole day. | ||
| And it's like, anytime he went against anybody, he did the same thing. | ||
| He used the same faints, same faints. | ||
| And he often would do things that other chickens just didn't know to do. | ||
| But that's God-given. | ||
| Men didn't teach them that. | ||
| God gave them that. | ||
| So if you learn his characteristics, which I would watch how he would carry himself all day long, the way he carried himself when he wasn't around the other ones, the way he got rid of when the other ones came around. | ||
| People say, people used to think that I was very egotistical. | ||
| I've never been an egotistical person. | ||
| But what I was was a highly confident person. | ||
| I'm God's game rooster. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| You bring another one around, guess what? | ||
| I'm ready to defend my turf. | ||
| That's a funny thing to say to a world champion fighter who's one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| You're egotistical. | ||
| I mean, listen, if you're not confident, you don't get to that place. | ||
| Never ever. | ||
| Impossible. | ||
| You have to have a belief in yourself. | ||
| There's no other way. | ||
| If you don't, who's going to believe in you? | ||
| Yeah, nobody. | ||
| Yeah, I was a fan back when you got fucked over in the Olympics, man. | ||
| Goddamn, did they ruin that. | ||
| That was terrible. | ||
| That was one of the worst Olympic decisions I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Maybe the worst. | ||
| It was so bad, but it was in Korea, right? | ||
| Yep, it was in Seoul, South Korea. | ||
| And the Korean fighter, yeah. | ||
| Goddamn, that was ridiculous. | ||
| It was one of those fights where you're like, well, he got the gold medal, clear. | ||
| And then you see the decision, your jaw drops. | ||
| You're like, what is this? | ||
| It hurt the sport of boxing, especially amateur boxing. | ||
| It hurt it because when you can take a kid 19 years old, he defeats his rival, clearly, and you rob him, it really eliminates the integrity of that sport. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you still don't go back and fix it. | ||
| Nobody to this day has come back and tried to fix it. | ||
| They gave me Olympic orders. | ||
| They gave me the Val Barker Cup, which is for the best boxer at the Olympics. | ||
| How crazy is that? | ||
| How is the best boxer here not wearing a gold medal? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was bad, but it also was, in one way, it made people really root for you. | ||
| It was a blessing in disguise. | ||
| And I understood that the second day, I think I might have cried the whole first day. | ||
| But the second day, well, I didn't cry until after I went to the back and asked the interpreter to ask him if he really thought he'd beat me. | ||
| Because if he said yes, then he didn't know it, but he was going to get another one. | ||
| laughter laughter But he said, no, I know I didn't win, but it wasn't my fault. | ||
| It was the judge's. | ||
| I shook his hand and I left. | ||
| I never had another bad feeling towards him because he didn't do it. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| You're right, for sure. | ||
| You have to understand what is coming. | ||
| But then I also realized that not only were the judges not necessarily, they are to be blamed, but what God did was take their negative side. | ||
| It was a big talk. | ||
| Remember when you began your career, there was a big talk of your career, how you got fucked over in the Olympics. | ||
| It wasn't a question. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| There was no debate. | ||
| I never saw a single person that made an argument that he won. | ||
| It was all you. | ||
| And so that when you began your career, you had a lot of people rooting for you. | ||
| Yes, and that was a beautiful thing. | ||
| That's the blessing above all for me because To me, it was God's way of making me not put my life on idle, but turn me up on high. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had no clue what he was doing, but that's why you're just trusting God. | ||
| Look where you at now. | ||
| Yeah, I remember when you fought James Toney and that was a big fight because James Toney was in his prime and you were in your prime. | ||
| And again, you caught him with that leaping left hook, man, that crazy left hook and dropped him. | ||
| When you beat James Toney like that, I think a lot of people had to go, whoa, like he can do this to an elite top of the food chain world champion. | ||
| That's what makes a real superior athlete. | ||
| Not that you can do it to guys who are beneath you, but you can do it to guys who are supposed to be your equal or above you. | ||
| That's when you're really doing it. | ||
| Now, maybe people don't know, but you have been active and you fought up until about, what, like two years ago? | ||
| 2018. 2018. Yep. | ||
| So, you decided you're done, or were you 100% done, or were you just 100% done? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Walk me through this call. | ||
| How do you get this call to fight Mike Tyson? | ||
| Well, one of his guys, Azeem, calls McGee and tells McGee, my partner, to tell me to call. | ||
| So I call Azeem. | ||
| Azeem says, hey, Mike wants to do a comeback. | ||
| He wants to do an exhibition, but he wants you to be his dance partner. | ||
| Me? | ||
| He said, yeah. | ||
| I said, okay, well... | ||
| Let's see what we can work out. | ||
| He said, yeah, we got a lot of different situations going on, but they want to do it in a different format, and they want to do it in a way that you and Michael are taking care of, and everything is good. | ||
| Well, that didn't turn out to be necessarily what the case was, but me being Roy Jones Jr. and us being in COVID, I'm like, you know what? | ||
| Six weeks, that's right around the corner. | ||
| He ain't been fighting. | ||
| I can get rid of it. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I can get a little bit more ready than he can because he's been inactive a lot longer than I have. | ||
| So six weeks, I know it's Mike Tyson. | ||
| He's big as heck and he's still Mike Tyson and he still can punch. | ||
| But six weeks, there's no way he can get prepared for this. | ||
| So I said, you know what, I'll take that. | ||
| And I jumped on it. | ||
| Well, lo and behold, something happens and they change. | ||
| Now, why did they change it? | ||
| Did they give a reason? | ||
| They said something about marketing. | ||
| They told me something about marketing, but I don't really believe much of what was said. | ||
| I mean, I just can't believe it, you know, because we had a September 12th date. | ||
| That was before football season started. | ||
| Basketball had started, but... | ||
| People at home with nothing to do, and that's why I was like, you know what? | ||
| I wanted him when I was in my prime, so why not take him now? | ||
| I mean, six weeks, that's easy. | ||
| And they said, well, we got more attention than we expected to get, and this happened and that happened, so we want to move it. | ||
| I'm like, man, so... | ||
| I was thinking about it, and Dean Tool, my guy, he posted something about the new date on my site. | ||
| And when he did that, it was like, well, that means that you admitted, that you agreed to it. | ||
| I didn't, but okay. | ||
| That's how it goes. | ||
| I'll be that guy, you know. | ||
| I don't back out of nothing. | ||
| It ain't like I'm scared of Mike Tyson because he's Mike Tyson. | ||
| It's just that I know that in six weeks, he had no chance to deal with me. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| 12 weeks, well, he'll have a better chance to deal with me, but his chance is still going to be rough, but it's going to be better than it would have been in six weeks, because six weeks, he didn't have a chance. | ||
| Now, during the time where you were off, were you working out? | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| Were you still staying fit? | ||
| Because you always stayed slim, you looked good. | ||
| I have to work out because I train a lot of guys. | ||
| And when you train guys, for me, I like to not only just teach them, I like to also give them an example. | ||
| The best example is the best that I think did what I'm teaching them. | ||
| And I want to teach them what I learned and what my style was. | ||
| So I like to be able to demonstrate by example, lead by example. | ||
| So do you have young guys that fight in your style? | ||
| They're trying to. | ||
| It's hard to say they fight in my style. | ||
| And really, I don't really necessarily teach them to fight like me. | ||
| My style is not necessarily just me. | ||
| My style means that you know how to counter everything. | ||
| You know offense, you know defense, you know footwork, you know everything. | ||
| Every aspect of boxing is what my style is. | ||
| Now, the craziness, that's your individual person. | ||
| Your DNA will decide what you do with that. | ||
| What I do is, I try to make guys... | ||
| Comfortable and to give them every opportunity to execute on another guy's mistakes. | ||
| If I can make you do that and have you prepare, always prepare for the next move, then that's my style. | ||
| Your style required extreme physical attributes though. | ||
| You know, that's a... | ||
| Well, physical attributes, it does require extreme attributes, but when you come and watch one of my classes, like I got an apprentice over in Sweden, I got an apprentice over in South Africa, I got a few apprentices that I've been teaching. | ||
| I got one out in Washington State, and when I teach them, they understand that, yeah, people blame it on athleticism, but it's not all athleticism. | ||
| There's a lot more knowledge to it than people ever would begin to understand. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So, yeah, people say, ah, he was just a super athlete. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| If you take me back, I can go visually or verbally walk you through every knockout that I got or every setup to the knockout before it happened. | ||
| Sometimes rounds before it happened. | ||
| Sometimes when it happened quick, I can tell you exactly what happened, exactly what I saw and why I did what I did. | ||
| Physical attributes? | ||
| No, there's no way it could be just that. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| You gotta know a lot. | ||
| There's a lot of freak athletes out there. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| But you had freak athleticism as well as like an insane comprehensive understanding of boxing. | ||
| That's what makes it great, right? | ||
| Yeah, you gotta have an insane comprehension. | ||
| But what I do have, the freakiness about me is my hand speed. | ||
| Because how can I still be this fast at 51 years old? | ||
| I was watching you hit the pads. | ||
| Holy cow. | ||
| I'd be looking at it. | ||
| I'd be saying, whoa. | ||
| Is that... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Double, triple, quadruple, left hands in a row. | ||
| How? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| We were just talking about that at 51. I know it's not 51 like in the day. | ||
|
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No. | |
| Back in the day, 51 was done. | ||
| Oh, 51 was over with. | ||
| It's different today with the new training methods and understanding of the human body and supplements. | ||
| Like, people are different. | ||
| But you were always different, too. | ||
| I always tell people, like, you had crazy biceps but small triceps. | ||
| Like, you were built to throw hooks. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, if you look at your body when you were in your prime, you had these... | ||
| Best hook in the game. | ||
| No, it's still like that. | ||
|
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I show people. | |
| Look at the thing still there. | ||
| Let that rock still there. | ||
| It ain't went nowhere. | ||
|
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Look at the size of that thing. | |
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| That's that hook. | ||
| The right ain't like that, but that hook. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Your left is way bigger than your right. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's why I see I'm the best hook in the game. | ||
| Yeah, that's nuts, man. | ||
| That's a serious imbalance right there. | ||
| Now, when you train young guys, when you're showing them your style, do you try to get them left hook heavy the way you are? | ||
| Or do you just let them do whatever their style is and just teach them what you know about boxing? | ||
| I take whatever you got, whatever your best attributes are, and we work from there. | ||
| I am not God. | ||
| I cannot reinvent the wheel. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| I can invent some stuff, but not the wheel. | ||
| The wheel was already made like it is. | ||
| You can't reinvent the wheel. | ||
| So what I do is, whatever God has given you, we try to take that and take that to the next level. | ||
| Now, you get this phone call. | ||
| Do you just immediately start training? | ||
| And when you immediately start training, how are you ramping up for a fight like that? | ||
| You know, it's like I heard Mike say something about when he started training, he was in the bed for a week. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I went in the bed for a week because I was going a lot already, but I was a sore person for a couple days. | ||
| Did you, I mean, did it feel good to say, oh, wow, I got a big fight coming up. | ||
| I got a goal. | ||
| We're back. | ||
| I was excited. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's Mike Tyson. | ||
| So it's like, in most cases, you'll say, yes, I got a big fight on the road coming, you know? | ||
| But this time I was like, you know what? | ||
| Your buddy get in a little shape because you are going there with Mike Tyson. | ||
| Yeah, it is Mike Tyson. | ||
| You don't know what Mike Tyson might come in there and do. | ||
| You don't know if you got to protect your ears, your chin, your jaw. | ||
| You don't know what he might do. | ||
| So what you better do is get in shape and be prepared for whichever Mike shows up. | ||
| Yeah, when I read that it was going to be an exhibition, they weren't going to try and knock each other out, I went, the fuck out of here. | ||
| I mean, you think about it. | ||
| Oh, it's an exhibition, but we got 12-ounce gloves. | ||
| But it's an exhibition. | ||
| Exhibition. | ||
| No headgear. | ||
| Exhibition. | ||
| Judges. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's still Mike Tyson. | ||
| And exhibition. | ||
| Mike Tyson, who knocked Corey Sanders down in the first round of an exhibition back in 2004. Yeah. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So, what is your definition of an exhibition? | ||
| Because going in the ring with Mike Tyson has nothing exhibitionist about it. | ||
| No, he doesn't have that in him. | ||
| When you watch him spar, his sparring was fights. | ||
| Nothing exhibitionist about it. | ||
| Yeah, they were fights. | ||
| His sparring was fights. | ||
| Everything he does is a fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, you said that he was always kind of on your radar. | ||
| He was. | ||
| When you were the heavyweight champ, when you beat John Ruiz... | ||
| He was the only other person I would have fought as a heavyweight. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because he was the youngest heavyweight champ ever. | ||
| And to be honest, I probably was the lightest. | ||
| I started lighter than anybody, only junior middleweight to ever go win a heavyweight title. | ||
| So I was the smallest guy to ever come up and win a heavyweight title. | ||
| How much did you weigh when you fought Ruiz? | ||
| 200. 200. Wow. | ||
| And so did you think when you were getting ready to fight, what do you walk around at right now? | ||
| Now I'm heavier than I was then. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Now I walk around like 220 sometimes. | ||
| 220? | ||
| I've been up to 220. So do you feel good at 220 or would you like to be lighter when you fight him? | ||
| I'm at about 210 now. | ||
| This is where I want to be at. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Hands fast as ever. | ||
| Still a lot of mobility. | ||
| Not too much weight on these knees. | ||
| So I feel pretty good at 210. So I think I'm going to stay around this area. | ||
| That's not much different than him because when he was in his prime, he was about 215. I mean, he was a light heavyweight, you know, a lighter rather heavyweight. | ||
| A light explosive heavyweight. | ||
| Yeah, super. | ||
| Super explosive heavyweight. | ||
| So it's like size doesn't really matter with Mike. | ||
| I mean, it mattered with Reese because I knew I was going to push a little bit in the hole, but Mike's size don't really matter. | ||
| Now, when you decided to go up and fight Ruiz for the heavyweight title, did you think that was one and done? | ||
| Or did you think once I win that title, maybe I'll defend it a few times? | ||
| Like, what was your thoughts getting ready for that fight? | ||
| So, as you know me, I'm a man of my word. | ||
| I try to be. | ||
| And I said I wanted to go do... | ||
| What Bob Fitzsimmons did, but I was going to add a little bit to it because I was also super middleweight champion, which was a division that wasn't around when Bob Fitzsimmons did this in 1896. Well, what Bob Fitzsimmons did was he won the middleweight title, the light heavyweight title, the heavyweight title, and then he recaptured the light heavyweight title. | ||
| That's a big segment of the whole thing, recapturing the light heavyweight title. | ||
| So if I go up and do what I did, win the heavyweight title, and don't recapture the light heavyweight title, I can't look you in your eyes and say, I did what Bob Fitzsimmons did, because I didn't. | ||
| I did part of what he did, but the hardest part is to come back from heavyweight and recapture that light heavyweight title. | ||
| That's why I came back and did it. | ||
| But before I departed the heavyweight division, I would have fought Mike Tyson because of what I told you earlier. | ||
