My first memory of boxing is me hiding behind the wall of my living room. My dad and his buddies would order the Mike Tyson fight on pay-per-view, and at my age I was not allowed to watch, because of how violent it was. So I would sneak to the edge of the living room wall with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and my Spider-Man and Batman action figures, and steal what I could. At least I caught the intro. The truth is I did not see much of the rest, because the moment Tyson started his walk to the ring my dad and his friends would shoot up out of their seats, and I could barely see the screen as it was. By the time I found an angle, it was already over. The fight was over, and I could not understand how one human being could beat another in under three minutes. I never understood it. I had just watched something I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand, and I have been hooked on the fight ever since.
Even though I was not allowed to watch the Tyson fights, I grew up around fighting in every other way. I was a huge Bruce Lee fan, and every Sunday morning my dad and I would watch kung fu movies, and the moment they ended I would get up and practice the moves I had just seen, mimicking every single one, right there in the living room, the same one I would sneak into to watch Tyson. I would square up to the coffee table and try to chop it clean in half, the way the masters split boards on the screen, completely convinced I could do it. Sure enough, my dad enrolled me in Taekwondo, and I did martial arts for years. Somewhere in there I fell deeper into boxing. I watched hours of Muhammad Ali highlights, because my dad was a devoted Ali fan, and float like a butterfly, sting like a bee was practically a motto in our house. I became a Roy Jones Jr fan in his prime, then a Floyd Mayweather fan, simply fascinated by the craft of it. That fascination grew into the UFC, and eventually into Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which I still roll in different regions as I travel. Fighting, in one form or another, became a part of me.
The other half of it is that I am competitive to the bone, and I always have been. I have played sports my whole life. My mom, my brothers and I go to war over Monopoly. My dad and I compete in the weight room, where I am forever trying to outlift him, and my mom is convinced she can still take me in a hundred-meter dash because she ran track competitively back home in Trinidad in her younger days. And she is just as sure she can take me on a tennis court, where she has put in the lessons and the hours, learning the angles and grooving a backhand I still cannot read. That wiring never left, and now I do it with my own wife and kids: who can finish a plate first, who can race down to the garage the quickest, who can shoot the fastest. We turn everything into a game, and we always have. So I have tried just about every competitive, physical thing I can think of, except the one that fascinated me first. The closest I ever came to boxing was slapboxing after school, which we all know can turn into a real fight. But I have never been taught, properly, how to truly box. I have never actually done it. This summer I am going to close that gap.
If you are going to learn to box, you go to where boxers are made, and few places on earth make them like Puerto Rico. The same way Brazil turns out soccer players and Kenya turns out distance runners, this island turns out world champions, more of them per person than almost anywhere on the planet: Wilfredo Gomez, Felix Trinidad, Miguel Cotto, and Hector Macho Camacho, names that built a culture. You think of Puerto Rico and you think of the beaches and the music, Bad Bunny and Marc Anthony, the easy beauty of it. You do not think of the gym. But the gym is in the blood here, and that contrast is exactly why I want to do it in San Juan and nowhere else.
I will be in Puerto Rico for the month of July, and I am going to bring you inside all of it: the gym and the trainer I choose, the regimen, what I eat, what I lift, the early roadwork, the bag work, the pads, the rounds of sparring once I have earned them. There is a feel to a boxing gym that you do not get anywhere else, the smell of old leather and sweat and floor cleaner, the slap of the rope, the timer bell that owns the whole room and tells everyone when to work and when to breathe. And there is the gear, which is its own language. Wrapping your own hands, knuckle to wrist, is a quiet ritual before anything else happens. The mouthpiece you mold to your own teeth. The headgear you choose for how hard you plan to work. The gloves, sixteen ounces for sparring, lighter for the bag. You learn the jab before you are allowed anything fun, then the cross, the hook, the slip, the footwork that makes all of it possible. I want to learn it properly, in order, the way it is supposed to be built, because that is what boxing actually is underneath the spectacle. It is not the knockout. It is the thousand unglamorous hours that make the knockout possible.
I want to be honest about this, because it would be easy to be arrogant about it. Yes, a boxer is an athlete, but being an athlete does not make you a boxer, and anyone who has spent time around real training knows the difference. I have trained at a high level my whole life and trained professional athletes for half of it, so I know, in a real and unglamorous way, what it takes to build a body and a mind. But the engine is only the starting point. Drop a gifted athlete from any other sport into a boxing gym and the conditioning carries over while the craft does not, and in boxing the craft is everything. You cannot fake rounds. Look at what Jake Paul has done: he moved to Puerto Rico, shut out the noise, and put real time and real work into becoming a genuinely dangerous fighter, and he has earned every bit of credit for it. That is the example I respect, and the one I am chasing, my own version of it. Heads down in San Juan, nothing to distract me from the work, and no illusions about how much I have to learn.
I have watched every Rocky and every Creed movie, and I am self-aware enough to know that a movie is not the thing. This is me finding out what the thing actually is. I want to see what a month of real boxing does to my body, and honestly I am more curious what it does to my mind, because that is where the hard part of this lives. I am not chasing a record. I am chasing the challenge, the discomfort, the version of myself that only shows up when something is genuinely difficult. That is what the ring does. The bell is about to ring on this one, and I am going to bring you every round.
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