What Famous Fighters Have You Met?

Lennox Lewis, Barry McGuigan, Nigel Benn and Wayne McCullough.

 

Billy Conn also said, "When somebody's unbeaten, there's something wrong."

 

Pat, this may come across as a little bizarre, but congratulations on sustaining your first loss so early in your development. Sometimes the hard way to learn is the only way to proceed. Marciano was humiliated in his first amateur contest to Ted Lester in front of his hometown fans, due to very poor conditioning. The vivid memory of that outcome drove him forever forth. Joe Louis was bounced up and down like a basketball in his amateur debut, seven times.

Never let yourself forget the consequences of slacking off in training. This has made real for you the understanding that the more consistent and disciplined you are in your approach, the more successful you can be. The harder you work, the better the rewards. (And the harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.) You can make it your goal to overwhelm your opponents with superior conditioning. Then, the acquistiion of greater skill and experience will take care of itself.

I hope you're skipping rope routinely. Once you can do that for a half hour nonstop (without opening your mouth to take a breath), you can condition yourself to do anything aerobically.

A friend of my father's began boxing professionally when he was 38 years old. He was the cross country running coach at the school where he taught, and had always kept himself in fine shape. He sustained only one decision loss as a pro (to a world class southpaw), and basically ran his teenaged opponents into exhaustion. (When he was 40, one of his victims dropped for the count out of sheer weight of fatigue in just three rounds.) None of his defeated foes made it to the final bell.

Now that you know what can happen when you slack off in training, imagine what might occur if you work harder in training than you need to while competing!