| He was the youngest heavyweight champ of all times. | ||
| To me, he was one of the most explosive, entertaining guys you want to see because you never know what he's going to do. | ||
| And it's the same reason I'm going in with him right now because he's explosive, entertaining, and you never know what he's going to do. | ||
| I mean, both of you were in that Nas song. | ||
| You know that song? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The new Mike Tyson's Roy Jones. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And that's a line. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, very similar in that regard that you both were so dominant over your divisions when you were in your prime that those fights were like executions. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Why didn't that fight take place back then? | ||
| Because nobody ever saw me coming to a heavyweight back then. | ||
| And by the time I did it, he was already on his way out of boxing. | ||
| He already had departed. | ||
| So, people say, I think they say someone told them that I was awful 40 million to fight Mike Tyson. | ||
| No, I wasn't. | ||
| If I was awful 40 million, we've been fighting. | ||
| I mean, I tell people today, like, they always talk about, you know, what's going on with DAZN and all these fighters. | ||
| Listen, man, if I was in today's time, And I was Roy Jones, the same Roy Jones I am. | ||
| If they told me, Roy, we'll pay you $20 million per fight for five fights, we get to pick the opponents. | ||
| I say, matter of fact, don't even worry about picking an opponent. | ||
| Y'all call me, tell me what day I'm fighting, what weight I'm fighting, and I don't care who it is. | ||
| Just tell me when I'm fighting and what weight I need to be. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| That's who I am. | ||
| So it's like when they talk about I would have fought, no. | ||
| They would have offered me for the meeting to fight. | ||
| If Mike would have just said, yeah, I would have fought him for whatever we fought for. | ||
| That's how bad I wanted to fight him back then. | ||
| People love to talk though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just say a lot of stupid shit. | ||
| It doesn't make sense. | ||
| But that's just, people need something to talk about. | ||
| Well, I know, but I'm just saying I'd be wanting to clear it up because I was not offered money to fight Mike back then. | ||
| If I would have, I would have fought Mike back then. | ||
| I wanted to fight Mike. | ||
| He's the only other heavyweight I would have fought. | ||
| Everybody else, I was like, no, I'm not giving y'all the opportunity. | ||
| First of all, I'm a small guy coming up to the heavyweight division. | ||
| I don't belong up here anyway. | ||
| I just wanted to do what Bob Fitzsimmons did and prove I could do it or see if I could do it because Sugar Ray Robinson tried to go win the light heavyweight title. | ||
| And he passed out. | ||
| So he didn't win it. | ||
| So, of course, we always want to try or challenge ourselves. | ||
| I want to see what the sky with the roof is. | ||
| Can I win the heavyweight title? | ||
| Am I really that good, as good as I think I am? | ||
| Maybe I am. | ||
| Let's find out. | ||
| Now, how difficult was it to get from 200 pounds to go all the way back down to 175? | ||
| That was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. | ||
| 25 pounds of muscle put on by Megan Shearstone. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| Because if you look at you when you fought Ruiz, there was nothing to be lost. | ||
| 25 pounds of pure muscle. | ||
| So that first fight, I won on pure heart. | ||
| We're talking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pure heart. | ||
| That's when people, and I had people even text me and call me and tell me, you know, I was a fan. | ||
| I liked you, but I like you a whole lot more now because I realize what you really are. | ||
| I never knew you had that big of a heart. | ||
| That was a big transition for you. | ||
| I mean, and maybe a bad transition to go from heavyweight down to light heavyweight again. | ||
| Because you could see physically you weren't the same. | ||
| Because of that weight cut, you were struggling. | ||
| And that was the talk of all the commentators. | ||
| They were like, what is happening to his body that he's going from 200 pounds ripped? | ||
| Down to 175 and then competing. | ||
| I mean, you must have cut an extreme amount of weight for the weight. | ||
| Was this the day before weigh-ins or the day of weigh-ins? | ||
| It was the day before, but it didn't matter because I had pulled so much muscle off. | ||
| So you can't put that back. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So I couldn't put that back, but it was so... | ||
| Ironic about that is that as weak as I was, he still couldn't get me out because my mind said I got to do what Bob Fitzsimmons did. | ||
| So because my mind was locked on something, you can't get me out of there. | ||
| My mind locked in. | ||
| I was weak as I probably ever have been. | ||
| My mind said, no, we're going to forget this. | ||
| And I got that. | ||
| And then you went and fought him again. | ||
| Yeah, I probably shouldn't have because, like I said, my body hadn't came back yet. | ||
| And I didn't have nothing mentally to get there. | ||
| I was just doing it because people say, well, he gave you a hard time. | ||
| Okay, well, I ain't scared to fight nobody. | ||
| So, y'all want me to fight him again? | ||
| Sure, why not? | ||
| But I had nothing to gain, so it's a little bit harder. | ||
| So, he closed his eyes, got lucky. | ||
| It's called good, but, I mean, hey, it's boxing, you know? | ||
| For me, though, that first win was one of the most impressive wins of my career because it's the first time I ever had to win a fight with strictly my heart. | ||
| Because your body just wasn't performing. | ||
| Body wasn't there. | ||
| Now, when you were walking around after the Ruiz fight, what did you weigh when you started cutting down for the Tarva fight? | ||
| 203. 203. And how did you do it? | ||
| Were you doing crazy cardio? | ||
| What were you doing to try to lose all that weight? | ||
| Crazy cardio is the only way I ever did it. | ||
| The only way I ever did it. | ||
| I run two, sometimes three times a day just to get the weight down. | ||
| That's the only way I ever lost weight. | ||
| Rubber suits the whole deal? | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Goddamn, what kind of an impact must that have had on your body? | ||
| Well, that's what people fail to realize. | ||
| Now I hear kids talk about, oh, we couldn't make weight or we couldn't. | ||
| Man, don't tell me that. | ||
| I'm from the old school. | ||
| Don't tell me none of this new school stuff. | ||
| You couldn't lose a pound? | ||
| Don't tell me that. | ||
| Man, when I was amateur, when I was amateur, my dad made me go down to 147 for the Eastern Olympic trials. | ||
| I fought that night. | ||
| I made 147. I fought that night. | ||
| I got out of the fight. | ||
| I went and got on the scale. | ||
| I was 165 pounds. | ||
| I had to fight the next day at 147. I had to make weight that next morning. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Ran all night. | ||
| 7.30 the next morning, I got all the way down to 1.48 and a half. | ||
| And I said, I can't go no more. | ||
| My dad's like, why you can't lose money? | ||
| You can lose another pound. | ||
| No, pound and a half. | ||
| I said, no, because it hit me. | ||
| And it was God talking to me. | ||
| I knew it was God talking to me. | ||
| How are you going to do this every night in an unfamiliar country? | ||
| You don't know if it's going to be cold. | ||
| You don't know if it's going to be rain. | ||
| You're not going to know where to go run at. | ||
| You might not even be allowed to go out and run in the area you are. | ||
| So if you make the Olympics at this weight, how are you going to make weight every night? | ||
| You went from 147 to 165. Yeah, that's a big jump. | ||
| Then back down to 148 and a half. | ||
| And you tell me y'all can't lose a pound or two pounds? | ||
| Get out of here with that, bruh. | ||
| So, was that when you made a decision to go up? | ||
| Yeah, I was already up, but he made me come down. | ||
| Then I went back up. | ||
| How old were you then? | ||
| 17. Oh, so your body's just starting to get thick, too. | ||
| No, 18. You're feeling out. | ||
| 18, yeah. | ||
| That's, yeah. | ||
| I think one of the big problems with MMA, as opposed to boxing, is there's a very limited number of weight classes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of fighters that ruin their body cutting too much weight and going down. | ||
| And you hear about these guys, sometimes they get so dehydrated they pass out. | ||
| I had that happen to me before. | ||
| So I understand it. | ||
| I know how it goes. | ||
| But there's a science to it and there's a limit that you should do it to. | ||
| But you got to know the science and know the limit to how far you can go. | ||
| If you don't ration that out, then it's bad for you. | ||
| There's a lot of guys that are very good at it, but ultimately the damage that it does, particularly to your kidneys, it's just not worth it. | ||
| I wish MMA had more weight classes. | ||
| I don't know if boxing is the right number, because there's a lot in boxing. | ||
| Sometimes it's like 47, 54, 60, 68. There's so many weight classes. | ||
| But there's a good argument that that's better. | ||
| And when you look at boxing, there's so many super fights that can be had, too, because there's champions that are so close to each other. | ||
| They're just a few pounds here or there. | ||
| It's better because it gives a lot more people the opportunity to become world champions. | ||
| But at the same time, like you said, if they cut it back down to eight weight classes... | ||
| Only the strong gonna survive, baby. | ||
| We gotta go. | ||
| We'll cut out some of these paper champions. | ||
| They'll get cut out real quick. | ||
| So do you think it'd be better that way? | ||
| I know it would be that way. | ||
| Look, look, look, look, look. | ||
| I won a title from, I mean, I fought from junior middleweight to heavyweight. | ||
| All the reason I didn't win a title at junior middleweight is because my daddy wouldn't let me fight for one. | ||
| And I knew I was gonna outgrow the weight class. | ||
| So I told him I wanted to fight Gio Franco Rossi early because if I can fight Rossi now, vacate the title because I ain't gonna be able to stay there at this weight no way. | ||
| And he didn't let me do it, but I would have had titles from 54 all the way to heavyweight. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That would have been unprecedented. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| What made you go from 68 to 75? | ||
| I ran out of competition. | ||
| I always just went to whoever the competition was. | ||
| So after I beat James, I fought Paz Jones, I think. | ||
| Then they started giving me the, God bless the dead, but Tony Thornton's and no more contenders that really the world didn't know. | ||
| So I wanted to go up and fight somebody that the world knew, which was like a Virgil Hill type guy, Reggie Johnson type guy. | ||
| So I went to set the fire, Lou DelVal. | ||
| I went to set the fire to make bigger, better fights. | ||
| Those guys were all bigger than me too. | ||
| But I went wherever I had to go to make fights. | ||
| So it's like people often, I mean, there's a guy, the guy who used to coach Triple G, I can't think of his name, Abel Sanchez. | ||
| I said Triple G should have went up a long time ago and tried Andre Ward. | ||
| He's only eight pounds. | ||
| But Abel Sanchez said, oh, he's too little to do that. | ||
| We're fighting 68 now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| Canelo went all the way from 54 to 75. So how you tell me he's too little? | ||
| Then you say, oh, you did against a bomb. | ||
| Mike McCallum, a bomb ever, gave James Toney two of the hardest fights of James Toney's career before me. | ||
| And Montel Griffin did it. | ||
| Knocked out Milton McCrory. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| So you tell me he was a bomb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I fight him and say, oh, he's a little bit older. | ||
| But like you said, look at us now. | ||
| Oh, he knocked out Donald Curry. | ||
| Donald Curry, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, that Donald Curry knockout made me so sad. | ||
| I was a giant Donald Curry fan, and I was rooting for him. | ||
| I got my shoes on, I ran running. | ||
| I ran like three miles, and I came home, and I said, I am never investing that much in a fighter again. | ||
| Because it was like, I lost. | ||
| Because I remember he caught him with that left hook to the body, and then the left to the chin. | ||
| And I went, oh, no. | ||
| And seeing Donald laid out on the canvas, I was like, fuck! | ||
| Because when Donald knocked out McCrory, when Donald knocked out Milton McCrory, I remember thinking like, damn, he is so fast. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He was the Cobra. | ||
| I want to say the Cobra. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| He was so fast. | ||
| And then when he got KO'd like that, I was like, I can't believe this is happening. | ||
| I had to go running. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It was bad. | ||
| But for Abel to say, I fought a bomb. | ||
| No, it's crazy. | ||
| McCallum was an animal. | ||
| Yeah, to me, you're trying to... | ||
| No. | ||
| You fought Hopkins. | ||
| You fought animals. | ||
| But you're covering up for what you're not doing. | ||
| Because if Triple G was good, we'd say, yeah, what's one more weight class? | ||
| Canelo came to him. | ||
| I mean, to me, you cheated Triple G out of opportunity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If he didn't win, he'd become one of the pound for pound. | ||
| You can't say John Ruiz is the greatest heavyweight of all time. | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| But he was no bum. | ||
| No, he wasn't. | ||
| He beat Holyfield. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Knocked Holyfield down with the right hand. | ||
| He was one of them. | ||
| He was a tough guy. | ||
| Very tough guy. | ||
| It's just you had the style to beat him. | ||
| He just couldn't compete with your speed and your fluidity and your understanding of distance. | ||
| You just controlled that fight. | ||
| I try to teach guys Every way, every aspect of boxing so that you understand some guys, because you're tall, you're going to have to fight close. | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| Because there are guys that realize you're tall and they know they got to get close to you to win. | ||
| That's their best opportunity. | ||
| Hagler Hearns. | ||
| So you got to get close. | ||
| Look what Hagler did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Took him out. | ||
| But Hearns was trying. | ||
| Hearns was trying because Hearns knows how to fight close too. | ||
| Just that he's not in condition to fight close for a long time because that's not what he trains at doing. | ||
| Well, Hagler had a ridiculous chin, too. | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| Ran it. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Ran it. | ||
| Yeah, it was one guy knocked him down, but it was a bullshit knockdown his entire career. | ||
| Who was it that knocked him down? | ||
| I'm trying to remember the name. | ||
| I don't even remember who knocked him down. | ||
| I don't remember the dude. | ||
| Juan Roldan? | ||
| Was it Domingo? | ||
| Juan Domingo Roldan? | ||
| It might have been Juan Roldan. | ||
| Yeah, it might have been Roldan. | ||
| And then Hagler eventually stopped him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I heard the elementary pass, too. | ||
| Oh, did he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I was sad and sad because those days were the real days of boxing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Almost one champion, maybe two, but mostly one champion. | ||
| You knew who the champ was at every weight class. | ||
| I remember when they started out in IBF and WBO. How many champs are you going to have? | ||
| Well, see, my point, though, is here's my problem there. | ||
| I don't have a problem with you having more champs, but why not make every champ have to fight one another to find out who is the champ? | ||
| When I was a light heavyweight, I had seven of the eight known available belts. | ||
| And the only reason I didn't have the eighth one is because I wasn't going to Germany to take all my seven belts for that one belt, and they may rob me because I had gotten robbed in Seoul, Korea. | ||
| So I had learned my lesson. | ||
| I can't go away over there to fight Darius and I'm the man right now. | ||
| He needs to come see me. | ||
| If you're offering me to come see me, he turned it down. | ||
| So what does that tell you? | ||
| He don't want this smoke. | ||
| But if I could have got it, if I could have got it, I'd have had every belt at Light Heavyweight because that's who I am. | ||
| So I feel like any fighter That is aspiring to be champ or is champ. | ||
| If you don't want every belt in your weight class, you don't think you're the best. | ||
| Yeah, it should be if you're calling someone a world champion, they really should fight the other world champions. | ||
| If you're going to have a bunch of different sanctioning bodies, if they're available, they should have to fight each other. | ||
| Every year. | ||
| The East play the West in the NBA for the championship. | ||
| Every year, the AFC play the NFC in football. | ||
| Every year, the American League plays this league every year. | ||
| So it's like, come on, baby. | ||
| At some point, we got to put somewhere. | ||
| Y'all got to show me who the real man is. | ||
| And that's what I wanted to do. | ||
| That's why I had seven that I knew of. | ||
| And I didn't care what they were. | ||
| You could have put any letter on them. | ||
| If they were known belts, if you can call me and tell me y'all got a president, I need that bill. | ||
| Yeah, it was simpler times back in the day. | ||
| For me it was. | ||
