RJ, PBF, Cotto, Khan...

Predicting prospects and champions well in advance....

Once in a while, even when a boxer is young and/or unknown, you just know that he is something special. Someone to look out for. With me, I saw a kid at the 1987 National Golden Gloves that impressed me enough with his boxing skills and ring savvy that were so much different from everyone else in the tournament that I went home and told my father, "You should see this kid out of Florida. I think he's going to make the Olympic team next year."

And Roy Jones, Jr., did just that.

In 1993 a kid from my gym named Felix Cruz came back from the 1993 National Golden Gloves Championships and I asked him "if anybody stood out" that he saw there. He said, "Yeah, the kid in my weight class (112 pounds) that won the whole thing. He's only sixteen years old but that kid is NASTY."

And Floyd Mayweather Jr., is still "nasty."

(In 1988, my last year as an amateur, there were two young kids just out of the Junior Olympics that had a lot of people talking, too. Mark "Too Sharp" Johnson and "Sugar" Shane Mosley.

Jones and Mayweather definitely turned out to be major forces in the world of professional boxing. They lived up to the forecasts. Now, there is another one I remember getting praised back in the day that seems to be on that same path to stardom. We'll see how he turns out.

In 1997 a kid I train named Sammy Vega won the U.S. National Junior Olympics and represented this country at the World Championships in Mexico City. When he returned I asked him the same question I asked Felix four years prior: If anybody at the tournament stood out. He said there was a kid from Puerto Rico that he hung out with and go to know because Sammy is from Puerto Rico originally and he and this kid came from the same town of Caguas. Sammy's mother also shared the same last name as this kid and they wondered and assumed that they might be related.

That last name was Cotto. Fifteen year old Miguel.

Note: One more for you. A couple of years ago a featherweight from Connecticut named Matt Remillard represented the USA at the "World Under-19 championships" in South Korea. When he came back I asked him if there were any kids that stood out to him and he made specific mention of a kid boxing for the United Kingdom that he said reminded him of Prince Naseem Hamed. I had never heard of him before but a few months later, when the 2004 Athens Olympiad was over, the majority of the boxing world was very aware of Amir Khan. Some say he is "the future."

We'll see.

 

If he makes it, though, Remillard will come out of it looking pretty good, too, because at the time he saw him he had no idea who the kid was, hadn't heard the hype etc. So he based his opinion strictly on what he saw from him in the ring that week

 

Godfrey resumed training very shortly after his last fight and his promoters are working on something for him as we speak. Jose Rivera is doing real good, he started a promotional company and his first show is at the end of June.

As for Zab, for what it is worth, back in 1995 I was out in Dallas at the National PAL tournament and one day in the workout room I saw Lou Duva watching a guy hitting the heavy bag...the guy had his back to me....I swore it was Pernell Whitaker (assumed he had a fight coming up and had traveled with Lou to the tournament)...I said, "Hey, check out Sweet Pea" and the kid I was with said, "No, that's not Pernell, that's Zab Judah from New York."

I had no idea who he was at the time

 

ROY, MICHAEL WARD AND GERALD MCCLELLAN, 1988, AT SUGAR RAY'S GYM IN MARYLAND (one of the

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best pics I ever took)

 

Michael Ward, in the middle, made a name for himself as a solid pro and also as the guy who once dropped Sugar Ray in a sparring session