Raymond Ford was not thrilled with his performance against Abraham Nova in Saudi Arabia earlier in August.

Ford won a 10-round decision and the former featherweight titleholder, now competing at junior lightweight, improved to 18-1-1 (8 KOs) after Nova took the place of original opponent Anthony Cacace a few weeks ago.

“I ain’t really too happy with the fight and the performance, but the main thing is to get the job done, so that's all that really matters,” Ford, of Camden, New Jersey, told BoxingScene.

“I feel like, watching it back, I feel like I should have used my legs more and boxed a little bit more. I feel like I allowed him to put his body weight on me and make it ugly, like, way too much and just allow it to be like a sloppy fight – especially later on. I felt like I was in control the whole time. I felt like he couldn’t really touch me, like I didn’t really feel like his work was effective. I felt like he was smothering himself, smothering me, too, so it kind of made it hard for me to, like, get my shots off at the same time. But I felt like he wasn’t doing anything besides making it ugly.”

Ford refused to put it down to the opponent change, and simply said it was a case of styles making fights.

“He came in there basically to try to rough it up and make it ugly and do whatever he could to be successful,” Ford explained.

But even heading into the fight, Ford was being asked about what was next, who would he fight later in the year, could the O’Shaquie Foster fight happen?

“At the end of the day, when you’re in there fighting you ain’t really thinking about nothing else other than the person that’s trying to take your head off,” said Ford, a 26-year-old southpaw. “So I wouldn’t really say, like, it’s a distraction or anything like that.

“It comes with the job. The media is going to do what the media do – ask questions – and it’s your job to answer them.”

Ford’s fight-night ring attire did catch the eye, however. He wore bright orange shorts with cartoon characters Tom and Jerry on them – a nod to the well-documented notion that recent bouts have not had enough action in them. The idea came from Ford’s manager, Ireland’s Brian Peters.

“I really didn't believe in the vision,” Ford smiled.

“I kind of had a hard time trying to envision what it would look like, but they came back with it drawn up and everything like that, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s fire. So, yeah, we can go through with it.’”

The outfit will be different next time, though. 

And although Ford has moved up in weight, the scales informed him that he came in heavy for Nova. That is something he still can’t explain, but he thinks it came down to the scales provided at the weigh-in.

“I would have been on weight had I known that the scale was gonna be off as much as it was off, because I was up, like, two, three hours before we had to go weigh-in. I was just chilling, watching boxing,” he said. “I could have been losing weight the whole time or, you know, figuring out how to get that because I was over 0.9[lbs] on the scale, on their scale.”

At first, he was just 0.1 over at 10 a.m., with the weigh-in at noon. 

So Ford went and watched some boxing and relaxed. When he returned, he was 0.9 over, and then, when he went to shift the weight, he said he was interrupted in the midst of his final cut.

“They called me back down there, like pretty much just ruined my whole time while I was in the middle of, in the process of, losing the weight. … They called me back downstairs to check and see if I was making progress, and I’m like, ‘What’s the point of all that if y’all giving me two hours to go lose the weight? Why y'all stopping my time and cutting in between what I got going on to check to see if I’m making progress on making the weight? Let me make the weight.’ So then, when I come back down to check to see my progress or whatever, I only had about 20 minutes to lose the rest of the weight.”

It didn’t come off in time, but it did not bother him on fight night. Even though Nova was talking smack to him in there, none of it mattered.

“He was talking, but that wasn’t a problem for me,” Ford said with a smile. “I’m used to people talking and stuff like that. I spar people all the time, and people be talking and things; I’ll be talking, too, so that wasn’t a problem for me.”

Tris Dixon covered his first amateur boxing fight in 1996. The former editor of Boxing News, he has written for a number of international publications and newspapers, including GQ and Men’s Health, and is a board member for the Ringside Charitable Trust and the Ring of Brotherhood. He has been a broadcaster for TNT Sports and hosts the popular “Boxing Life Stories” podcast. Dixon is a British Boxing Hall of Famer, an International Boxing Hall of Fame elector, is on The Ring ratings panel and is the author of five boxing books, including “Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing” (shortlisted for the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year), “Warrior: A Champion’s Search for His Identity” (shortlisted for the Sunday Times International Sportsbook of the Year) and “The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxing’s Wastelands.” You can reach him @trisdixon on X and Instagram.