| When there was one champion in each weight class. | ||
| But you gotta also understand that a lot of this stuff happens because of promoters. | ||
| So because I was doing my own thing, I could do what I wanted to do when I got ready. | ||
| That's why I used to tell them, y'all can call me. | ||
| It ain't hard to get a fight with Roy Jones. | ||
| You just call me and either call me or get a belt. | ||
| I don't care what belt it is. | ||
| It could be the National Walmart belt. | ||
| If it's light heavy, I want that. | ||
| When you go back to the Hagler days, how many belts were there? | ||
| It was only one or two then. | ||
| WBA and WBC, I think. | ||
| You know what I watched the other day? | ||
| Hagler versus Mugabe. | ||
| That was a good fight. | ||
| Mugabe was killing people back then. | ||
| Yes, he would, but Hagler wasn't having it. | ||
| There's a time in the fight where he hits Hagler with an uppercut, snaps Hagler's head back, and Hagler just right back at him. | ||
| Like it was nothing. | ||
| Like it didn't even work. | ||
| Hagler was in my dynamite dozen that I learned things from as a kid, and what I learned from Hagler was consistency. | ||
| He wore the same maroon and white trunks, and he was the same Marvin Hagler every time you saw him. | ||
| If you fought Hagler, guess what you're going to get? | ||
| Hagler. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah, he was so disciplined, too. | ||
| So disciplined. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think he was training for a Mustafa Ham show. | ||
| I forget who he was training for, but it was when I was a kid. | ||
| I was living in Boston, and I was watching this thing. | ||
| They had him on the news where Hagler was running down the Cape, Cape Cod, in the wintertime, running the sand dudes, screaming war. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And I got chills. | ||
| I got goosebumps just watching. | ||
| Just the discipline that man had. | ||
| He was never out of shape. | ||
| He psyched himself out the whole training camp. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| What a mind he had. | ||
| I mean, he was just so fierce as a champion. | ||
| But once again, see, what I liked about people like Marvin... | ||
| he was so consistent that not one time did he not make weight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He wasn't going up to meet you. | ||
| He wasn't going down to meet you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Meet him at 160. | ||
| He'll fight him. | ||
| I don't care what your name is. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| 160. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I love the fact that when he fought Sugar Ray I kind of gave it to him. | ||
| I mean, I'd have to watch it again now as an adult. | ||
| But I remember when I watched it back then, I thought he won the fight. | ||
| And he just said, that's it. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| Never came back. | ||
| Went to Italy. | ||
| Started making movies. | ||
| You ever watch some of those movies? | ||
| I ain't never watched them, but I see him every now and then. | ||
| They're hilarious. | ||
| He's still in good shape. | ||
| He looks really good still. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sure. | |
| He talks great. | ||
| I mean, he has no problems at all. | ||
| No whatsoever. | ||
| Which is amazing. | ||
| It's beautiful to see someone get out clean. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And have a new life after. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| But for me, for Marvin, I thought that fight, after I looked at it as an adult too, I thought the fight should have been called a draw at least, or at best. | ||
| And I understood why Sugar won it, because Sugar painted a picture before the fight that I'm not even supposed to be in here. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So anything he did, he's going to get two points for it, whereas Hagel was going to get one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because Sugar painted a picture to the public that I'm not even supposed to be in here with this monster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's always a problem judging underdogs, right? | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| And the fans, he also knows how to play with the crowd. | ||
| So Sugar used his brain and got the decision that night. | ||
| But if you look at the actuality of the fight, it either was a draw or you probably could have gave it to Hagler because he was champ. | ||
| But I would have said, looking at it as an adult, I would have probably scored a draw. | ||
| But both of them put on an immaculate fight that night. | ||
| It was a beautiful fight for me because Sugar came back and, like I said, he painted that picture like, I shouldn't even be in here. | ||
| And he was really phenomenal for what he had been on five years. | ||
| So he made it look like, I'm defeating the odds. | ||
| And everything he did, he did it to such a high level that it made it look like he did defeat the odds. | ||
| When you were coming up, did you watch a lot of films of the greats? | ||
| Well, I only watched a few guys. | ||
| And I can tell you a lot of the guys I watched. | ||
| One was, I used to watch Salvador Sanchez every opportunity I got. | ||
| Because to me, he was the best offensive-minded guy of all. | ||
| What a tragedy that guy died so young. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Because my dream fight, this is why I get so pissed off about fights not happening. | ||
| Like right now, I'm mad because Crawford and Spence aren't getting the opportunity to fight one another. | ||
| One of my dream fights was Ecibio Pedroza versus Salvador Sanchez. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mmm. | |
| Both of the featherweight champions. | ||
| One but two champs back then. | ||
| The two featherweight champions, the best at the division. | ||
| I want to see them lock up. | ||
| See who wins that because I love both of them. | ||
| I love Pedroza because of his bolo punches and because of his knowledge inside. | ||
| He was a real smart but dirty guy inside the ring, right? | ||
| But Salvador had so much offense that I wanted to know how was he going to keep Salvador off of him with the offense. | ||
| And then Salvador, unfortunately, was killed in a car wreck. | ||
| And that That just blew my mega fight away. | ||
| That was my mega fight probably besides Hearns Leonard. | ||
| That was my other mega fight to me. | ||
| The original Hearns Leonard is an all-time classic. | ||
| Just an all-time classic. | ||
| When Angelo Dundee's in the corner. | ||
| You're blowing it, champ. | ||
| You're blowing it, kid! | ||
| And he goes out and wins and stops him. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| That was epic. | ||
| That was epic. | ||
| Especially because Hearns at 147 could hit people and knock them into another fucking dimension. | ||
| Well, now, to Hearns' credit, he could do that at 168. Yeah, he did it. | ||
| Remember when he did it to Duran? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He did it to Duran. | ||
| The only person ever to do it to Roberto Duran. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The only other person I think knocked Duran down was Esteban DeJesus. | ||
| He face-planted Duran. | ||
| I'm talking about coke. | ||
| Cold. | ||
| He had that snap because he had that wide torso. | ||
| Wide shoulders. | ||
| Thin waist. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Torque that punch. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| But to show you how much mental it is, Sugar Ray would take that punch like nobody else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Except in the second fight, I think. | ||
| He dropped Sugar a few times in the second fight. | ||
| But the first fight, Sugar Ray took all of it. | ||
| He took it, yeah. | ||
| Because they had such a beef. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| That was his rival. | ||
| Yeah, well, he had known that this was the fight that he had to win for greatness. | ||
| You know, and there was so much. | ||
| I mean, it's hard for people to imagine how big Sugar Ray Leonard was. | ||
| Like, people don't know the sport of boxing. | ||
| When he was the Olympic champion, and he was, I mean, what was it? | ||
| He did 7-Up commercials or something? | ||
| I forget the commercials. | ||
| Sprite. | ||
| Sprite. | ||
| He was huge. | ||
| And this was when boxing was on ABC, ABC World of Sports. | ||
| I mean, people don't know. | ||
| There was no cable back then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
None. | |
| It was giant. | ||
| He was America's superstar. | ||
| Yes, he was. | ||
| And Tommy Hearns was an assassin. | ||
| Killer. | ||
| He was an assassin. | ||
| Killer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the two of them getting together was like one of those who knows fights, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's like you get them occasionally today, you know? | ||
| And see, this is what hurts me about the Olympics right now. | ||
| About that move that they did to me to lose the integrity. | ||
| See, I followed Ray Leonard from the Olympics. | ||
| I followed Howard Davis Jr. from the Olympics. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| These guys were incredible to me because they set a precedence for me. | ||
| They made me want to go represent my country one day at the Olympics. | ||
| Then turn pro and do like they did and become somebody. | ||
| They drawed me a blueprint to follow. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| Muhammad Ali, all of them. | ||
| George Foreman, they drawed us a blueprint to follow. | ||
| That Olympic blueprint meant something because that was the It's the epitome of amateur sports. | ||
| The Olympics was the highest level of amateur sports. | ||
| If you can get there, get there and represent your country, you're doing something. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| You're on your way. | ||
| And then they have robbed me. | ||
| Well, remember that was like the doorstep to professional stardom. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Meldrick Taylor, Pernell Whitaker, Vanderholy. | ||
| Remember that one class? | ||
| They had a heck of a class too. | ||
| Mark Breland. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They had a heck of a class. | ||
| Leo Randolph, yes. | ||
| What a class that was. | ||
| Even a guy from my area, Clint Jackson, was on that team. | ||
| And everybody was following that. | ||
| When those guys left the Olympics and when they were on the podium with their medals and then they went on to their pro careers. | ||
| He wasn't on that team. | ||
| He was on the 76 team, my bad. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Another great team. | ||
| But watching those guys leave the Olympics and go on to superstardom, that was what you wanted to see. | ||
| That's what the normal trajectory was. | ||
| You go from the Olympics to superstardom in boxing. | ||
| And now it's like, we don't even half the time know who all made it to the Olympics. | ||
| No one knows anymore. | ||
| But also, the Olympics have gotten... | ||
| I don't know if you ever saw that movie, Icarus. | ||
| Did you ever see that movie? | ||
| I don't watch many movies. | ||
| It's a documentary that Brian Fogle did on the Olympics. | ||
| It's a crazy documentary. | ||
| And the documentary starts out where he's a cyclist and he wanted to do this race and do the race clean and then get someone to show him how to dope and then do the race doped and see what the difference was. | ||
| So he does the race clean, and then he employs this Russian cat who was responsible for Olympic doping in Russia, and he shows them how to do it. | ||
| Now along the way... | ||
| They find out that there was something at the Sochi Olympics where a lot of the athletes had... | ||
| They had done something where they had built a hole in the wall and they had taken the dirty piss, snuck it through the hole in the wall and replaced it with clean piss. | ||
| They figured out how to work that... | ||
| So all these athletes that were supposedly clean were on steroids. | ||
| Or dirty, right. | ||
| And so it happened in the... | ||
| And so you see that and you realize like... | ||
| What happened to you? | ||
| What happened in the Beijing Olympics? | ||
| It's so politicized. | ||
| It's become such a big thing for the country that they're willing to do all kinds of shenanigans, bribe judges. | ||
| If those judges that ruled it against you weren't bribed, I would be stunned. | ||
| Of course, they had to be. | ||
| They had to be. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| I mean, someone told them to do that. | ||
| There's no other way that makes any sense. | ||
| None whatsoever. | ||
| But it's, you know, it's a problem anyway that amateur sports, like, one of the things that drives me crazy about the Olympics is how much money it brings in, but the athletes don't get any money. | ||
| None. | ||
| None. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Just like college sports. | ||
| A lot like college sports. | ||
| A lot like college sports. | ||
| And college sports is even worse, maybe, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because you can't even, they can't even say, hey, we're going to hook you up with an apartment. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| You can't say nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nothing. | |
| Nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And meanwhile, they're making billions. | ||
| That's how, that's... | ||
| It's dirty. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| It's really dirty. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how they should distribute the money, but they should distribute the money. | ||
| Somehow, but I mean, come on, if you want the top athlete to come to your school, that's going to add to your school's credibility, then why he have to not be able to make money off of that too? | ||
| Yeah, and if someone wins the Olympics, if they dedicate years of their life for this one goal and they win, they should make some fucking money. | ||
| Nine years of mine and got robbed and they got nothing for it. | ||
| So I got robbed twice. | ||
| You got double robbed. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| I got robbed twice. | ||
| And all the people that put that on, they all made a shitload of money. | ||
| And they do it right now. | ||
| They're making money off of it right now. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And what are they going to do with the Olympics now with no audience? | ||
| Because it's a weird thing now with the UFC. It's a weird thing now with boxing. | ||
| These fights with no crowd are very strange. | ||
| It's very strange to me. | ||
| I don't know how. | ||
| I mean, the crowd meant so much to me. | ||
| That's why when they moved to fight, I was like, you know what? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Y'all give him a chance to go get even more ready now when he's the bigger guy and we got no crowd. | ||
| So I came, look over there and see somebody saying, yes, go get him, champ. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Get me hyped up. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So... | ||
| You should be able to have one hype man. | ||
| At least a few of them, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, I gotta have a few of them. | ||
| Sometimes the least little thing can get that thing going, you know? | ||
| When you were fighting, did you ever look into the crowd? | ||
| Oh yeah, all the time. | ||
| Really? | ||
| All the time. | ||
| I want to know that you're enjoying yourself. | ||
| If I'm not giving you something to make you enjoy yourself, then I'm wasting your time. | ||
| I shouldn't be out there. | ||
| That's how I feel. | ||
| If I'm boxing for you, that's with anything. | ||
| If I'm doing something for you and I'm not making you excited or happy that you're doing it, then I'm wasting your time. | ||
| Well, at the end of the day, it is entertainment. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| So if I ain't entertaining you, I'm wasting your time. | ||
| There was a certain time in your career where you had to do other shit to entertain, too. | ||
| Like you played a full basketball game and then fought that night. | ||
| Who's ever done that before? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Nobody? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| I mean, that was part of the thing you had to do to entertain. | ||
| Because you were so dominant. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You had to get people to pay attention in different ways other than just destroying people. | ||
| You want to make them feel like there's a chance. | ||
| You're giving this guy a chance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So by playing a basketball game, it gives him a chance. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you know you got to use your legs to play basketball. | ||
| So your legs shouldn't be rested like they should be in a 12-round title fight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| After the fight, this guy went on to win the super middleweight title and held it for three years. | ||
| Who was that again? | ||
| Eric Lucas from Canada. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Held it for three years. | ||
| But they said you ain't fighting nobody. | ||
| This guy, after that game, after that fight... | ||
| He went and won the WBC, Super Middleweight title, and hit it for three years. | ||
| It's funny that it still bothers you, that people say you didn't fight anybody. | ||
| Well, it don't really bother me. | ||
| I'm just saying, I'll just be arguing back with him sometime. | ||
| I got an opportunity to argue back with him right here on Joe Rogan's show, so why not? | ||
| Do you remember when Jordan was... | ||
| Was it Hall of Fame? | ||
| What was it when he got up there and he was just talking shit about all the writers? | ||
| Did he talk shit about them over the years? | ||
| It's funny, but I think that for all the greats, there has to be something that's pissing you off, something that you're fighting against. | ||
