Ever since I've been boxing, it's always been the case that when I go inside the ring a switch goes off and my attitude changes totally from the person I am outside it. I really can't explain why or how.
Machiavelli taught me it was better to be feared than loved. Because if you are loved they sense you might be weak. I am a man of the people and help them but it is important to do so through strength.
The opportunity and the concept of merging music culture with actual boxing is exciting. It's bringing a younger demographic to the sport.
In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance.
Anybody going into boxing already has brain damage.
I've always boxed, I always taught boxing.
I didn't run with a gang - I didn't have time. There were a few little street gangs sitting in the spotlights at night time - talking and playing marbles. But I was so wrapped up in boxing since I was 12.
An incident that left an impression on me was the 1999 sub-junior national boxing championship held in Calcutta. I had trained extremely hard to get there but got kicked out in the first round itself. 'If others can win, why can't you?' I repeatedly asked myself.
He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.
You cannot let something deter you from giving someone a rematch unless you are going to retire. If you are going to retire, go ahead, but if not, you need to do what you are going to do. You do not have to keep playing with the game of boxing. If you are going to fight, fight.
The type of work I do is more like CrossFit, so I do track workouts, and I do boxing workouts. So it's a lot of different things that I do. I don't want to overload the body too much, but when we do the hill, it's not like workouts.
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.
Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
This kid [Janks Morton, Jr. ] was so special, although he's not a kid anymore, obviously, but he was there from day one of my rise through boxing. You know how the years go by and then, when you stop to reflect, you realize that someone was a part of your whole evolution as an individual? That's what I share with Junior.
I think the media, the boxing public hasn't seen me at my best simply because great opposition brings out the best in you.
I'm not much for talking. You know what I do. I put guys in body bags when I'm right.
Newspapermen ask dumb questions. They look up at the sun and ask if it is shining.
It's not rage that drives me, it's competition.
Mike Tyson fit the American ideal of a boxer. A fighter who jumps out of his corner and hits out fiercely. Thats what he'll be remembered for. But good boxing doesnt work like that. Tyson never won on points. It was clear that he'd come a cropper some day.
I don't see you making a movie about Bob Arum.