By Thomas Gerbasi
It’s a fair question to ask Ed Latimore, even days before the unbeaten heavyweight prospect steps into the ring tonight in Miami, Oklahoma to face Trey Lippe-Morrison on ShoBox.
“Why not boxing?” he quickly responds. “There is nothing in this world that I can touch that forces me to be challenged mentally and physically. I can sit in a lab all day and do physics, but that’s not going to develop my body. I can run ten miles and that’s not going to develop my mind. But this here, to learn how to deal with pain and to push through another person and have my psychological faculties pushed to the extreme, there is nothing like it. That’s why I’m here. I love it.”
If you’re wondering why such a question was asked, consider that in addition to boxing, he usually does sit in a lab studying physics, where he’s 17 credits away from a degree. He did take this semester off in order to focus on his fight career, but that doesn’t stop the veteran of the Pennsylvania National Guard from writing on his website, EdLatimore.com, or even writing and publishing a series of books. In other words, there’s a whole world out there that the 31-year-old is embracing that has nothing to do with being punched in the head. But like he said, he loves this, and he has since he first laced up the gloves, even if there were some skeptics around.
“I remember my first fight, it was a Golden Gloves fight, sub-novice, and I knocked the guy out and my friend goes, ‘What are you going to do when you fight somebody who’s been in this longer than you?’ (Laughs) I’d imagine I’ll fight him the same way and hope that pain is the great equalizer. That was nine years ago. And now my friends, they’ve slowly but surely come around. Most of them understand that I’m in this to go as far as I possibly can.”
As for his family, Latimore says, “My family, they’re supportive, but I never looked for their approval with anything anyway, so they kind of knew. They were like, all right, this is what he’s going to do, let’s just get out of his way or help him – one or the other, because opposition won’t be met too kindly.”
After compiling a 40-11 amateur record, Latimore turned pro in January of 2013, and his opposition hasn’t been met too kindly, as he’s gone 13-0 with seven knockouts. Yet for all his success thus far, which includes a signing with Roc Nation and tonight’s ShoBox assignment, he hasn’t hit that point where he’s saying to himself, “Yeah, I’ve got this.”
“I probably have the most serious case of imposter’s syndrome that you’ll ever see in a boxer,” he laughs. “After every single fight, I sit and think to myself, ‘Man, when are the boxing police going to show up and say to me, ‘You know, we know what really happened in that last fight; I don’t know why you’re still doing this. It’s time for you to leave.’ And I think that attitude keeps me focused, because the one thing I know is that I can’t do this complacently.”
So he works. And works. And works some more. When he’s not hitting the books or writing his latest blog post, he’s in the gym. He jokes, saying he’s “almost Rain Man-esque” in his training habits. But Dustin Hoffman never hit this hard. In any event, Latimore isn’t hurting his shoulder patting himself on the back. He knows he’s a work in progress.
“I still don’t think I’m terribly talented,” he said. “I’ve had very good breaks, I train very hard, I’ve made smart decisions, and if I have any talent, other than being able to take a shot and not respond the way 99 percent of other people do, is that I’m going to keep learning. That’s all I can do. And I know that as long as I have the drive to be there and the drive to keep going, I’ll do fine. I’ll keep learning and I’ll keep progressing, and that’s what it is for me. I don’t really care about much else related to this sport because all that stuff can be taken from you. I can get injured, some people can decide they hate me, I’ll lose all my money, who knows. But they can never take what I get from the sport. But maybe one day I’ll wake up and be like, ‘I’m not too bad at this.’”
In so many ways, regardless of what happens in the ring tonight, next month, next year or in five years, Pittsburgh’s Latimore has already won. He’s carved out a life for himself with hard work and dedication that is real and not a logo on a t-shirt. That makes him someone to look up to in a game that can use all the role models it can get.
“That is very important to me,” he said. “I live by a saying, ‘If you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning,’ and I don’t want to be a horrible warning; I want to be a good example. It’s like they say when you look at art. It doesn’t really matter what the artist is trying to do, as weird as that sounds. It’s important what the viewers get out of it and take from it. And I hope that someone looks at my life and realizes that if we put our minds to anything, we can do it. I am a living, breathing example.”