^He don't want none.
So this seems to require a bit of back-story. Oscar (my guy) has no fights, and has only sparred maybe 6 times with no restrictions. However, he's going to compete in an up-coming 3-day tournament here in Vegas. I'm permitting it because they have a novice division. So he'll be in there with kids 14-16, and with less than 10 fights. This was one of our litmus tests, 2 weeks out.
Some people seem to forget that the gym is controlled. I can stop it at any moment. If I thought he was grossly over-matched or thought he was hurt I would have, but between each round he spoke fine, wasn't wobbly, etc. But what he was, was NERVOUS. Floyd Sr. being there, Bryce is jacked, he had all the nervousness and butterflies a kid would have in a first fight. And it accomplished what I wanted, he froze. I wondered in what way he'd respond poorly, and he totally froze. This happened before with my 18 year-old heavyweight. In his first bout with me he barely threw anything out of nervousness, and got hit a bit. Second fight with me he won a tournament in front of about 150 people. So in this environment, we can hammer that out. Bryce was a bit nervous too, it just takes more of a trained eye to note his tension (which is a lot of what burnt him out) whereas Oscar was much more relaxed and not winded, but he didn't do dick for a round and a half. Nervousness effecting two guys, two ways.
Bryce does have a hell of a lot more experience. But not that many fights. So there's every chance Oscar could run across a kid like that in a tournament. Sometimes a kid has 2 fights, but he's been training since he's 4 years-old, or something similar. Now he knows he can get through it. Even if Bryce wasn't trying to kill him, that's not what we wanted, either. The funny thing is we knew this was what was going on, but a lot of people watching didn't. So you hear some sideways comments in the background particularly from another trainer who had an issue because he tried to muscle in on the sparring and wanted to put Bryce, for more rounds, with a much more experienced fighter (which is a whole other can of worms that erupted later). So this was all orchestrated carefully, and was constructive. Here's how Oscar looks against another kid with 4 fights, but who is his own age and not trained by Floyd Sr. for 6 years:
BTW, this isn't the first time YCM has sparred one of my fighters and it was posted here. There's a thread floating around where he sparred Bleu a few years ago.