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My book will be VERY REAL, I will give you real insight into the mind of boxers. This is an unedited excerpt.............
Sometimes you end up using sparring as a way of establishing yourself in the eyes of other boxers. Sometimes sparring can get tedious and then something will happen and all of a sudden you get juiced up mentally and physically enough that it turns into something more than just every day sparring. Sometimes you might get a guy that takes the sparring a little too seriously. There is a guy here in Connecticut that I have sparred with a few times. An amateur 201 pounder, about twenty-three years old. A local Connecticut amateur and certainly not a guy the average boxing fan would have ever heard of at this point. One time we sparred at my gym in Hartford for four pretty much uneventful rounds but just one day later a friend of mine from another gym asked me if I sparred this kid yesterday. I said "Yes" and he said "Yeah, because he was at my gym earlier today saying he dominated you last night."
Now, see, that kind of thing is just irritating. If I spar with a good guy and we are going at it and it is serious sparring and he says "Yeah, I did good in sparring with Scully" then I have no problem with that at all because, Hey, you just aren't going to have a good day every time out. But when some amateur kid comes in and I do him a favor by working with him for a few rounds and then he starts talking stuff about it, that really gets to you. I probably take it a little more personal than some other guys but I think that is what keeps me competitive. It's as if he's saying "We're on the same level." The thing these inexperienced amateur guys need to realize is that there is many skills that are what I call "acquired skills." You can't be taught them. You can only gain them through experience. Sometimes a pro can't, or won't even, call on them until the later rounds in a sparring session or a fight when they are required or when he loosens up properly.
Amateurs are forced, and trained, to loosen up quicker. You can box a good pro for four rounds and never even really see what type of skills he truly has. Box him ten rounds, though, and you will see tricks and wisdom that you didn't see in those first four. If you are a national or world class amateur and you box a professional in the gym for three or four rounds I could see how the sparring could be very competitive. So much so that you could watch it and if you didn't know who the two guys were you might have a 50-50 chance of guessing which one was the pro and who was the amateur. For two or three rounds I could see the top amateur getting the better of the action and in some cases even I could see some of the top amateurs really putting it on some of the slower starting pros. But a guy that is what I consider a "local amateur," not a real seasoned guy with high level experience, is very unlikely to do much with an experienced pro other than what the pro allows him to do. (This is why even the absolute cream of the crop amateurs don't turn pro in ten round fights against particularly decent competition let alone world class opposition. A lot of amateurs like to spar with good pros and if they do well with the guy they like to spread the word. But when they themselves turn pro they still do it in four round fights against lesser competition. That's because when it comes right down to it they know the sparring they did with the better more accomplished fighter was just a "gym thing")
This brings up another aspect of sparring that I love: The last few rounds of a heated twelve round sparring session with a good pro. The intangible I love is that in long battles like that it is a thing where both guys are in there trading punches and working themselves to the extreme that over the course of that time there is a lot of testosterone at work in there. The emotions can run very high at time and the longer you go, the more tired you get, the more you begin to wage battles within your own mind and body as tough as the one you have going on with the guy in the other corner. As the clock runs down and you start heading towards that finish line knows as the twelfth round, it becomes a sort of unspoken thing where you know that both of you are going to want to take that last round big. No matter what happened in the previous eleven rounds, you are going to want to land some serious stuff in that last three minutes. And both guys know it, too. You come to the center of the ring when the last round bell rings and you look at each other and touch gloves with that look that says "Let's get busy, let's finish this thing right!!" You find that energy you didn't know you had, sometimes you find a lot of it, like it is overflowing in your body and spilling out through your pores like a fast flowing river! You could see two guys go at it for eleven average looking rounds in the gym but when that 12th round comes you could catch yourself a Hagler-Hearns type thing. And when that :30 second buzzer goes off to signal that there is only a half minute left in the round? Get out of the way, man!! Thats the gun that sounds the start of the final race, your last thirty seconds to let go every bomb in your arsenal. Jabs are put away for another day and whatever guns and ammo you have left are brought out to end the night with a ****. Sometimes I will be sparring with a guy for a few rounds and I wish silently that we could just fast forward to the 10th, 11th and 12th. Those are the best rounds in the gym to me.
