Issue 182

September 2019

You are not accustomed to losing but you went through a pretty rough patch. You are a former champ. You were on the cover of the Wheaties box. You had one of the brightest futures in the entire sport. What was the lowest point of the losing streak for you when things really went downhill?

Just the whole experience, man. Losing three fights in a row…that has never happened to me. I barely lost once. To lose three fights in a row was more fights than I lost in my career in total before. It was weird to be in that position. The way I was losing was very frustrating, losing by close split decisions and things like that.

I feel like it was more of a mental thing than a skill thing. Training the mental process is harder to train than the skill process. You only have between fifteen to twenty five minutes to go out there and preform in front of the world. If you aren’t mentally sharp that time, you lose and that’s what the world remembers.

Dealing with the fact that I had never been in that position before, it was weird to feel what it feels like to be on the other end, the losing end. I didn’t want to make it where I got comfortable losing. If I felt like if it was a comfortable thing to lose then I had to be done with this sport. I am still hungry. I am still motivated. I am still training my butt off. All I can do is work harder. Now with this weight cut I feel like I am the bigger guy in these fights. I just have to make sure my cardio matches.

The personal attacks on you and your property have been well documented. With all the crazy stuff that has been going on personally how do you compartmentalize those things, put that on the backburner and focus on the fight at hand?

That’s life, bro. I have been through so much in my life. Milwaukee is not the best place to grow up but it’s my home. I just deal with it. The biggest thing I wanted to make sure is that my family was safe. Once I found out it wasn’t like a direct attack on me then I was ‘OK. I can’t control that.’

I can’t control what other people do. I won’t hide where I live because other people are stupid. I just push forward. A quote that I live by, since I lost my father, is ‘The best revenge is massive success.’ All I can do is show that it isn’t affecting me. My life is going to keep moving on.