Devin Haney knows he is living his career on fast forward, but is showing no inclination to slow up any time soon.
The interim WBC lightweight title is only 20, but doesn’t hold back at calling out Vasiliy Lomachenko., partially because he knows time is against him to ever fight the great Ukrainian.
Haney drew a decent-sized crowd to an open workout in London on Friday, showing that his fame is beginning to spread beyond his own stomping ground of Las Vegas and California. He is due to next box on November 9 in Los Angeles, but while he knows a fight with Lomachenko looks unlikely, he says he would happily take it now.
“I hope it will happen, but it is not looking realistically like it will,” Haney said. “I’m pushing for it to happen, I want the fans to put the pressure on him but if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I am chasing a world title, I’m not chasing Lomachenko.”
The main problem is that Haney is still growing and making the lightweight limit is getting difficult. With Lomachenko eyeing a move back down the weights, after he has unified the lightweight division. Haney believes he could eventually box as high as middleweight.
“The 135 division is hard to make for me now,” he said. “It takes a lot of sacrifice, I have been at 130 since I was an amateur.
“After I get a world title and make one defence I will move up. You look at (Regis) Prograis, (Josh) Taylor and (Jose Carlos) Ramirez, those are three great guys. I have sparred with Ramirez already, so I have some history with him.
“I think I will be 147 or 154, maybe even middleweight if I get any taller. I am 5ft 9in now. If you look at Canelo, he is going up to 175 and he is the same height as me now.”
It would be easy to believe that Haney was lacking in patience. He admits that his dream was once to go to the Olympics, but had given up on that by the age of 16, when he turned professional, having his first four fights in Mexico as he was too young to box professionally in the United States.
He is loving the sport right now. The trip to London was meant to be partly to raise his profile, partly as a holiday, but he took the opportunity to get some work in, sparring six rounds with Ricky Burns at Matchroom’s gym in Essex.
Many of his formative years boxing were spent at the Mayweather Gym, and he even got to spar Floyd Mayweather when he was 18, although he is honest enough to admit that the legendary multi world champion probably went a bit easy on him.
“It was crazy experience,” Haney said. “He didn’t put it on me, I’m not going to lie. It was a good spar, a competitive spar, but he didn’t really put it on me.
“But at 16 I was beating up on all the guys my age, so I was l already having to spar guys who were way older and more experienced. I’ve always been willing to push myself to get better.”
Talk of settling at welterweight or beyond will inevitably lead to thoughts of once day facing Terence Crawford or Errol Spence, but they are not really on Haney’s radar.
“I feel like that is the generation before me,” he said. “I feel like when I get up there they will be at the end of their careers and not thinking about in fighting me.
“Ryan Garcia, Vergil Ortiz, Keyshawn (David), Shakur Stevenson, Carlos Balderas, those guys are my generation, those are going to be the big fights for me.”