I was in the gym one day recently and this same amateur 201 pounder was talking about some sparring he had done recently with a professional 175 pounder that lives about thirty minutes from us. He was saying something like"He's too small for me." The same kind of nonsense he was talking about me after we sparred that time, most likely. That kind of thing irks me. I know the pro in question and he is a very rugged, ultra-tough, super durable guy with forty-five pro fights under his belt. This amateur kid usually spars him for three, four or maybe five rounds at a time. Let him do ten rounds with the pro and then he will see that the guy is certainly not "too small" for him. Sometimes guys have a lot of pro fights like that and they are accustomed to taking their time and not letting loose until the later rounds. These amateurs and young pros really need to realize and respect the experienced professionals more. Doing good with a professional when you are an amateur is not usually indicative of both of their skill levels. A good pro and his "acquired skills" often don't come out until the going gets tough and the fight begins to wear on his opponent. Not to mention the fact that the pro is used to not wearing headgear and the amateur kids get to engage him in the gym when he is wearing both bigger gloves and a headgear. He also gets to spar with him after the pro has been at work all day at his 9-5 while he has been at home resting up for the sparring sessions.
It is times like that when I want to say "Oh, you wanna talk about what you did? How about we go to the gym one day and go at it for ten rounds with no headgear? Then we'll see what you've really got." And people might wonder why I would put this out there when many people that read this will know exactly who I am talking about. My logic is this: When he mouthed off that day after we sparred for the very first time he put his attempt at being a big man at my expense out there in the open for all to see and hear. Maybe he didn't think it would get back to me or that it would get around as quickly as it did, who knows? But it did and his false information got him brutalized five times as a result. I am putting it out there just like he tried to do. That's all fair in my view.
Another indication that even the best amateurs, despite how well they can do in the gym, are not ready immediately for the better pros and the true pro circumstances is that even the Olympians turn pro in four round fights against less than formidable opposition. Not easy marks so to speak but definitely not guys expected to win against them. This is why Jeff Lacy and Jermaine Taylor, two dynamite amateurs from the class of 2000, are just now, in late 2004, starting to get matched up with dangerous opposition. If they were as great in real fights, if they were ready to do what they could probably do in the gym and in the amateurs, then they would have been facing guys in ten round fights immediately. This is why soon-to-be professional Andre Ward, the 2004 Olympic Champion, will turn pro in shorter fights just like any other pro making his debut and he will be brought along at his own pace. You may see a kid like him in the gym, sparring with a seasoned pro, and maybe the kid is tearing him up. You say "Why doesn't he just fight the better guys now, since he is that good?" And the reason is that you cannot just jump in there with guys in real fights that have experience going rounds and guys that have overcome certain things as a professional. Put Andre Ward in right away with a solid ten round fighter that you never heard of and chances are the unknown but experienced guy wears him down and beats him. As much potential that guys like Andre have there are other guys out there that you have never even heard of that would run guys like him, at this stage of his development, right out of the ring.
Sometimes you end up using sparring as a way of establishing yourself in the eyes of other boxers. Sometimes sparring can get tedious and then something will happen and all of a sudden you get juiced up mentally and physically enough that it turns into something more than just every day sparring. Sometimes you might get a guy that takes the sparring a little too seriously. There is a guy here in Connecticut that I have sparred with a few times. An amateur 201 pounder, about twenty-three years old. A local Connecticut amateur and certainly not a guy the average boxing fan would have ever heard of at this point. One time we sparred at my gym in Hartford for four pretty much uneventful rounds but just one day later a friend of mine from another gym asked me if I sparred this kid yesterday. I said "Yes" and he said "Yeah, because he was at my gym earlier today saying he dominated you last night."
Now, see, that kind of thing is just irritating. If I spar with a good guy and we are going at it and it is serious sparring and he says "Yeah, I did good in sparring with Scully" then I have no problem with that at all because, Hey, you just aren't going to have a good day every time out. But when some amateur kid comes in and I do him a favor by working with him for a few rounds and then he starts talking stuff about it, that really gets to you. I probably take it a little more personal than some other guys but I think that is what keeps me competitive. It's as if he's saying "We're on the same level." The thing these inexperienced amateur guys need to realize is that there is many skills that are what I call "acquired skills." You can't be taught them. You can only gain them through experience. Sometimes a pro can't, or won't even, call on them until the later rounds in a sparring session or a fight when they are required or when he loosens up properly.