| There's no way you're going to have peace of mind and still have the drive to succeed and to conquer the way the all-time greats do. | ||
| The all-time greats have to have a chip on their shoulder. | ||
| If you don't have a chip on your shoulder, then you're not going to ever reach the heights or take the measures that it takes to become an all-time great. | ||
| Me, I had two chips. | ||
| They robbed me at the Olympics, and I had a father that I separated from that I know in my heart didn't really want me to succeed without him. | ||
| So those were my chips. | ||
| And because I had those chips... | ||
| I can't lose. | ||
| Because if I lose, he win. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So in my prime, if I lose, he win. | ||
| Because he said I can't do it without him. | ||
| And in my life, the way I was taught, the way I was brought up, all I need is God. | ||
| Nothing against my dad, but all I need is God. | ||
| So to me, God prepared you to get me to a certain level. | ||
| But God took those roosters. | ||
| God took a guy named Charlie Campbell. | ||
| And you wouldn't know Charlie Campbell because he was a boxer back in the day, an amateur boxer. | ||
| But God showed me so much through Charlie Campbell that to this day, I still speak to Charlie Campbell because without Charlie Campbell I might have never gotten to be Roy Jones Jr. Charlie Campbell taught me so much about charisma that my father could never have taught me that it was unbelievable. | ||
| Charlie Campbell beat all my father's fighters as amateurs that were in his weight class. | ||
| Easily almost every time because he had charisma. | ||
| Now they were better than him, but he had charisma and he beat him with that charisma. | ||
| How did he beat him with charisma? | ||
| Because he believed in himself, he had confidence, and he knew how to do stuff that made me love watching him. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| And he wasn't the best puncher. | ||
| He really didn't have the best boxing skills, but his emotions, he breathed with everything he did. | ||
| Even though he was slapping, he had sharp breath with it. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| And to me, I was like, whoa, and he beating these guys that own my team. | ||
| So they learn the same thing I'm learning, but they can't have that kind of charisma because my daddy won't allow them to beat them people. | ||
| He won't allow them to perform with that kind of confidence. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So, I need to learn how to do what he doing. | ||
| Because if I can add what he doing to what we doing, now I got something. | ||
| How did you incorporate it? | ||
| Well, I started doing the stuff he did. | ||
| A little bit of it. | ||
| Until I figured out what it really was. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So some of the grunting, some of the moaning he did while he was fighting to show that he had breath control, I started doing it. | ||
| So like when you hear Bruce Lee go, woo! | ||
| Charlie Campbell will do stuff like that in a boxing match. | ||
| Now his punches weren't nearly as effective as the sound was, but he kept them on beat and in tune with the sound. | ||
| So it made him look way better than he really was. | ||
| And he won the fights against these guys because these guys don't know how to do that. | ||
| So I started copying some of it. | ||
| Not all of it, but I started adding it to my stuff. | ||
| When I met him, it became hell for all the little kids in the area. | ||
| Really? | ||
| What? | ||
| Not a little charisma? | ||
| Something my daddy can't teach me? | ||
| And he beat my daddy fighters? | ||
| And to me, these guys are older than me. | ||
| I'm 12. They're 17. He beating them. | ||
| So they ought to be better at what we're doing than I am. | ||
| Because they're older and bigger than me. | ||
| He beating them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| I gotta get that! | ||
| So I got that. | ||
| So was it also like, you obviously had animosity with your father. | ||
| So you were looking for other ways to do it too? | ||
| No, I had to find other ways. | ||
| God had to talk to me in other ways. | ||
| If God didn't speak to me in other ways, here's the real deal. | ||
| What people don't understand. | ||
| There's nothing against my father, it's just kind of our destiny, right? | ||
| This is why I tell people that nature is also a Bible. | ||
| Right? | ||
| When a lion get a certain age, his dad will kick him out. | ||
| He got to go. | ||
| You got to go get your own pride because this is my pride. | ||
| And that's kind of how me and my father were. | ||
| So it's like at a young age, I knew I was going to have to go because just the way things shaped up. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So me growing up watching, even these guys watching before me, I watched all of them get to their age, but my dad would never allow them to be as confident and as Charismatic as Charlie Campbell was because he didn't allow that. | ||
| Because he was the boss. | ||
| He's the boss. | ||
| He was in control of everything. | ||
| But he ain't got to fight nobody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So then, after the 76 Olympics, God gave me a second confirmation. | ||
| Howard Davis Jr. won the Val Barker Cup. | ||
| I mean, he was the best fighter at the Olympics. | ||
| But he probably was the only one of them gold medalists that didn't become world champion. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because his daddy waited way too long. | ||
| So he waited so long that when he finally fought Jim Watt, he couldn't beat Jim Watt. | ||
| Because in Howard Davis, the fire had died. | ||
| Now in his daddy, the fire still was there. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| His daddy ain't got to fight Jim Watt. | ||
| How it does. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| That was my second confirmation that when I get old enough, I got to go. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| I started to understand, and like I said, nature has always been my Bible. | ||
| So people always say, why you love animals? | ||
| Why you love chickens? | ||
| That's where I learned God's teachings from, because God made those animals, and people can't change them. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| You can neuter them, but when you neuter them, you change them to a whole other animal. | ||
| And to me, in society, sometimes that's what they're trying to do to us. | ||
| They're trying to neuter us. | ||
| So when they neuter us, we don't fight back. | ||
| Well, that's a giant thing with men today. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to tell you. | ||
| That's what toxic masculinity and all that bullshit. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to tell you. | ||
| They're trying to mentally neuter us. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When you neuter a horse, he becomes bland. | ||
| Again, he don't fight back no more. | ||
| He don't care no more. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So it's like, if you neuter a man, he becomes nothing. | ||
| He don't care no more. | ||
| He ain't gonna fight back. | ||
| He ain't gonna stand up for himself. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because he ain't got no what God gave. | ||
| You took that out. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| And to me, that's... | ||
| Emotionally, mentally, what they try to do to us without physically doing it. | ||
| So that was a problem that me and my father also had. | ||
| And people say, well, why are you so against what goes on? | ||
| Well, to me, that's what he was trying to do. | ||
| But what I learned is, and this is going to take you down that road, too. | ||
| I used to hunt when I was a kid, right? | ||
| We would hunt squirrels. | ||
| When we hunt squirrels, there would be some squirrels that would have a penis, but no balls. | ||
| Because the other squirrels bit their balls off. | ||
| The daddy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The daddy did it? | |
| The daddy have a nest about anywhere from 10 to 25 females. | ||
| Every time one of them have little babies, he goes and bites the nuts out of all the males because he wants no competition. | ||
| No, listen. | ||
| But you got to know this now. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| So this shows me he can't do it physically, but this is what he's doing. | ||
| I watched him do it to all these other guys I told you about before me. | ||
| They can't beat Charlie Campbell because they're gettings. | ||
| Charlie Campbell's a stud. | ||
| He ain't better than them. | ||
| He ain't stronger than them. | ||
| He ain't even a better puncher than them. | ||
| But in his mind, he's a stud. | ||
| In their mind, they're guiltings. | ||
| Because my dad has made them so, he's meant to beat them down so low that they have no real fight back in them. | ||
| Because they got to be second to my father first. | ||
| I can't be that guy. | ||
| If you're going to rule the world, you ain't never seen a gilding rule the world in breeding. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| Now you see some fast gildings because they're just fast naturally. | ||
| But they're not going to rule the pastor because once you cut the balls out of him, he's no more a man. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| I do. | ||
| So it's like, I be saying, you know, it's like nothing personal against nobody. | ||
| I don't care if you do what you want to do. | ||
| But for me, I couldn't be world champion. | ||
| If I let my father make me a gilding, mentally and emotionally. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So I could not stay there and become a gilding like I watched them do before me and expect to be Roy Jones Jr. that you know today. | ||
| It just couldn't happen. | ||
| That's a difficult balance with some trainers, right? | ||
| Because some trainers were fighters and they're tough guys. | ||
| Yep, and they don't want to let the other guys surpass them. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why a lot of fighters don't make good trainers. | ||
| And that's why a lot of father and son relationships don't work as fighters because the father don't want to let the son grow up. | ||
| And in order to stop him from growing up, you got to almost turn him into a guilty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he'll go for anything and not fight you back. | ||
| It usually works out in a weird way. | ||
| It's very rare that a father-son fight-coach combination works. | ||
| Lomachenko, his dad do a good job. | ||
| But his dad is an unusual cat. | ||
| His dad told him, you're going to just dance for two years. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| I think it might have been more than two years. | ||
| His dad's God-gifted. | ||
| A lot like Joe Calzac's dad was. | ||
| He's God-gifted. | ||
| These guys never boxed, but they made world champions out of their sons. | ||
| They knew, they seen something, and they knew what it took to get him there. | ||
| The fact that he told his son to take up Ukrainian dancing and then you look at Lomachenko's footwork, it's off the charts. | ||
| So God gave him a vision way before his son got to where he was going. | ||
| He showed him where he was going, but way before it happened. | ||
| He gave my father the same vision, just that my father's personality wouldn't allow him to enjoy the fruits of that vision. | ||
| Did you ever resolve it with your father? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Never? | |
| No. | ||
| Is he still alive? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you talk at all? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Damn. | ||
| That's gotta be weird for him. | ||
| No, it's not weird for him. | ||
| He understands. | ||
| He's a lion and I'm a lion. | ||
| I understand, but his son's Roy Jones Jr. Yeah. | ||
| When you're a boxing trainer and your son's one of the greatest of all time and he doesn't talk to you, that's got to fuck with you. | ||
| Well, he don't talk to you because you don't want to talk to him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's not like he wouldn't talk to you if you wanted to talk to him, but you don't want to talk to him. | ||
| So if you don't want to talk to him, then he's not going to chase you down and talk to you. | ||
| Why would he? | ||
| Me, personally, as a father, I couldn't handle that. | ||
| I couldn't handle it with none of my kids, so I didn't raise my kids the way that I was raised. | ||
| So me and all my kids, my kids can talk to me about anything. | ||
| I'm like you, as a father, I couldn't handle that either, but sometimes there are sacrifices. | ||
| But sometimes a guy like you has to come out of a situation like that. | ||
| You have to fight your way through the struggle of being dominated by your father to become your own man. | ||
| And then that's one of the reasons why you're such a bad motherfucker. | ||
| If I didn't beat that, I never would have made an inbox. | ||
| Sean O'Grady used to tell me all the time, you did the one thing that I never could do. | ||
| I said, what's that, Sean? | ||
| He said, I just couldn't walk away. | ||
| He said, well, I thought God had me destined to be great, so I had to walk away. | ||
| And look where I am now. | ||
| Yeah, indeed. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| What does it feel like after, like, you're already an all-time great. | ||
| You're already Hall of Famer. | ||
| And now you're getting back into the ring again. | ||
| Like, what does that feel like? | ||
| Is it exciting? | ||
| Is it... | ||
| It's a new feeling, you know. | ||
| Right now, I gotta tell... | ||
| While I'm here, I gotta tell them they gotta go to Roy Jones Jr. I mean, rjjfightstore.com to get a shirt like me. | ||
| That's where I got it. | ||
| rjjfightstore.com. | ||
| Don't miss that. | ||
| Y'all must have forgot it's on the back. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, it's like, for me, it's a whole new game now. | ||
| You gotta do a little bit more promoting stuff. | ||
| You gotta... | ||
| Try to do a little bit more media work. | ||
| I'll come talk to you because you always supported me. | ||
| You've been one of the best daddies, one of the best people that I have known as far as being a Roy Jones person. | ||
| I would have came to you if I was doing nothing. | ||
| But having a Mike Tyson fight for us to talk about. | ||
| What better time to come see you? | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| I've been trying to get here, but I say I want to wait until we got something interesting to really talk about. | ||
| Because we good people. | ||
| You are good people. | ||
| So I wanted something big when I came here, and now I got something. | ||
| So having this Mike Tyson fight, it has its advantages, although I told you the timing and all was a disadvantage, but it does have its advantages because now We get to have a great conversation first time with me being here. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| Listen, I appreciate it. | ||
| I'm happy to talk to you anytime, anyplace. | ||
| What is it like, though, when you see now Holyfield's thinking about coming back, he's training hard, Oscar De La Hoya, that could be a fight for you, too. | ||
| If you decide to keep going with this, that's someone who's more your size as well. | ||
| Yeah, he's more my size, but he look at me like I look at Mike. | ||
| He say, you know, he's too big. | ||
| Well, he fought some middleweights, right? | ||
| He fought Bernard. | ||
| Bernard stopped him with that body shot. | ||
| You see that? | ||
| That's fighting middleweights. | ||
| They're a little different than me, and they're a little different than Mike. | ||
| It's like, when you look at it, the true fact is that if you ask people, and you can pull the highlights up right now and say, look at this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy. | ||
| At that time, who they're going to look at again? | ||
| They're going to look at Mike Tyson again, they're going to look at Roy Jones again. | ||
| And they're going to look at Roy Jones again first, because Roy Jones do so much crazy stuff that You're like, hot in the world. | ||
| Not only do, like you said, it's a basketball game before the fight. | ||
| Method Man and Red Man bring him to the ring. | ||
| He got, I mean, Radio City Music Hall. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Robert Jones got so much stuff that he going to win that debate. | ||
| And if you remember, then Mike Tyson probably going to be right behind him because Mike Tyson got some knockouts that are unbelievable. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So it's like that's the two most Entertaining guys over the last two decades, without a question. | ||
| Without a question. | ||
| You said you learned that move when you put your hands behind your back. | ||
| Who'd you knock out when you put your hands behind your back? | ||
| I knocked him down. | ||
| James Turner. | ||
| Oh, no, no. | ||
| Glenn Kelly. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You knocked him out. | ||
| You said you learned that from a rooster, too. | ||
| From a rooster, too. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Who else learns shit from roosters? | ||
| Just for what? | ||
| The rooster man. | ||
| But see, you got to understand this too. | ||
| There's a little bit more to that. | ||
| I'm also big on the kung fu movies. | ||
| So the kung fu movies, you know, they got tiger style, crane style, all these, the toad, the lizard, all these different things. | ||
| So I said, you know, I love roosters. | ||
| So let me see how I can incorporate the roosters into my style of boxing. | ||
| Do you think this is one and done? | ||
| Do you think this Tyson fight is one and done? | ||
| Does it depend on the outcome or you just have to focus on the fight right now and then decide what else is going on afterwards? | ||
| It really depends on how it goes because You know, I'm like this, man. | ||
| I think Mike is an awesome person. | ||
| And I know Mike has had his ups and downs in the world. | ||
