By Keith Idec
If you looked at Anthony Joshua’s Instagram page recently, you might’ve gotten the wrong idea about the roughly three weeks he spent training in Miami.
Joshua arrived in Miami three weeks ago to complete a training camp that began in England for his heavyweight title fight Saturday night against Andy Ruiz Jr. Between training sessions, the British superstar posted photos of him talking to golf great Rory McElroy, jogging on the beach, emerging from a crystal-clear pool and looking relaxed as he sat poolside, preparing to do yoga.
The 29-year-old Joshua joked with DAZN’s Ak & Barak about how his training regimen in Miami might’ve seemed more relaxed than it was. The IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO champion assured them, though, that the trappings of Miami didn’t distract him from the task at hand.
“It didn’t look it,” a laughing Joshua said. “It didn’t look it, but I stayed out of the clubs. I stayed out of the other clubs. I went down South Beach one afternoon for some lunch, which was nice. Other than that, it was straight gym work.”
Joshua’s trainer, Rob McCracken, and the rest of his team made sure Joshua could concentrate only on road work, sparring and other boxing training while he prepared to face Ruiz at Madison Square Garden in New York.
“I heard,” Joshua said when asked about distractions in Miami. “I heard. That was word on the streets. But the way that the team set up my training is that I only had one day off in between. I never had like two, back-to-back days off. When you have two back-to-back days, you have one for turning up and one for recovery. So, all my recovery was just based around one day, so I had no time to kinda mess around or put a foot wrong.”
DAZN will stream Joshua-Ruiz as the main event of a seven-bout card. England’s Joshua (22-0, 21 KOs) is regularly listed as at least a 25-1 favorite over Southern California’s Ruiz (32-1, 21 KOs), who replaced Brooklyn’s Jarrell Miller on five weeks’ notice once Miller failed three performance-enhancing drug tests.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.