The book made me do it—why I’m boxing again

Let’s start this newsletter with a brief summary of my past.

I started amateur boxing at 22. By 26, I had won a state and national amateur boxing championship, earned a sponsorship worth $100k a year, and was ranked 4th in the United States in the 201+ weight class.
I turned professional three weeks before my 29th birthday. By 30, I was signed to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Sports.
At 31, I suffered my first professional loss by an embarrassing first-round knockout. I took a year off to finish my degree in physics.
I returned to start training for a fight, but I got injured and ultimately decided that my time boxing was over. I was 33.

I’m currently 39, and I’ve been training to box again. I’ll likely be 40 by the time I step in the ring. I know this looks crazy, but it’s no crazier than starting the sport at the age of 22. However, if my intuition is correct, this will be one of the smartest—if not THE smartest—things I’ll have ever done and will set me up for the rest of my life.

What has motivated me to step back in the ring and to do so at an age where 99.9% of athletes, combat or otherwise, are done with their careers? This essay lays out my thinking and motivations.

A few years ago, I wrote this detailed essay about why I quit boxing with only one loss. I wrote that piece because:

People kept asking me why I stopped boxing, and I got tired of explaining it. Now, whenever someone asks, I send them the essay.
There wasn’t one sole reason I hung up the gloves almost a decade ago. It was multifaceted and required a detailed explanation.

The rest of this essay is motivated by those two factors, but this time, I’m explaining why I’m starting to fight again and my expectations.

This essay is as much for the curious reader as it is for me. In the worst-case scenario, in writing down my thoughts clearly, I’ll realize this is a bad idea and call the whole thing off. I doubt that will happen, but then again, I wrote an essay detailing my reasons for quitting, yet here I am, preparing to step back into the Colosseum.

I hope someone reading this will be inspired or motivated to do something crazy that could change their life.

These reasons are *roughly* listed in order of importance from most to least. Also, no one reason by itself was enough to push me to decide to do this. For the past six years of “retirement,” I’ve toyed with the idea of fighting again, oscillating between “no interest in ever getting punched again” and “this could be interesting if I’m short on things to do.”

But the events over the past three years have culminated in me deciding that “by whatever means necessary, I will box again.”

Promotion of “Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business”

My memoir “Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing and The Art of Life” is now unofficially finished. I say “unofficially” because while everything is turned in with all the feedback implemented, it still has been put into “transmission,” meaning it hasn’t gone into the production line. Still, as far as the writing part goes, the book is finished.

*Update: While editing this piece, I received word that it has been transmitted to production. I am now officially finished. *smiley face emoji*

Much of the memoir is about the timeline I outlined at the start of this post, the things I learned, and how I changed along the journey. When researching how David Goggins’s memoir became such a huge success, I came across a video by Scribe Book School titled “How David Goggins Became A Bestseller.” The point they make is that Goggins “became the book.”

Now, I’m already a boxer who overcame an abusive, poverty-stricken childhood and my demons with alcohol, but I want to take this concept to the next level. One unexpected lesson I learned from self-publishing my first book was how many podcasts wanted me on their show because it looked like I was still actively fighting. Yes, I have a great story, but there aren’t many people boxing who can articulate the story and the lessons learned as well as I can.

I credit those podcasts and the exposure I received with growing my profile and opening up more opportunities. It also helped me move 10,000 copies of the book, and I wasn’t actively marketing it.

Truthfully, the book is poorly written and edited because I was a worse writer with no budget. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wanted to write a book and that attention found me.

Well, this time, I know what I’m doing, I have a plan, a big house publishes the book, and I have a big agency representing me. But I think what will make the book take off will be if I—who will be 40 by the time it comes out—is out there still boxing—especially since boxing is in the title.

TL;DR: Fighting will bring more press and buzz to my book because it has a large boxing component. No matter what, it’ll be an exciting story because boxing is typically a young man’s game. However, Bernard Hopkins, George Foreman, Badou Jack, Zhang Zhilei, Firat Arslan, and my personal hero, Amir Mansour, beg to disagree. You’re probably familiar with those first two names, but look up the five. My plan is rare but not unheard of.