| I know Mike is really, you know, he is Mike. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So you don't know what Mike you're going to get. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So in this exhibition, you got to prepare for the best you can prepare for. | ||
| And, you know, anything can happen. | ||
| If Mike hits you with the elbow and cuts you on purpose, anything can happen. | ||
| You don't know. | ||
| And you try to get him back, and they may stop it before you get to get him back. | ||
| Then they say, well, y'all want to do a real fight? | ||
| Hell yeah, I want to do a real fight with my get back. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| If that happened like that. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| You've already got to play down your head. | ||
| I'm just saying, yeah, because you ain't going to do just no anything. | ||
| I think I ain't getting no get back. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, I understand. | |
| It ain't going to go like that. | ||
| You feel where I'm coming from? | ||
| So now if we have a straight up one, this time is good, then I'm cool. | ||
| That may be the end. | ||
| It might turn out like I want it. | ||
| Everything will be great. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So it may be a great opportunity. | ||
| We both may... | ||
| Put up great performances and we might call it a day. | ||
| We might be too tired to talk about it after it's called we old. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| That may happen too. | ||
| But it all really probably depends on the outcome of this. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| Because when you're the smaller guy and you find a guy that you know is over here today and over there tomorrow, then you just got to prepare yourself for whatever because you don't know what he may come in there and do. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So I got to be really I mean, I feel safe with these earmuffs on because he might bite you in your damn ear. | ||
| That's the thing about Mike is he's so crazy. | ||
| He's so wild. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| You don't know what he might do. | ||
| I think he's a different human now. | ||
| I've talked to him twice on a podcast. | ||
| I've talked to him once. | ||
| It was about 10 months ago and once just a couple weeks ago. | ||
| And he's two different people from those two times. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's just 10 months. | ||
| So imagine what he do in 10 days. | ||
| Well, 10 months ago, he was smoking weed. | ||
| He wouldn't even work out. | ||
| He said he couldn't work out because he didn't want to reignite his ego. | ||
| And then he said his wife called him fat. | ||
| And then he started working. | ||
| He said, I got on the treadmill, started doing it for 15 minutes. | ||
| Next thing you know, it's two hours. | ||
| And then he's obsessed again. | ||
| And now his ego has been reignited. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He said the gods of war reignited his ego. | |
| You feel me? | ||
| But they called it an exhibition. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He looks shredded. | ||
| Oh, he is shredded. | ||
| And he's good. | ||
| He's doing the right thing because DBs ain't playing. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| I understand. | ||
| He's doing the right thing, but like I said, if everything goes good, then I won't have to do it twice. | ||
| But if it don't go like I want it to and they say, y'all want to do a real one, then give me some 10s and let's go for real. | ||
| 10s and would you do 10 rounds? | ||
| No, 10 or 12. 10 or 12. I want 12 if I can. | ||
| I want it. | ||
| See, they got me doing... | ||
| Eight, two-minute rounds now. | ||
| Is it two-minute rounds? | ||
| That's to his advantage too. | ||
| Everything is to his advantage. | ||
| That's to his advantage too. | ||
| Why'd you agree to it? | ||
| At this point, the fans are so excited about it. | ||
| I wouldn't want to pull the rug from under the fans, then they try to suit me. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So it's not really worth it. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So I'm going through these two rounds just that I'm going to have to figure out a little bit different. | ||
| I'm going to have to work a little faster than I expected to. | ||
| Yeah, two-minute rounds is a totally different kind of rhythm. | ||
| Totally different kind of rhythm. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird that they decided to do it that way. | ||
| Do you think they decided to do that because of the September 12th date? | ||
| It was only six weeks for him to prepare? | ||
| No, they just decided this last week. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they changed stuff on me about the week. | ||
| So it was originally three-minute rounds. | ||
| I thought. | ||
| I guess I read the memo wrong. | ||
| Like I said. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It changes so much on me, man. | ||
| I mean, I think the WBC came in and said they want to put up some kind of title or something, so they want to cut it back to two-minute rounds. | ||
| They said something about that Arce and Chavez Sr. fight, how fatigued they were after the fight, and they feel like that's a safety measure. | ||
| But what they don't realize is that if you keep Mike fresh, the longer you keep Mike fresh, the more dangerous that is for me. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| So I need to get Mike unfresh quick so we can get out of this danger zone. | ||
| What happened with Chavez Sr.? | ||
| He and Arce, I think, fought a true exhibition with headgear and big gloves. | ||
| But they said they were so exhausted afterwards that they felt like that is what could inhibit somebody's health. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Well, how much did they train for? | ||
| That's why I don't know. | ||
| So they're making it two different things, you feel me? | ||
| So I don't know why, and they cut it back, but like I'm telling them, no, that's not right for me because I'm a smaller guy. | ||
| Time is the best component I have. | ||
| The longer he goes, the more he wears, the better my chances are. | ||
| The longer you keep him strong and fresh, the more dangerous it is for me. | ||
| So they didn't discuss this beforehand? | ||
| It's not a part of the contract? | ||
| They just contacted you and said they're dropping it down to two-minute rounds? | ||
| They said the commission is dropping it down to two-minute rounds. | ||
| You can pull out. | ||
| The commission said that? | ||
| They said the commission, you drop it down to two-minute rounds, you can either pull out or you can fight. | ||
| So this is the commission's idea? | ||
| Well, I guess. | ||
| They said WBC came in and said it along with the commission. | ||
| So I don't know if it's... | ||
| The commission told me it was WBC. WBC told me it was the commission. | ||
| So I ain't even sure who it is. | ||
| But my point is, that's not good for me. | ||
| That's good for him. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| Y'all are the bigger man. | ||
| Y'all started giving him everything he want. | ||
| Yeah, I want it to be three-minute rounds. | ||
| I want it to be three-minute rounds. | ||
| It's safer for me for three-minute rounds. | ||
| Yeah, it's just better. | ||
| It's boxing. | ||
| It's traditional. | ||
| It's what it's always been. | ||
| Guess what, though? | ||
| What they going to do is turn that light back on. | ||
| When they turn that light on, bad things happen. | ||
| You heard me? | ||
| I heard you. | ||
| And they turn that light back on. | ||
| Slowly but surely, they turn that light back on. | ||
| And I'm going to say, I did want to be this person, but since y'all going to do me like this, now y'all start something. | ||
| That mean trouble. | ||
| Listen, I'm excited about this fight no matter what, but now I'm more excited about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| This is going to be a gigantic fight, too. | ||
| I mean, I've heard so many people talk about it that are just casual boxing fans that are excited. | ||
| I was cool in the beginning, but like I said, once you only kick me around so much, then the hook comes out. | ||
| I see myself, I think I'm turning green. | ||
| Well, you always said that, that there's like two dudes inside of you, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's Roy Jones Jr. and there's RJ. And they're starting to wake him up. | |
| Well, who's RJ? He didn't want to be after it. | ||
| When did you realize there was like a second person? | ||
| Well, I've been new it my whole life. | ||
| I've been new it my whole life. | ||
| I always try to suppress that person because that person will end up in somebody's penitentiary somewhere if you don't watch him. | ||
| Because he ain't really thinking about or caring about what nobody thinks. | ||
| So is this... | ||
| Do you think that this... | ||
| You developed this as a way of... | ||
| Has this just always been inside of you? | ||
| Or is this how you dealt with certain situations in your life where you had to like shut off parts of who you are... | ||
| I think all real men have it. | ||
| They just don't ever have to tap into it, or they never have been pushed to that measure, which is why I say society tries to make us guiltings, because any man like you, you got kids. | ||
| Somebody did something to your kid and you saw it, RJ coming out. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| I do. | ||
| So it's always there, it's just that you try to keep it suppressed. | ||
| So I try to keep it suppressed. | ||
| But Gene gonna kick on me so much, then he coming. | ||
| And once he start coming, guess what? | ||
| He's just like a pit bull. | ||
| He has no off switch. | ||
| Who was it that you fought? | ||
| You fought this dude, Jack guy, shorter guy, first fight. | ||
| Martin Griffin. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The second fight, RJ came out in a big way. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That was an annihilation. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, you just hunted him down. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That's who RJ is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Seek and destroy. | ||
| That was Hagel's words. | ||
| Seek and destroy. | ||
| Seek and destroy. | ||
| So the first fight, what happened in the first fight? | ||
| He got injured? | ||
| No, I hit him. | ||
| He went down one knee, but he was already short. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I couldn't take him down, so I tapped him again, and I thought the referee was going to say stop. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| It's disqualification. | ||
| I'm waiting for the referee to say stop. | ||
| He didn't say that, so I tapped him again. | ||
| He looked at the referee and thought, oh, he crashed on his head, face down. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Okay, I'll take that disqualification, but now, it's a little bit harder for me when you... | ||
| Did they give him the title for that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Hey, that was my first loss. | ||
| If it wasn't for that loss, I probably still wouldn't have a loss today. | ||
| That was my first loss. | ||
| So now, around the Olympics, here I go again. | ||
| So you know how I feel come the second time, right? | ||
| Now I got robbed twice or three times. | ||
| We talked about how the Olympic Committee robbed me too. | ||
| So now I've been robbed three times. | ||
| Now somebody got to die. | ||
| How many times has RJ come out and fight? | ||
| Just that one time. | ||
| Just one time? | ||
| It's because he talked crazy to me out there. | ||
| I'm knowing, you got my title while you're down, face down on the mat. | ||
| You can't talk to me like that now. | ||
| If he would have left me alone, it wouldn't have came out. | ||
| If he was just left alone, let's go to the second fight, I would have probably beat him, but I wouldn't have beat him like that because I'm not that dude. | ||
| I try to suppress that guy. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| But when he started talking, now you make me be a person I don't want to be. | ||
| And I'm glad we friends now. | ||
| We ain't got no beef no more. | ||
| We cool. | ||
| Now we shook hands. | ||
| He understands and I understand, but it's like, at that time, you can't talk when you took my belt while you was face down the mat. | ||
| And you gonna talk crazy about me too? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, you have always showed great sportsmanship and also control. | ||
| I remember when you tried to get the referee to stop the Pazienza fight, you looked at the referee, you're like, come on, stop it. | ||
| He done, bro. | ||
| What do you want me to do to him? | ||
| The referee wouldn't stop it, and then you just finished it real quick. | ||
| I said, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was devastating. | ||
| But that was an excellent example of you being a good sportsman. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I'm not out there to hurt people. | ||
| That's what I try to tell people. | ||
| I'm not out there to hurt people. | ||
| When you and Gerald McClellan, who was at the time a destroyer, you know what I mean? | ||
| He was the man that people thought of as being a great challenger for you. | ||
| And then he had that fight with Nigel Benn and wound up getting a brain injury and just devastated and was never the same again. | ||
| How much did that affect you? | ||
| Because a guy who was your peer, who was a man that many people thought was going to be a rival to you, and you guys were eventually going to have a big super fight. | ||
| How bad did that affect you? | ||
| It affected me pretty bad because being that I knew Gerald and we were friends, he won a 3-2 split decision over me and the amateurs. | ||
| So he was one up and I was definitely looking to get that one back, which I got a little bit back when I sparred with him at Sugar Ray Leonard's gym, but I still wanted an organized get back. | ||
| So I definitely was looking to fight him down the road, but When that fight happened, when I saw that fight was happening, I was the only person that said that he wouldn't win that fight. | ||
| I was the only person. | ||
| And people called me the next day and said, how did you know he was not going to win? | ||
| I said because... | ||
| He's good. | ||
| He's a very strong puncher. | ||
| But punching is all that Nigel really has. | ||
| Nigel does not believe in boxing skills. | ||
| Nigel don't care about boxing skills. | ||
| Nigel is just what he say is, a dark destroyer. | ||
| You go into his country, you go into his backyard, and you're going to fight him just like he fights. | ||
| That's not a good recipe. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| I didn't think it was going to be quite that bad. | ||
| I didn't think he was going to end his career. | ||
| But I thought that he was going to end up losing to Nigel because of the fact that he would fight the wrong fight. | ||
| He would fight the style which Nigel shines in. | ||
| The only style that Nigel could shine in. | ||
| When he knocked Nigel down the first round, 99% of fighters would have been done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When he sent them through the ropes, it looked like it was over. | ||
| And that's what Gerald was doing to everybody. | ||
| Gerald was destroying people. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| Destroying people. | ||
| What a puncher he was. | ||
| And what a classic, cronk-style fighter he was. | ||
| Tall, long dude, serious power, super hyper-aggressive. | ||
| Both hands. | ||
| But Nigel Benn could fucking take it. | ||
| You know, he almost had a comeback recently. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he did. | |
| He had some shoulder injuries and sidelined him. | ||
| The bad part about it is, and this is what we're saying we're missing right now, if it was in today's society, Nigel never would have recovered from that first round knockout because today with no crowd, He had nothing to urge him back on. | ||
| But with that crowd and he at home, if he has breath in him, he better get up and get his ass back in that ring. | ||
| And he did just that. | ||
| He survived. | ||
| But the crowd made him do that. | ||
| Yeah, and then when he started taking it to Gerald, I mean, that was crazy. | ||
| Gerald just emptied his gas tank trying to take him out of there. | ||
| And Gerald was also another guy who cut a tremendous amount of weight. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| He was big for a middleweight. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| He probably should have gone up to light heavyweight even before then. | ||
| Or super middleweight. | ||
| Yeah, or super middleweight. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what most people thought was going to happen. | ||
| Yeah, that's to me one of the great tragedies of boxing because it's very rare that an elite top of the food chain world champion in his prime is cut down like that. | ||
| It's really only been a couple instances. | ||
| Well, it puts people on notice again as to why fighters ask to get paid properly every time they go in a ring, especially against another elite fighter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because tomorrow is not promised to nobody when you go in that ring. | ||
| Anything can happen at any time. | ||
| Nobody suspected that that would be Gerald McClellan's last fight ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| Nobody suspected that. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| Same with the guy, the heavyweight, that it happened to up in New York. | ||
| He fought the Cuban guy, Mike, whatever his name was. | ||
| I can't even remember his last name, but nobody ever suspected that that would be the heavyweight's last fight. | ||
| I remember that, yeah. | ||
| I know the fight you're talking about, but I can't remember the name. | ||
| Yeah, same situation. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| You never know. | ||
| So in boxing, you have to take every fight. | ||
