When 21-year-old Steven Navarro is asked how much time boxing leaves him to live his life as a young adult, the question doesn’t compute.
“This is my life, that’s the thing,” Navarro told BoxingScene. “Boxing is my life. It’s all I need, really. I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years, and I’m fine with that, I really am. It’s just a way of living. I’ve embraced it. I don’t allow any distractions.”
The times in which Navarro, a junior bantamweight with a record of 6-0 (5 KOs), struggles most, aren’t in the throes of a brutal training camp. They’re after his fights. He wants to come back to the gym sooner than his coaches will let him.
“They literally need to pull me away from the gym, and even so, they’re still not keeping me away from the sport. I’m shadowboxing, I’m working out. It’s stamped in me, my heart, my brain.”
After his last fight, a fourth-round TKO of Juan Esteban Garcia, Navarro took a break from training for all of three days. His coaches have to sell him on the “unsexy things,” like “recovery.”
Loving boxing this much is one thing. How Navarro processes the sensations of the brutal sport is more foreign still. Every other day, he rises at 4:30 a.m. to run, motivated to train in ways others won’t. Posed with the suggestion that running and boxing share a crucial factor – that pain tolerance is integral to success – Navarro again elides the concept of the question.
“If I’m being honest, I don’t feel pain,” he said. (Does a more terrifying admission from a potential boxing opponent exist?) Instead, he gets numb. “Pain is just, I really believe, a little concept in your mind that you can just set aside. Once you’re able to do that, you’re able to conquer anything, I really do believe that.”
Surely the numbness scares him the way pain would others, though.
“No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. At all.”
What does frighten Navarro, despite him being hardly old enough to legally drink, much less experience his physical decline, is the prospect of one day having to stop fighting.
“That’s something I always think about,” Navarro confessed. “I think I’ll be, like, 50 years old, like the Executioner [Bernard Hopkins], trying to fight still [laughs].”
For now, everything is fine. Navarro will fight Cristopher Rios, 11-2 (7 KOs), on July 26 at Madison Square Garden Theater in New York. He is confident it will be a great fight and night. The bout will be Navarro’s second scheduled for eight rounds and seventh since the start of his career in April 2024. He says he is having no issues making 115lbs and asserts that he needs to win a belt before moving up.
Recently, Navarro even met up with “Sugar” Ray Leonard, who along with Muhammad Ali is Navarro’s favorite fighter.
The youngster told Leonard how much the all-time-great had meant to him, and couldn’t risk a cheeky expression of his grand ambitions.
“I’m striving to become greater than him,” Navarro said. “When I told him that, he kind of sized me up [laughs]. It was a great conversation with him. He sized me up and said, ‘you need to grow a little bit, son!’ He did give me a lot of advice. I soaked it all in.”
Though those in low weight classes command far less attention than the big boys, Navarro is unconcerned that his marginal division might escape mainstream attention and foil his sky-high ambitions.
“I’m not too excited about the attention. It’s the accomplishments. The weight doesn’t make the fighter, the fighter makes the weight. I don’t want to be known for my weight, I want to be known for my accomplishments and my performance.
“Whether there’s 100 people who know about it or tons of millions, as long as the real boxers know – there’s a few Hall of Famers who I’ve met recently, and they’ve had conversations with me, and they say that they know about me and they love the way I perform — that just brings joy to my heart. It lets me know that I’m on the right path. Because I’m just getting started.”
It’s rare to fear for a 21-year-old boxer more because of their eventual, inevitable retirement than because of the violence that might await them during fights, but that is the feeling Navarro evokes. One hopes he finds new avenues for his passion during his career because one day, as they all discover, having to live in the absence of his way of life promises to be a more formidable opponent than anybody he could encounter in the ring.
Owen Lewis is a freelance writer with bylines at Defector Media, The Guardian, and The Second Serve. He is also a writer and editor at BoxingScene. His beats are tennis, boxing, books, travel and anything else that satisfies his meager attention span. He is on Bluesky and can be contacted at owentennis11@gmail.com.