I’ve cracked the boxing code—and I can program with it

In 2021, I started doing part-time coaching at a friend’s gym (Shoutout to Southside Boxing Club and Matt Leyshock. If anyone is in the Pittsburgh Area looking for a gym, check it out). I wanted to make sure that everything I was teaching was objectively correct. For me, this meant:

Revisiting what I had learned.
Making sure it stood up to the vast amount of physics and biomechanics knowledge I had acquired.
Being able to explain it.

Around this same time, Coach Yanekello (another fantastic gym—it’s where I trained my entire professional career, though it’s about 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh) asked me to appear on one of this course videos to explain the physics behind why a fighter shouldn’t twist his front foot when throwing a hook.

This led me down a rabbit hole, further increasing my knowledge of boxing mechanics. That knowledge completely changed how I looked at fights. I see fights differently from how most coaches and boxers see them.

I know this because I am accurate in picking not just the winners of a fight but also how they’ll win. That matters more because it’s a fight.

Someone has to lose, so any guess is effectively a coin toss. This zero-sum nature of sports is why bookies give payouts based on odds, with the favorite receiving a lower payout than the underdog.

For the boxing fans reading this, I called:

Gervontae Davis stopping Ryan Garcia in the mid-rounds
Terrance Crawford manhandling Errol Spence Jr.
Ryan Garcia beating the breaks off Devin Haney
Oleksandr Usyk winning a close but not contested decision over Fury (I could not have predicted the ref not understanding the rules in place and not stopping it in Round 9 to Usyk the TKO victory, but I got it directionally right)

Once I knew what I saw in boxing was correct, I started looking into how to train and teach it. Once I did that, I realized something controversial but that I believe is accurate:

Most boxers have no idea what they’re doing, and most trainers have no idea how to teach them how to improve.

Someone has to win a fight. Since professional fighters often pick their opponents rather than being thrown to the wolves on a predetermined, unalterable schedule (as in amateur boxing and all other sports), they usually fight someone inferior, either in knowledge, ability, or both.

Yes, some guys figure things out along the way, and some coaches learn enough to improve fighters beyond a certain point. However, I posit that what I’m seeing and training towards is unknown by most boxers—even the champions. And the guys who know—or happen to figure it out through other means—become the all-time greats.

Because I’m familiar with boxing culture, I know that trying to change anyone’s mind would be a waste of time.

Coaches see the sport as one where a specific style makes the difference in a fight, and I’ve yet to meet a boxing coach who has studied biomechanics or physics. That’s not to say that they don’t exist, but I’ve been involved in the sport across the country, and I keep up with the coaching channels on YouTube and Instagram.

I’m also not interested in starting my own gym to teach guys how to fight from the ground up with the methods I’ve discovered and developed. So I’m going to prove it with my performance.

I won’t fight just to get publicity and say I was in the ring. I’m coming out to make a statement. Specifically, I understand how to train to develop high-level skills, and you can look at my previous fights to see that I didn’t have these abilities before.

So, I don’t only expect to fight, but I expect to win against younger guys to compete seriously. I fully recognize that this may be pure delusion. If that’s the case, I’m sure someone will find this post and mock me for being so arrogant.

However, if I’m even halfway right about how to move and how to train that movement, combining this with my experience will allow me to, in very short order, make a lot of noise.

TL;DR: I want to test my understanding of fighting by fighting. I believe how I look at boxing can set a precedent for the right way to train and fight. By winning at 40+ after an eight-year layoff and winning on a big stage, I’ll have proved my ideas are sound.

I don’t want to wonder, “What if?”

At 6’1” and a prime fighting weight of 215-220lb, I was never a big heavyweight. The weight class for professional heavyweight boxing is anything above 201 lbs. I should have cut the weight and fought as a cruiserweight. There, the weight maximum is 200 lbs.

While some parts of my career were only possible because I was a heavyweight (my sponsorship in Los Angeles in the final two years of my amateur status), I wonder how things would have played out if I had cut 15 lbs to compete in the cruiserweight division.

My skills wouldn’t have changed. I didn’t have the knowledge mentioned in the last section. However, I wouldn’t have always been the smaller man. I discuss the size discrepancy I faced in the heavyweight division here, but I’ll summarize it:

The average size of a heavyweight boxer is 6’4”, 235 lbs, and the data is heavily skewed to the left, meaning that most heavyweight boxers are taller, heavier, or both. I’m much smaller. A lot of my energy was spent managing their bigger weight. Half the battle was being leaned on by men 4-6 inches taller and 30-40 lbs heavier.