Amateurs are forced, and trained, to loosen up quicker. You can box a good pro for four rounds and never even really see what type of skills he truly has. Box him ten rounds, though, and you will see tricks and wisdom that you didn't see in those first four. If you are a national or world class amateur and you box a professional in the gym for three or four rounds I could see how the sparring could be very competitive. So much so that you could watch it and if you didn't know who the two guys were you might have a 50-50 chance of guessing which one was the pro and who was the amateur. For two or three rounds I could see the top amateur getting the better of the action and in some cases even I could see some of the top amateurs really putting it on some of the slower starting pros. But a guy that is what I consider a "local amateur," not a real seasoned guy with high level experience, is very unlikely to do much with an experienced pro other than what the pro allows him to do. (This is why even the absolute cream of the crop amateurs don't turn pro in ten round fights against particularly decent competition let alone world class opposition. A lot of amateurs like to spar with good pros and if they do well with the guy they like to spread the word. But when they themselves turn pro they still do it in four round fights against lesser competition. That's because when it comes right down to it they know the sparring they did with the better more accomplished fighter was just a "gym thing")
This brings up another aspect of sparring that I love: The last few rounds of a heated twelve round sparring session with a good pro. The intangible I love is that in long battles like that it is a thing where both guys are in there trading punches and working themselves to the extreme that over the course of that time there is a lot of testosterone at work in there. The emotions can run very high at time and the longer you go, the more tired you get, the more you begin to wage battles within your own mind and body as tough as the one you have going on with the guy in the other corner. As the clock runs down and you start heading towards that finish line knows as the twelfth round, it becomes a sort of unspoken thing where you know that both of you are going to want to take that last round big. No matter what happened in the previous eleven rounds, you are going to want to land some serious stuff in that last three minutes. And both guys know it, too. You come to the center of the ring when the last round bell rings and you look at each other and touch gloves with that look that says "Let's get busy, let's finish this thing right!!" You find that energy you didn't know you had, sometimes you find a lot of it, like it is overflowing in your body and spilling out through your pores like a fast flowing river! You could see two guys go at it for eleven average looking rounds in the gym but when that 12th round comes you could catch yourself a Hagler-Hearns type thing. And when that :30 second buzzer goes off to signal that there is only a half minute left in the round? Get out of the way, man!! Thats the gun that sounds the start of the final race, your last thirty seconds to let go every bomb in your arsenal. Jabs are put away for another day and whatever guns and ammo you have left are brought out to end the night with a ****. Sometimes I will be sparring with a guy for a few rounds and I wish silently that we could just fast forward to the 10th, 11th and 12th. Those are the best rounds in the gym to me.
I was in the gym one day recently and this same amateur 201 pounder was talking about some sparring he had done recently with a professional 175 pounder that lives about thirty minutes from us. He was saying something like"He's too small for me." The same kind of nonsense he was talking about me after we sparred that time, most likely. That kind of thing irks me. I know the pro in question and he is a very rugged, ultra-tough, super durable guy with forty-five pro fights under his belt. This amateur kid usually spars him for three, four or maybe five rounds at a time. Let him do ten rounds with the pro and then he will see that the guy is certainly not "too small" for him. Sometimes guys have a lot of pro fights like that and they are accustomed to taking their time and not letting loose until the later rounds. These amateurs and young pros really need to realize and respect the experienced professionals more. Doing good with a professional when you are an amateur is not usually indicative of both of their skill levels. A good pro and his "acquired skills" often don't come out until the going gets tough and the fight begins to wear on his opponent. Not to mention the fact that the pro is used to not wearing headgear and the amateur kids get to engage him in the gym when he is wearing both bigger gloves and a headgear. He also gets to spar with him after the pro has been at work all day at his 9-5 while he has been at home resting up for the sparring sessions.
It is times like that when I want to say "Oh, you wanna talk about what you did? How about we go to the gym one day and go at it for ten rounds with no headgear? Then we'll see what you've really got." And people might wonder why I would put this out there when many people that read this will know exactly who I am talking about. My logic is this: When he mouthed off that day after we sparred for the very first time he put his attempt at being a big man at my expense out there in the open for all to see and hear. Maybe he didn't think it would get back to me or that it would get around as quickly as it did, who knows? But it did and his false information got him brutalized five times as a result. I am putting it out there just like he tried to do. That's all fair in my view.
Another indication that even the best amateurs, despite how well they can do in the gym, are not ready immediately for the better pros and the true pro circumstances is that even the Olympians turn pro in four round fights against less than formidable opposition. Not easy marks so to speak but definitely not guys expected to win against them. This is why Jeff Lacy and Jermaine Taylor, two dynamite amateurs from the class of 2000, are just now, in late 2004, starting to get matched up with dangerous opposition. If they were as great in real fights, if they were ready to do what they could probably do in the gym and in the amateurs, then they would have been facing guys in ten round fights immediately. This is why soon-to-be professional Andre Ward, the 2004 Olympic Champion, will turn pro in shorter fights just like any other pro making his debut and he will be brought along at his own pace. You may see a kid like him in the gym, sparring with a seasoned pro, and maybe the kid is tearing him up. You say "Why doesn't he just fight the better guys now, since he is that good?" And the reason is that you cannot just jump in there with guys in real fights that have experience going rounds and guys that have overcome certain things as a professional. Put Andre Ward in right away with a solid ten round fighter that you never heard of and chances are the unknown but experienced guy wears him down and beats him. As much potential that guys like Andre have there are other guys out there that you have never even heard of that would run guys like him, at this stage of his development, right out of the ring.
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