| That's why people say, well, why you say that? | ||
| Man, you don't know. | ||
| You know, you get hit by somebody like Mike Tyson, anything can happen to you. | ||
| Mike Tyson is not just an ordinary puncher. | ||
| He's one of those guys that could do just that to you. | ||
| So you should know what you're going into, and you should be ready for that because this here is Mike. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| Now, for me, I don't really give a damn. | ||
| I fight for a living. | ||
| I feel just like a game rooster. | ||
| I'd be ready to die for my spot. | ||
| So if you want me, it's right down my alley. | ||
| I ain't tripping at all because I know that death is a probability. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| So yeah, that could happen to anybody. | ||
| And I know it could happen to me even more going in there with somebody as dangerous as a Mike Tyson. | ||
| Problem with me is why I love what I love and why I do What I do is because I love boxing. | ||
| So if I got to die boxing, I'm going to die a happy man. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| What? | ||
| Is that the way you'd like to go? | ||
| Well, I mean, well, it's probably one or two other ways I'd rather go. | ||
| Like a grandpa sitting on the porch. | ||
| Yeah, but if I went that way, I'm not mad at that. | ||
| Right, I understand. | ||
| Because I know that when I started boxing, I know that people get hurt in this. | ||
| Some people don't make it out of this a lot. | ||
| So if that's how you got to go, You gotta know that. | ||
| But if you ain't that game, if you ain't that committed to what you're doing, then you shouldn't be talking to me about boxing. | ||
| Because that's what boxing is. | ||
| Yeah, that's a great philosophy to have, to go into combat, because nobody gets out alive in this life. | ||
| Gotta leave some way. | ||
| Better believe it. | ||
| And you want to talk about a man who's been dedicated to a craft and a sport. | ||
| I mean, your whole life has been dedicated to this craft and sport, and because of that, you are universally recognized as one of the all-time best. | ||
| Yep, and I ain't caring tomorrow what it is, who it is. | ||
| When y'all say let's go, it's time for me to go. | ||
| Yeah, there's a legacy that you've left that no matter what happens, no one can ever take that away from you. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You've accomplished some crazy shit. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| It is what it is, right? | ||
| And your era too, man. | ||
| I mean, there's so many amazing fighters of your era. | ||
| I mean, you really came up and, I mean, boxing is in a good place now. | ||
| There's a lot of exciting champions and a lot of exciting fights to be made. | ||
| But, I mean, your era was one of the golden eras of boxing. | ||
| Yeah, it was. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The only thing, like I said, what hurts me now is like I be wanting to see the best fighters fight the best fighters. | ||
| Like right now, a good fight that's on tap is two good fights. | ||
| Tank's about to fight a good fight. | ||
| Lomachenko about to fight a really good fight. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| But the guy, his opponent hasn't been proven yet, Teofimo Lopez, but I think he's a really good prospect. | ||
| And if he does get into this fight, it could be really interesting. | ||
| Yet, at the same time, this tells us if it's too early for him or not, because he still has time to grow. | ||
| He's been in it, he's young, but he's a good-looking prospect. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| Good-looking prospect. | ||
| The guy Tanks fighting, just forgive me, I don't know the names, I don't remember the names that well, but He's a pretty good fighter too. | ||
| And I don't know that he's going to be able to take Tank's power because Tank's one of these guys that comes way down in weight too. | ||
| So he'll be big on fight night. | ||
| And if he's that big on fight night, it makes it very difficult to take those hammers or them tanks that he throws when he throws them. | ||
| So it's going to be a good fight too. | ||
| I can't wait to see that. | ||
| But there are some good fights on tap and I'm looking forward to it. | ||
| But I still say that right now, the best fighter out there besides Roy and Mike. | ||
| Is Crawford versus Spence in their pride? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I just am amazed. | ||
| Why are we still not making it happen? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm amazed Spence came out of that car accident. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man. | |
| Unfazed. | ||
| You watch that car flip like that? | ||
| You're like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| God had to be with him. | ||
| Something was with him, that's for sure. | ||
| God had to be with him. | ||
| Had to be. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Something. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And Terrence Crawford, to me, is one of the most interesting champions alive today. | ||
| Beast mode. | ||
| He think like me and Pernell would have thought, if you want it, come and get it. | ||
| I love how he switches stances, too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, he fights as good from Orthodox as Southpaw. | ||
| As he does, yep. | ||
| And when he decides to switch it up on guys, you see the look on their face where they get confused. | ||
| He'll fight two, three rounds one way and then switch it up. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And you see, like Hagler used to do that. | ||
| Hagler was a fantastic switch fighter. | ||
| One of the best I'd seen in Ted Crawford, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and Crawford just, he's got a mind for the sport. | ||
| It's like this, you could see when he's putting it on a guy. | ||
| You know, he just, he's as game as they come. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So, those are fights I want to see. | ||
| I have some interesting guys. | ||
| I got a guy, Chris Eubank Jr., I really want to see him with one of the Charlo brothers first. | ||
| And when we get, I think that'll be a very good competitive fight. | ||
| So you're training Chris Eubanks? | ||
| Yes, and that'll show us where he's at. | ||
| You know, I think the winner of that fight should fight Canelo. | ||
| But I think he's good enough that, you know, it's like you can't down a champion. | ||
| You can't just say, oh, he'll beat the champ. | ||
| I don't do that in boxing because that's not my thing. | ||
| But we do want to fight the champ, which right now I think the WBA champ, middleweight, is a Japanese guy. | ||
| And we need to fight him to find out, get us a real title. | ||
| Then we should fight the Charlo Brothers to have a unification title. | ||
| I mean, then he should fight Canelo to find out who's the man of the weight class. | ||
| Is Canelo going to stay at 68, or is he going to go back and forth between 68 and 75? | ||
| I think Canelo's going to go where the money fight is, which is smart for him. | ||
| Just kind of freelance and rolling. | ||
| He's been always to 75. He can go from 75 to 60. I think that's comfortable for him. | ||
| It kind of reminds me of what I kind of did. | ||
| Just dominate the area. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So if you get lucky enough to come get high enough in the area, he'll take you. | ||
| He's an interesting cat because what he's learned from particularly the Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight, if you watch the way he moves now, his head movement is so much better than it ever was before. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| His defensive skills are so much better than they've ever been before. | ||
| Yeah, but to me, that's not the thing that he needed to learn, because you have to look at the past to teach you about the future. | ||
| So if you look at history, Julio Cesar Chavez Sr., and God bless the dead Roger Mayweather, but Julio beat Roger because he started chasing Roger at the weight end. | ||
| He didn't wait and try to outbox Roger because he's never going to outbox Roger. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he started chasing Roger at the weight end. | ||
| And he chased Roger all night until he ran Roger complete ragged. | ||
| Then he would beat Roger. | ||
| Well, Julio did that to everybody, right? | ||
| Meldrick Taylor, too. | ||
| Yeah, but what I'm saying is that's the way to beat a guy who's a better boxer than you. | ||
| So if you notice, then why don't you send Canelo in to chase Floyd from round one? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You don't go out there and try to outbox Floyd Mayweather. | ||
| I mean, think about it, man. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| You think I'm going to go out and try to send somebody to go out and shoot Larry Bird? | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| That's stupid. | ||
| That's what Larry does best. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No! | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I think he was a little overwhelmed, you know, because that was a big fight for him, his first real super fight, and he's in there with Floyd, who's a defensive wizard. | ||
| Yeah, but you've been pro since you was 15. Yeah. | ||
| So you probably got a little bit more experience than Floyd had at the time as far as professional boxing goes. | ||
| So if you really think about it, you don't outbox the boxers. | ||
| Didn't Floyd make him suck a lot of weight, too? | ||
| I think he made him get down at like 52 or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, but he came in the ring at like, I think he was 16 pounds heavier than Floyd. | ||
| So if you're 16 pounds heavier than him, that tells you that you've got to use that 16 pounds. | ||
| Try to use it against him if you can. | ||
| I'm not saying that he would have beat Floyd, because Floyd is a smart guy. | ||
| Floyd knows how to change up. | ||
| That's the good thing about Floyd. | ||
| Floyd also is an elite fighter who knows how to make adjustments. | ||
| But for your best, for your optimal chances, you got to go and get on him for round one. | ||
| Like Maidana did in the floor of the first fight. | ||
| Gave him all kinds of problems in the first fight because he stayed right there on it. | ||
| And he's not the puncher that Canelo is. | ||
| He's not as big as Canelo is. | ||
| But Maidana's a wild man. | ||
| It don't matter. | ||
| That's the only chance Canelo had that night. | ||
| You're not going to outbox Floyd Mayweather. | ||
| Come on, bro. | ||
| You got to risk losing. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| At that point, he wasn't ready for that. | ||
| So to say that he's a better fighter, we could say that, but he's an older fighter too. | ||
| So of course, the older you get, the better you're supposed to get. | ||
| But we can't necessarily say he's a better fighter until we see him... | ||
| Against a guy like Floyd. | ||
| He had the same problem with Arizlandi Lara. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Arizlandi Lara as he had with Floyd. | ||
| Because Arizlandi Lara is a boxer. | ||
| So that fight was a fight that some people thought could have went either way. | ||
| Me being one of them. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| So that don't mean you got better. | ||
| That means that you've been facing different types of competition. | ||
| Because until we see you do that and handle that style... | ||
| Then we can say you got better. | ||
| Now, he's a great fighter, don't get me wrong. | ||
| To me, he's in my top three because I love Canelo. | ||
| I think Canelo's one of the best out there. | ||
| But we can't say, we're always quick to say he got better after the floor of a fight. | ||
| I'm not going to say that necessarily. | ||
| He got better because he's going to get better anyway because he's going to grow up. | ||
| Which he did. | ||
| He was 21 and he grew up. | ||
| Most people, when they grow up, they get smarter, so they have to get better. | ||
| But I don't think the Florida fight made him better because he still didn't show me that he made the necessary adjustment to come back and beat Florida if he fought him again or give Florida an even better fight if he fought him again because if he's outpressing Florida, he's never going to outbox Florida. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Styles make fights, right? | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were you stunned by the Kovalev fight? | ||
| No, I wasn't. | ||
| No, I wasn't. | ||
| Kovalev took the fight at a time I thought was bad for him because he took it right after one of his other fights. | ||
| And it's like, to me, I don't think Kovalev took the fight with the intent to win it. | ||
| I think he felt like, I'll get a chance to fight Canelo, I'll get good money, I'll take it. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| That's what I felt like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I don't think, I didn't see the real Kovalev. | ||
| I mean, then you try to box Canelo and move away and let Canelo stalk you, but now the way Canelo stalked him, It's the way he should have stalked Mayweather the first time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's what he had to do to beat Mayweather. | ||
| And he turned Kovalev, the crusher, turned into a boxer. | ||
| I think with Kovalev, the word's always been that he drinks too much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I hear that, but what I'm saying is, Kovalev, your nickname is the crusher. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why would you let a guy coming up to weight classes make you alleviate or deviate from where you normally are? | ||
| You normally call the crusher. | ||
| Now you're going to go to the boxer all of a sudden for a guy that's coming up to weight classes? | ||
| No! | ||
| No. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| I mean, I love Kovalev to death too. | ||
| That's my boy. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| But I just felt like he fought the wrong fight against Cano. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know if he was physically capable of fighting any other fight. | ||
| Well, but like I said... | ||
| I just don't think he's as durable as he used to be. | ||
| I agree with that too, but to me... | ||
| You must fight the right game plan or you've lost before the fight starts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| True. | ||
| Well, you're a fantastic commentator, man. | ||
| That's one of the things that got really bummed out when HBO died. | ||
| I can't believe they took away boxing. | ||
| I don't know why HBO did that. | ||
| I just don't understand it. | ||
| Well, I understood what they told me was that they don't like the fact they are not going to do something and be number two. | ||
| If they can't be number one, they ain't doing it. | ||
| And so I can kind of understand it. | ||
| So what put them into number two? | ||
| Well, I'm just saying they want to be best at it. | ||
| Was it DAZN or was it just money and streaming, ESPN Plus? | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| I just felt they want to be number one or they want to be nothing. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't know, man. | ||
| Between you and with Jim Lampley. | ||
| And Max Kellerman. | ||
| And Max Kellerman, who's fantastic. | ||
| You guys did an amazing job. | ||
| Fun stuff, man. | ||
| Fun stuff. | ||
| The commentary team was unparalleled. | ||
| The best ever. | ||
| The best ever. | ||
| So that's what I'm saying. | ||
| But like I said, I just feel like maybe they were used to having the elite champions. | ||
| And because the elite champions became dispersed, maybe that was it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But to me, I feel like, like I said, I feel like they... | ||
| Just wanted to be, or maybe people that bought them out, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know either, but it's a sad state of affairs. | ||
| It hurt me, I tell you that. | ||
| It still hurts me to this day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, they have been in boxing for how many years? | |
| 30 plus years? | ||
| It still hurts me to this day. | ||
| And it's amazing that no one has brought that team back. | ||
| Max Kellerman to this day is not doing boxing commentary that I'm aware of. | ||
| He do a little bit on ESPN. Does he? | ||
| Yeah, he does a little bit. | ||
| But where's Jim Lampley? | ||
| I don't know, but those two guys are two of the best guys you ever can work with. | ||
| And Jim Lampley has a memory that is unparalleled to anybody I've ever met in my life. | ||
| This guy can look at the paper one time and remember that whole damn page. | ||
| Word for it. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| I mean, I ain't never seen that like it in my life. | ||
| No, he is as good a play-by-play commentator as has ever lived. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| He's phenomenal. | ||
| HBO was pretty awesome. | ||
| As an organization because, you know, it's like I built my career there at HBO and then to be able to build that commentary career there was so fabulous for me. | ||
| So they were really, I mean, it hurt me bad that they got out of boxing because that was like, man, that was really the kingpin of boxing. | ||
| Yeah, no, they were, they were uncrowned. | ||
| I mean, undoubtedly the ones who wore the crown. | ||
| Now, do you do any commentary now? | ||
| No, I can't until my contract's over and my contract's not over until December. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, so after December I can do other commentary. | ||
| Are you talking to anybody about doing that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not yet. | |
| I hope you do. | ||
| I haven't spoken to anybody about it yet. | ||
| I'm sure after it ends we'll start speaking to people, but I haven't spoken to anybody yet. | ||
| So, how did you get involved with Russia? | ||
| How did you become a Russian citizen? | ||
| When I read that, I was like, what is happening with Roy? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Man, I do so much. | ||