I’m fortunate that I’ve taken care of my health and that I’m young enough to answer the question: What’s possible when the size difference is minimized at worst and occasionally in my favor?

Armed with my new paradigm of training and understanding of the sport, combined with aiming to walk around at 215 lbs to give myself a manageable 15 lb weight cut, I’ll get to test these ideas out. This nicely leads to the next reason why I will box again.

TL;DR: I’ve always wanted to see what it was like to fight at a lighter weight class where I wouldn’t be the lighter, shorter man. I’m returning at cruiserweight, the weight division below heavyweight.

Improved Health

What if you were driving a race car, but you had shitty tires and brakes? No matter how well you drove, you could never release the vehicle’s full potential. You’d never be able to take it up to top speed or turn sharp corners, so you can forget about competing in a race, let alone ever winning one.

Until recently, this was me. The only difference between my health and the racecar in the analogy is that the deficiencies in the racecar would be obvious to the mechanics. In my instance, I hadn’t realized until recently that I’d be struggling with reduced lung capacity and hypothyroidism my entire life.

I discovered the reduced lung capacity when looking over my bloodwork that I get every three months. I noticed my blood’s carbon dioxide levels were creeping into the COPD range. I was showing numbers of someone who’d been smoking for years and never worked out. But I’m in my 30s, never smoked, and could still run a 7-minute mile.

My blood test showing that my body isn’t handling respiration properly.

After arguing with my primary care physician (he was more pissed that I got my bloodwork taken without him signing off on it), I got a referral to a pulmonologist. Fortunately, the pulmonologist was way more reasonable. He ran some tests and realized the problem: my chronically reduced lung function was finally taking its toll.

He put me on a daily inhaler, and I haven’t had to use my rescue inhaler since. I know how much of a difference this made because I sparred a few days after starting the medication, and I could do six rounds without a problem. Still, the entire experience left a sour taste in my mouth with standard medicine. Enter today’s sponsor, Rebel Health.

When I started working with Rebel Health, they first did a blood and genetic test. The blood test revealed that my thyroid was out of whack. For the sake of the length of this essay, I’ll keep the light of the specifics, but I’ll include the specific names in parentheses for the biochemistry nerds.

I produced one hormone in extreme excess that slows metabolism (reverse t3) and was underproducing another hormone that upregulates metabolism (t3). I *effectively have hypothyroidism, and the genetic test revealed that it’s congenital.

When I discovered that some of my problems slimming down made sense. Even when I was at my leanest as a fighter, I still carried fat in my midsection that wouldn’t budge. When I stopped competing, I couldn’t get my weight below 225 despite watching my diet and exercising regularly. Well, within two weeks of starting a medication (25mg of Liothyronine)] to fix this problem, I dropped 10 lbs despite being hungrier than I’d been in a long time. My metabolism was back to normal.

I’m 215 lbs here, the same weight I am currently, but I’m not nearly as lean in the midsection then—when I was training 4 hrs/day—as I am now with the fixed thyroid.

With these two health problems taken care of, I feel confident that I’ll be even more competitive than I was when I was younger. I’ve been fortunate that I never had a testosterone issue (As long as I have a good few nights of sleep before the test, I hover around 800 ng/dl total testosterone). With that said the extra body fat and sluggish thyroid drove it down. Nothing in my bloodwork (testosterone and growth hormone) suggests that I can’t compete with guys in their 20s, So I’m good to go on health.

The other thing I have in my favor is that I haven’t had a professional fight in 8 years. My sparring has been limited and controlled, so I haven’t been hit either. Another thing I hope to demonstrate is that it’s the damage that wears athletes down. Not necessarily the age. Yes, age is a factor, but when we look across all sports and all positions, we can see that the more physical the sport, the earlier the athlete is forced to retire.

TL;DR: I’m healthier than ever, even compared to when I competed. I left the sport without sustaining any severe damage, and I haven’t fought, so I’m as fresh as ever. The one thing that slows athletes down as they age, I haven’t experienced.