Boxer quotes thread

[JAB5239]

'Micky is the toughest guy that I ever fought in my life. There aren't many guys like him around. The sport needs people like me and Micky Ward. Me and Micky make the sport look good, and we make other fighters work harder when they see us fight. Micky is unbelievable. He has the heart of a lion. He is my twin, I think.'
- Arturo Gatti

[JAB5239]

'Boxing is a poor man’s sport. It’s a sport that demands your outright respect. Most people look at boxing or any contact sport and say, 'Wow, I couldn’t do that,' because they don’t possess the thing inside of us that makes us go through pain. It takes something to activate that. That’s what separates fighters from other people.'
- Sugar Ray Leonard

[JAB5239]

'If you quit every time things don't go your way, then you'll be quitting all through your life.'
- Evander Holyfield

[JAB5239]

'I was born in a sharecropper's tumbledown shack on a dirt road in Alabama, on May 13th 1914. Later, I was a Depression kid in the Detroit slums. Whenever I could, I earned a few cents after school by working on an ice truck. I toted 75lbs chunks of ice three or four floors up.
Nights I hung out at the corner with the Catherine Street boys. Most all they ever talked about was how much the big fighters took home in their purses. I had just started to take violin lessons, and one of the gang showed me that Kid Chocolate and Jack Dempsey made more money in one fight than a good fiddler could make in a couple of lifetimes.'

- Joe Louis

[JAB5239]

'I try to look tough because I'm trying to get the scare on the other guy. The way some of those suckers fight I guess they are scared. But a boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There's got to be good guys and there's got to be bad guys. That's what the fans pay for - to see the bad guys get beat. So I'm the bad guy. But I change things. I don't get beat.'
- Sonny Liston

[JAB5239]

'I skipped the violin lessons and hid my fiddle in my locker at the Brewster Boxing Gym where I went to work out. When my mama finally found out, she never protested. All she said was that if boxing was something that I really wanted to do, I could keep on with it. Incidentally, on my way home from my last violin lesson, some kid saw me carrying my violin case and called me a sissy. I hit him over the head with the violin and broke it in a thousand pieces.'
- Joe Louis

[markusmod]

“The hero and the coward both feel the same thing. But the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.” -Cus D’amato

[JAB5239]

'They called me a fat, cowardly, cocaine-snorting, fight-fixing cheat... Who they calling fat?'
- Randall 'Tex' Cobb

[JAB5239]

'It is the mark of a great fighter when he has character, plus skill, because a fighter with character and skill will often rise and beat a better fighter because of this. Character is that quality upon which you can depend on under presure.'
- Cus D'Amato

[JAB5239]

'I remember in school one day, a kid came over to hit me and I moved. We exchanged positions, so his back was toward the steps. I hit him and he fell backward down the steps. And they threw me out.'
- Roberto Duran