| My partner got a movie coming out right now called Four Kings, me and Mike Tyson in that movie too. | ||
| But I do so much. | ||
| So I was over at Russia doing fights, doing stuff, and I never realized how big I was in Russia until I started going over there. | ||
| In Russia, it's like a Roy of 1990s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| When I go somewhere, it's all hell to king. | ||
| That's how much they love boxing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So to go to Russia and to see that you love that much, as bad as I hate the cold. | ||
| As bad as I hate the cold, to be revered that much, it's always like I tell people, I always want to be somewhere that I'm wanted and needed if possible. | ||
| But wanted is the big key. | ||
| And I tell my kids, don't date a girl that you want. | ||
| Date a girl that wants you. | ||
| She'll treat you better. | ||
| Smart words right there. | ||
| That's very important. | ||
| So Resha loves and appreciates me. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| The U.S. appreciates and loves me, too. | ||
| Don't get it wrong. | ||
| 99% of the population in Russia knows me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yes. | ||
| So it's like when they say you should become a part of us, too, it's like it's not to say, oh, I don't like you. | ||
| No, it's not like that. | ||
| It's like, why can't we all get along? | ||
| Why can't we? | ||
| What's the problem? | ||
| Well, one of the things I was going to say is that you haven't really taken any grief publicly about being a dual citizen that I've ever seen. | ||
| No, but there are several Russians that are dual citizens. | ||
| So why would y'all give me grief when y'all ain't giving them grief? | ||
| True. | ||
| I mean, is it? | ||
| We already talked about this racism stuff. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| If I got grief, what could it be? | ||
| Because there are several Russians over here in this country right now that they have dual citizenship. | ||
| So I can't. | ||
| Why can't you? | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| So how did it come up? | ||
| A Russian guy brought it up to me and said, hey, they love you so much, you should look at becoming a citizen here too. | ||
| I was like, wow, that's not a bad idea. | ||
| I never thought in my life that it would be possible to become a Russian citizen and an American citizen. | ||
| I said, but that can't be a bad thing. | ||
| And people forget that we fought together in World War II. Yes. | ||
| So it's like we're not really enemies. | ||
| We're enemies. | ||
| Sometimes politics try to make us enemies, but we're really not enemies. | ||
| And if we're all children of God, then why are we enemies? | ||
| Or how can we really be enemies? | ||
| So do you split time in Russia? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| How much time of the year do you spend there? | ||
| I usually go about, spend probably about six months a year there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| So you do hit that cold? | ||
| Yeah, I do hit it. | ||
| I hate it, but I hate it. | ||
| And my fighters, and I meant to mention that I have several fighters all over the world who have a Russian heavyweight I have a Swedish middleweight. | ||
| I have a Swedish coach. | ||
| I got some fighters in South Africa. | ||
| I got fighters everywhere. | ||
| And then I got a team here. | ||
| I got Andrew, Glenn, I'll tell you about Chris Eubank, Kevin Newman, the list goes Shady, Ikram, I got a lot of good Michael Williams, Jr. I got a good stable of young fighters up and coming. | ||
| Brian Pirello, I think his last name is. | ||
| Bryant. | ||
| I got a really good stable of Glenn Hagler, Jr. Really good stable of fighters that I'm trying to work on bringing up. | ||
| Fernando. | ||
| And I'm trying to get them to understand my thought process in boxing. | ||
| Because if they can understand my thought process, they're already ahead of the curve. | ||
| If they don't understand my thought process, they're not going away. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So it's like you have to understand the thought process in order to be able to really pursue a career doing it my way. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| What do you think is different about your thought process? | ||
| My thought process is some of it is already understood before I go in there. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So it's like certain things... | ||
| That you do, you know you have do's and don'ts before you go in there. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So it's like when I come out to a fight, if you got a bad jab, you won't live tonight. | ||
| You will not win tonight because you're not going to beat me with a bad jab. | ||
| Not because it's the first punch you learn in boxing. | ||
| If your jab is bad, you're not beating Roy. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| If you can't block this hook, you're not beating Roy. | ||
| You understand? | ||
| Those things are understood before the fight ever started. | ||
| I don't care who you are. | ||
| If you jab bad and you ain't going to block this hook, you ain't going to beat Roy. | ||
| So do you think like for young fighters, well, first of all, it's got to be an amazing opportunity to train with an all-time great, period. | ||
| But to get into your head and for you to explain to them how you approach situations, how you approach fights, how you approach stepping into that ring, how you approach dismantling opponents, that's got to rub off on young kids. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| That's what I try to do. | ||
| Some kids get it, some kids don't. | ||
| But my goal is to try to get it to all of them. | ||
| I get it in all of them's head. | ||
| Get them at least to start thinking in the right direction. | ||
| Because if I can make them think in the right direction, now I got something. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| I got to make them think in the right direction first. | ||
| See, most guys won't contact me. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| Contact is like, I got a guy, one of my guys I work with off and on named James Wilkins. | ||
| He works harder than everybody everywhere. | ||
| But I got to teach him that it's not about how hard you work, it's how smart you work hard. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| Because if you're working hard without smart, you're not going to get nowhere. | ||
| And you can overtrain. | ||
| Yeah, you're going to overtrain and you're not getting no better because you're not working smart. | ||
| So, so many boxers have now gone to Basically, strength and conditioning. | ||
| So my friend Tom Yankello has started a channel. | ||
| And Tom Yankello has a channel. | ||
| And his thing is, he teaches boxing. | ||
| Is it a YouTube channel? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you say his name? | ||
| Tom Yankello. | ||
| How do you spell that? | ||
| Y-A-N-K-E-L-O. Okay. | ||
| And his thing, he has a thing where he starts to teach because he realizes There's not a lot of coaches left in boxing. | ||
| So he's teaching boxing the right weight now. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| And with that being said, he's going to help give back to people because if you just go on YouTube and Look him up, you'll see him, but he got a lot of stuff on me on that right now. | ||
| There you go right there. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Okay, I've seen him work with you. | ||
| So those little flippy pads, those are like, they're different, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What do you like about those? | ||
| Well, I like them because they don't hurt your hands. | ||
| If you're a big puncher like I am, you ain't got to ever hurt your hands. | ||
| But the ones where guys hold their hands, they hurt your hands. | ||
| He gives a lot of knowledge. | ||
| He teaches a lot. | ||
| He teaches the sport the right way. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| So I like people like him because he's doing his thing the way it's supposed to be done. | ||
| Well, the beautiful opportunity that people have now to learn shit on YouTube that just was not available before. | ||
| You could spend day after day after day watching YouTube videos and instructions and watching old fights too, man. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Old fights is some of the best knowledge you're going to get. | ||
| But having somebody like him that's also teaching it helps you a whole lot. | ||
| Out of all the old fighters, is there one that really stands out to you that you enjoyed watching? | ||
| Sugar Ray Robinson probably was the one I watched the most. | ||
| But my favorite fighter of all time is Muhammad Ali. | ||
| Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Salvador Sanchez would be my second and third. | ||
| Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Salvador Sanchez. | ||
| And you can mix them in the kind of way because I got my top three qualities from those three. | ||
| What did you get from Muhammad Ali? | ||
| How to be a showman and how to have class inside and outside of the ring. | ||
| And how to outthink your opponent with your mind before you beat him with your fists. | ||
| No one played better mind games than him. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And he was doing it back when nobody did. | ||
| The Sonny Liston fight. | ||
| They literally were almost not going to let him fight. | ||
| They thought he was crazy. | ||
| Your blood pressure is off the charts, man. | ||
| He did it every time. | ||
| He did it every time, though. | ||
| Because he got so hyper before he fought. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he was what a unique human being. | ||
| He was about as unique as it gets. | ||
| I always point to people, too. | ||
| I say, if you look at Muhammad Ali, you got to look at Muhammad Ali before they made him take three years off. | ||
| You watch the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight. | ||
| I'm like, ain't my fucking heavyweight that moved like that. | ||
| Not now. | ||
| Not with that kind of speed. | ||
| Not with that kind of footwork. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Footwork, precision, everything. | ||
| They were faster than the middleweight. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| No bullshit. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| Faster than a middleweight and a full-blown heavyweight with length and reach and power and everything. | ||
| Couldn't deal with it. | ||
| And then also as a human being outside of the ring. | ||
| I mean, a cultural force. | ||
| I remember when I was a kid, my parents weren't boxing fans at all. | ||
| But when Muhammad Ali was making that comeback fight against Leon Spinks, he lost to Spinks the first time, and then the second time they're fighting again, my parents watched it. | ||
| They're like, we want to see him win the title back. | ||
| My parents were hippies. | ||
| They weren't boxing fans. | ||
| But he stood for more than boxing. | ||
| He stood for what's good in the world. | ||
| He stood for rejecting evil. | ||
| There's a man who gave up his career because he didn't want to fight in Vietnam because he thought the war was wrong. | ||
| And people don't understand, but that's the second reason I accepted the Russian citizenship. | ||
| Because Muhammad Ali showed me that we live here as one. | ||
| We shouldn't live as individuals. | ||
| We should live here as one. | ||
| Everybody should be respected, looked upon, equal. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| And because the Russians did that, that's why I accepted it. | ||
| What they gave me because they're looking at me as equal, not that I'm an athlete, not that I'm a boxer, not that I'm black, but that I'm equal and that they love what I did, they love what I stood for, and they would love to invite me to be a part of their culture as well as the United States. | ||
| That's a beautiful way to look at it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You talk about a country that has a great history of combat sports, too, man. | ||
| My God. | ||
| Between wrestling, MMA, boxing, I mean, there's so many of these up-and-coming boxers now that also are these great fighters that happen to be Russian. | ||
| But everything is carrying over now because of the internet, people can now see things differently. | ||
| And, you know, you can learn. | ||
| Like I said, you can look at this and you can watch old fights over and over and learn what your favorite fighter did or what his attributes were or what you like about him, what made him great. | ||
| That's why I used to look for what made people great. | ||
| Like, you understand this. | ||
| I got my left body shot from Eddie Mustafa Muhammad back when he was Eddie Gregory. | ||
| Oh, wow! | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Pre-Sphinx. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's where I got my left-level shot from. | ||
| Eddie Gregory, also known as Eddie Mustafa of Muhammad. | ||
| Who became a great trainer, too, by the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You better believe it. | |
| You better believe it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's old school, man. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And I got my defense. | ||
| I could go a whole round without getting hit from Wilfred Benitez. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| Best defensive fighter besides Willie Pipp, I think, to every little. | ||
| He was pretty special. | ||
| Well, you got to throw Pernell Whitaker in that mix, too. | ||
| Well, he was good defensively, too, but he wasn't as defensively as those guys were. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's so many greats to study and learn little bits and pieces from. | ||
| I mean, that was one of the big things that Mike Tyson did, of course, you know, is just spend a giant chunk of his youth watching a video. | ||
| And that's what people don't understand about Mike. | ||
| Mike is very well versed in boxing. | ||
| He knows what the hell he's doing. | ||
| He knows how to solve a puzzle in a boxing ring. | ||
| More so than anything else in life, he knows how to solve any riddle he needs to solve in a boxing ring. | ||
| People don't give him enough credit for that. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| I mean, Mike Tyson, he's a fascinating human being. | ||
| And his mind is, he has things that he focuses on. | ||
| And that's when you find out who he is. | ||
| When you talk to him about the things he focuses on. | ||
| Because he knows a lot about the things that he focuses on. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| A lot more than you would ever expect. | ||
| Yeah, he's intense. | ||
| When he talks to you about the things that are interesting and important to him, you see that intensity. | ||
| That's when it all comes out. | ||
| Now, you're 51 now? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| What is the difference between training at 51 and training at 31? | ||
| At 51, you need one or two more days to recover than you did at 31. Stuff that hurts, it hurts a little bit longer at 51 than it did at 31. Are you doing things differently? | ||
| Yeah, you got to do things differently. | ||
| You have to take days off a little bit more frequently than you would have wanted to back when you were 31. When I was 31, I didn't need no days off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I go all the time. | ||
| At 51, after about two or three days, you got to say, okay, let me hold up a minute because if you don't, that need to say, okay, you might want to go, but I ain't going today. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, are you using any technology in terms of like heart rate monitors? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nah. | |
| No, you're just going by feel? | ||
| I'm old school, you know me. | ||
| Old school, yeah, I do. | ||
| I go by feel. | ||
| I feel it today, I get it today. | ||
| I don't feel it today, we'll rest and get it tomorrow. | ||
| Are you using any new school recovery methods? | ||
| Like, are you using sauna? | ||
| Are you using ice plungers? | ||
| I do a little ice. | ||
| I did a couple of little things I tried. | ||
| One thing that made me stop, I was doing a thing called ProTech, I think, and they said I got to stop because it got something in it that didn't work. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| ProTech, it's a thing like they give you, it's for my knees, basically. | ||
| And it's supposed to help get the cartilage back in my knees. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Wasn't working? | ||
| It was working, but it said there are things that may not pass the test if you take a test, so you got to stop. | ||
| You can't do that no more. | ||
| So I couldn't do it, but I really enjoyed it because it made my knee feel a lot better. | ||
| But they said you got to be careful now because I guess something on there may not... | ||
| Some forbidden thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's called Pro-Tech? | ||
| It's called Pro-Tech, yeah. | ||
| See, what is that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm curious about that because my knees were all fucked up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got a couple people that can help you out with your knees, though, because there's another lady down where I live, Dr. Deborah. | ||
| She can really help your knees out too. | ||
| She's also, she's the one who gave me the shot with the protec, but she has another product that she uses that I think hers may pass the test, so I don't know. | ||
| I'm not going to take it this time though, because I tried this and they said the doctor told me that I can't do it again, so I got to stop. | ||
| Now, what kind of testing are they doing for this fight? | ||
| They said they're doing regular fight testing, so just like they would do in a normal fight, we're going to get tested as though we are regular athletes, as though we're fighting a regular sanctioned fight. | ||
| Vada has already been to my house once. | ||
