Keith Thurman Admits Training Slightly Altered Due To Neck Injury

By Ryan Burton

Fight fans have been anxiously awaiting the June 25th welterweight showdown pitting unbeaten WBA champion Keith "One Time" Thurman (26-0, 22KOs) and the once beaten former champion "Showtime" Shawn Porter (26-1, 16KOs).  The first potential date mentioned for this fight was December 12th, 2015.  When that date came to pass, there was talk of the fight happening in January or February before March 12th was officially announced.

That date ended up having to be postponed as well after Thurman injured his neck in a car accident on February 22nd when he was driving through a rainstorm.  June 25th was finally settled on as the date for the rescheduled bout with the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY serving as the host venue. 

Even with the delays Thurman said that he has had a good camp and he is very confident of victory against Porter.

"It has been going along good. We have to be cautious and do everything right with the recovery but all is well. We feel really good about the sparring we have gotten in this camp. We feel really good about the training. We felt confident about the matchup the whole time. Shawn Porter is a great fighter, a great world champion, but we believe we have the skills and the talent to take him out," said Thurman.

The 27-year-old Thurman did however admit that the neck injury has caused him to make some adjustments to how he normally prepares himself for a formal training camp.  He wasn't able to follow his typical routine of sparring before beginning camp but insists that when it is all said and done that he will have had great preparation for Porter.

"We were still able to get the necessary amount of weeks in for the sparring but we did have to push it back. Normally I'll spar a minimum of once a week leading up to the sparring in training camp. What I was unable to do pretty much was I was unable to do that sparring. Sometimes if I feel up to it and I really wanted to I maybe spar twice (a week prior to camp) but once we were doing camp it is always a minimum of twice a week with an average of three times a week. We spar Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The only thing I wasn't able to do was get some earlier rounds of sparring in this camp but it didn't really disturb how we organized this camp which is why I still feel real good and confident about this training camp," Thurman told BoxingScene.com.

Send questions or comments to ringsidewriter@gmail.com. You can follow Ryan on Twitter @ringsidewriter