| Vada? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you can't be on any testosterone replacement, no growth hormone, no peptides, no nothing. | ||
| Just 51 years of life. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And if you ain't got it in them 51 years of life, then too bad you ain't getting it. | ||
| Well, it certainly helps if you had it and never lost it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We were talking about that before we got here. | ||
| You never stop moving. | ||
| I never stop moving, so that's a good thing for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When we were kids and we looked at 51-year-olds. | ||
| We thought they were super old. | ||
| They were grandfathers. | ||
| Yeah, they were dead. | ||
| They were throwing triple F hooks. | ||
| No, not almost. | ||
| Lightning speed. | ||
| Not at 51. No, not at 51. Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so just the days off, that's the only thing that's different? | ||
| Well, I don't go as long when I train. | ||
| What's a typical session for you? | ||
| A typical session is now 12 or 13, maybe 15 rounds max. | ||
| It used to be 16 to 24 rounds. | ||
| Now it's like 12 to 15 max. | ||
| And some of those are low-impact rounds even because you don't want to overdo it because you do too much, tear the tendons in your arm again, mess your hands up again. | ||
| You don't want to mess nothing up when a fight does not happen. | ||
| Now, do you have a person who's making your schedule, or do you do everything yourself? | ||
| I do a little bit of it myself. | ||
| I've got a few people that help out. | ||
| My wife helps out some, but she's doing her thing with the SheWarrior brand as well. | ||
| So, IamSheWarrior.com. | ||
| Make sure y'all check that. | ||
| That's where you get your wife this stuff from. | ||
| Yes, thank you. | ||
| So, yeah, if you can pull it up, IamSheWarrior.com. | ||
| So, she helps you put your schedule together as well? | ||
| She helped me put my schedule together and she trains with us every day. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, so it's all good. | ||
| There it is right here. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, very nice. | |
| That's what I'm trying to get. | ||
| Embrace every challenge as a strong, confident woman you are. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Now, what about when you were briefly talking about strength and conditioning? | ||
| Do you do strength and conditioning? | ||
| Like you see a lot of these fighters are doing like the circuit training, high intensity, you know, like kettlebells. | ||
| Yeah, I do a little bit of that, but I don't make that a vital part of my workout. | ||
| I get up and do it in the mornings like three or four days a week. | ||
| I got a friend named Lee Fusula. | ||
| He brings this guy over and we go to work. | ||
| We do it like three or four days a week. | ||
| But we don't make that a priority because I'm not a weightlifter. | ||
| I'm not a football player. | ||
| I'm a boxer. | ||
| So boxing skills still should have to be the priority. | ||
| You want to be in shape too, but don't mistake fitness Over boxing skills. | ||
| Some people now prefer fitness over boxing skills. | ||
| But when you run into a guy that has boxing skills and a little bit of fitness, he gonna beat you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The most important thing is efficiency and skill. | ||
| Boxing skills. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How did that happen where this thing got confused that way? | ||
| Well, I think what really happened is a lot of the foreigners started picking up a little bit of our boxing skills too. | ||
| And they were always super fit, but they didn't have the boxing skills. | ||
| Now that they have the internet, they can get the boxing skills. | ||
| So they can pick up one or two little tricks, put it with that conditioning, and you're going to get beat. | ||
| Because they can do this all night. | ||
| Well, when you see a guy who's like super strong and super fit and dominates people with that, it tempts people into thinking that's the way. | ||
| That's the way. | ||
| Like Artur Bitterbeef. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Super strong guy. | ||
| That motherfucker's a tank. | ||
| A killer. | ||
| He's such a tank. | ||
| I love watching that guy fight. | ||
| But he's been down twice, too, though. | ||
| Yes, he has. | ||
| He gets in wars. | ||
| Yeah, he gets in wars. | ||
| But that fucking guy, he is seeking to destroy every fight. | ||
| One of the strongest power-for-power punches I've ever seen. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| I mean, I'm a giant fan of his and I love watching his fights because that's what you're going to get. | ||
| You're going to get seek and destroy every fight. | ||
| And see, the problem is, in our country, we're not open-minded enough to be able to see good fights no matter what race they are. | ||
| Because if you think about it, Arthur Bitta Biff and B-Ball, Demetri B-Ball, will be a sugary little Tamar Heron type fight right now. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Right now. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Look at that motherfucker. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| He's so jacked! | ||
| These two guys can freaking punch and they both can fight. | ||
| You feel me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I just think people maybe don't have the understanding and appreciation of boxing as a whole as they used to back in your day. | ||
| Yeah, we're more closed-minded, you know what I mean? | ||
| Well, it's just, it's unfortunate because he's, I think he's like 37 now. | ||
| So he's, you know, he's... | ||
| Getting to the later stages of his life. | ||
| He's in his prime still, but he's like, the outside edge is... | ||
| How old is he? | ||
| 35! | ||
| Oh, that's not that bad. | ||
| But still, you know, really, from 35 on is when, unless you're Bernard Hopkins. | ||
| Fucking that guy, man. | ||
| And again, but that guy speaks to discipline and boxing skill, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, that's what led Bernard Hopkins to have such an incredible career. | ||
| That's right, because of the boxing skills. | ||
| Not just... | ||
| Strength and conditioning, but boxing skills along with a little strength and conditioning. | ||
| I remember back when he was the executioner, when he fought Felix Trinidad. | ||
| People were already counting him out. | ||
| They were like, he's too old. | ||
| And you think about, he knocked out Felix Trinidad. | ||
| I want to say he was like 36 back then. | ||
| And that was just the beginning. | ||
| That was just the beginning. | ||
| He went on to have this incredible career post-36. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And he won't tell nobody the truth ever, but he came to Pensacola before he did that and asked me what should he do now? | ||
| Because he really wanted to fight me again, too, in a sense, but it wasn't really the money that he wanted. | ||
| So I told him, listen, you could beat all those small guys. | ||
| Go down to one to fight Felix Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya's of the world. | ||
| Be your name back up, and you'll get someone. | ||
| And he did exactly that. | ||
| I know he won't ever tell nobody the truth that I told him that, but I did. | ||
| And I ain't got no reason to lie to you. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Just like I told Tyson Fury that if he just took five years of his life and dedicated it back to boxing, he'd beat the majority of the heavyweights after the day because the ones that are on top, mentally he can beat them. | ||
| He's mentally better than most of them, but he's got to dedicate himself to the sport. | ||
| And look where he's at right now. | ||
| Well, it's funny that when you talk to Tyson Fury, his father told him to not take the first Deontay Wilder fight. | ||
| He said, you're not ready. | ||
| He said, you haven't fully recovered physically from all the years of drinking and abuse that he's put on his body. | ||
| After he beat Vladimir Klitschko and won the title, he kind of went crazy for a while. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| He's open about that, about his issues with alcoholism and mental illness. | ||
| But his father was like, you haven't come back yet. | ||
| You're not all the way back. | ||
| So they have that fight. | ||
| Fight ends in a draw. | ||
| Crazy fight. | ||
| And then the rematch. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| Seeing him take it to Deontay Wilder, you want to talk about a hard puncher. | ||
| Deontay Wilder is one of the freakiest punchers I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Freaky. | ||
| Freaky powerful. | ||
| With the right hand especially. | ||
| Yeah, freaky. | ||
| When he knocked out Ortiz with that right hand to the forehead and just flatlined him, he was like, he's sitting there like, what in the fuck just happened? | ||
| He's just crazy power, but Tyson Fury's boxing skill, his boxing skill, and the fact that he started training with Sugar Hill, Kronk fighter before that, Kronk trainer, and had that super aggressive in-your-face style, and just really used those boxing skills and got super aggressive in the rematch, and had Deontay on the back heel. | ||
| That was the main thing, and when you're not as powerful as Deontay, you have to think of other ways to do it. | ||
| And the fact that when they fight Tyson Fury, same thing happened with Klitschko. | ||
| They're not punching down or straight ahead. | ||
| They got to punch up. | ||
| That takes a lot of power away from those good right hand punchers. | ||
| So unless you have a good Joe Frazier type, George Foreman type hook or Ken Norton type hook, then you're going to be in trouble if you got to punch up here. | ||
| The hook is still deadly up here, but the right hand going up here takes a little bit off of it. | ||
| That's just the law of gravity. | ||
| If you don't know that, there's something wrong with them. | ||
| I was just amazed that he got up after the 12th round, the first fight. | ||
| I was too. | ||
| I was too. | ||
| I truly was too. | ||
| When you know what a crusher Deontay is, and the fact that he went right hand and then left hook on the way down, and then went like this, because he's like, it's over. | ||
| And that's what really shocked him the most. | ||
| That put him in a state of shock for Fury to come off of that floor and come back the way he did. | ||
| And come back and win the rest of the round. | ||
| He'd never had nobody do that to him before in his life, I guarantee you. | ||
| I couldn't believe he did it. | ||
| I guarantee you never had nobody in his life to do him like Tyson Fury did that in his life. | ||
| I think that's one of the greatest comebacks ever in a round. | ||
| Without a question. | ||
| To have him flat. | ||
| I thought it was over. | ||
| I remember watching it at home. | ||
| I went, oh! | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm on the front of my bed going, oh! | |
| 12th round! | ||
| Stopped him in the 12th round. | ||
| And Deontay... | ||
| 209 pounds for that fight, which is crazy. | ||
| I mean, he's about as light as anyone who's ever fought for the title and been a title holder. | ||
| And then also you think about how many fights he won by KO. He won all his fights by KO except one. | ||
| But that hurt him though, because he never had to box. | ||
| So now he don't know how to box and go that way. | ||
| I mean, he'll go this way. | ||
| He knows how to go this way, but he never had to learn how to box and go that way. | ||
| And that hurt him when he met somebody that can fight going both ways. | ||
| On the first wave, Tyson Fury fought him going like this. | ||
| What advice would you give Deontay? | ||
| If he came to you, if he's listening to this, because I've heard that Floyd is interested in training him, but if he came to you, what advice would you give to him? | ||
| Well, we go back to learning how to use our jab and developing our left hand. | ||
| Because once we develop the left hand, the right hand already left. | ||
| We don't need that. | ||
| We learn how to operate with developing that left hand. | ||
| We develop that left hand, make it become a weapon before the right hand. | ||
| Now it's hard to beat us with the left hand. | ||
| If we add the right to it, we're unstoppable. | ||
| So you would concentrate on the left hand? | ||
| Right away. | ||
| Right away. | ||
| How much time would you give him if you said, like, if we have all the time in the world, it's up to you to pick when the next fight is. | ||
| How much time would you like to see him spend working on something like that? | ||
| Six months. | ||
| Six months. | ||
| Six months and nobody would beat him again. | ||
| They'd have a hard time beating him again, I should say. | ||
| But it would take him six months. | ||
| What would you want him to do with his footwork? | ||
| Because one of the things about Deontay is he throws everything into his punches and sometimes... | ||
| And that's what we would change. | ||
| That's why we would focus on the left hand more. | ||
| Because the left hand right now, he don't think it's a killer hand. | ||
| He throws a jab with it, but he's looking to kill with the right hand. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we've got to become, you've got to make him diverse. | ||
| You've got to be the killer with the left or the right. | ||
| And you've got to make everything used as a unit. | ||
| You've got to make him use everything as a unit. | ||
| If you don't make him use everything as a unit, then it's not good for him. | ||
| So to focus on one punch kind of takes everything else out the game. | ||
| If that one punch don't work, what are we going to do now? | ||
| Now, in his struggles with backing up and moving back, what would you have him do with that? | ||
| Would you have him concentrate on cutting angles? | ||
| No. | ||
| We know how to fix that, too. | ||
| But that's part of that jab. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's how we use the left hand. | ||
| The left hand will allow us to go in every direction whenever we need to. | ||
| But the left hand is most important. | ||
| The left hand and feet as defense. | ||
| Now, do you ever reach out to fighters? | ||
| Like, you see a fighter like that have a loss? | ||
| No. | ||
| Now, the only fighter I ever tried to reach out to was... | ||
| I forget the guy's name, Linares. | ||
| Well, Linares was about to fight Lomachenko because I knew it was going to be a good fight. | ||
| And I was going to reach out to him, but he had to train, so I didn't even reach out to him. | ||
| But if he would have asked, I would have accepted that because that's a hard fight for him to fight. | ||
| And I know Linares, he's a good guy, but he had a chance to win the fight. | ||
| But the way they trained him to fight it took all of the way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's interesting because you as a multiple division world champion, but also a commentator, when you were doing it for HBO, you could point out little things. | ||
| Right away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you ever have fighters come up to you and thank you for that point? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Thank me. | ||
| Tell me what I told them. | ||
| Tell me what I said they need to get better at. | ||
| Tell me I made them a better fighter if they listened to the commentary and saw the mistakes that they were making. | ||
| So often I can look at a guy and break him down right away. | ||
| It's also got to be crazy for a fighter to be fighting. | ||
| I know there's a giant amount of them that were huge Roy Jones Jr. fans, and now they're looking over, and you're talking about them while they're fighting. | ||
| That's got to be a trip. | ||
| My guy got Andrew. | ||
| I think it's Andrew Murphy's last name. | ||
| I ain't sure what Andrew's last name is. | ||
| But Andrew, he always says, they say, I'm so amazed still that I'm here taking instructions from you. | ||
| You understand me? | ||
| And Bryant says it too, so it's just they always, they're happy though to be there. | ||
| So I got another kid named Mark, a guy from Mobile, Alabama. | ||
| And Waylon. | ||
| Waylon, my next door neighbor, 15 years old, he's going to be a banger too. | ||
| But they love taking instruction from me and I enjoy it, so it's all good. | ||
| Well, it's obvious that you enjoy it. | ||
| And for them, first of all, it's an amazing honor for them. | ||
| But also, it's got to be so motivational. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And I think for them to really see me still getting active at 51, now they're like, wow, he still does it like that. | ||
| So now we understand what he's saying. | ||
| Because how can we be slower than him? | ||
| He's 51. And we can't do it that fast. | ||
| So we got problems. | ||
| Yes, y'all got major issues. | ||
| Now get off your asses and let's go. | ||
| Well, it's just beautiful to see how much energy you have and how much enthusiasm you have. | ||
| And that's really what life's all about, right? | ||
| Yes, it is, man. | ||
| It's about having energy, being a positive force in the world, and just helping other people, you know? | ||
| If you do that, you're doing the right thing. | ||
| If you're not doing that, then you're almost wasting time. | ||
| Because why did God give you life if you're not going to help the next person? | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Roy Jones Jr., November 28th. | ||
| I'm going to be watching. | ||
| I think I'm going to be there. | ||
| I think I'm going to go. | ||
| I think I'm allowed to go if I just have to take a COVID test and I can sit. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| I would love for you to be there. | ||
| I'm starting my YouTube channel too soon, so be on the lookout for that. | ||
| Let me know what that is and I will promote that for you. | ||
| I'll let everybody know. | ||
| And I'll be back on here soon too. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Appreciate you very much, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. |
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