Sinister, I will have to say where and how do you know as much as you do? LOL broad question but seriously, you know your craft and its fascinating. Being in boxing gyms over the years, trainers won't simply just tell you stuff like this you have to find out on your own. just wondering how YOU actually got so knowledged. Very interesting
Oi. This will really piss off the trolls who hate me. Jaja!
I guess I have an engineering mind. I always look at everything as a problem that MUST have a solution. That's how I approach learning anything I'm interested in. Some things I've always wanted to learn, but were never around places I could for free-ish. Like cars, you have no idea how much I'd LOVE to be able to work on my own car. Take it apart and re-build it. But I've never been around a guy who actually knows how, has the time, and I was never in a position to do it myself. The result? I don't know a lot about engines, only the accumulation of shitty cars I've ever had. Which can kind of sound like I know a lot. But I'd never try to FIX one. I know a good amount of biochemistry now, because I felt I had to learn it. I was plagued with fatness as a kid. Often "fit but fat"...I could play Sports, but was always chubby. In learning how not to be, now I can speak to biochemists in their own lingo.
When I moved here to box, former Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval was my first trainer. He DID notice my ability to learn and adjust. Got my ass kicked a couple of times but the guys who did it always had MUCH more difficulty repeating the act. But he was/is a bit crazy, so I moved to Mike. Mike had a lot of knowledge, but he was an athlete, not a teacher. And Futch passed away before he took to training people full time. I quickly realized that only by asking him questions could you get all the really GOOD info. Asking him stuff Georgie used to say, stuff Steward said, stuff Futch said. He even showed me some drills he never uses himself, saying Eddie used to do them. The thing about athletes is they almost NEVER teach people
the way they were taught. They teach people what they feel they know. So they all have this streamlined secret formula, but I suspect this is why most of them churn out fighters who fight exactly like they did. Merqui Sosa has two ways he trains people, to be a bruiser, or to be a backwards moving boxers. Those two ways are in him. When he shadowboxes he's a backwards moving boxer, when he fights, he's a bruiser.
Then when I came to Tocco's, and after realizing my own career wouldn't go much further (around the same time I got ASKED to train a couple of guys who couldn't come to the Gym in the afternoon, they asked to come in the morning when I'm here myself working out), I spent a couple of years just assisting the trainers. I sort of became a culmination of their philosophies. Then Dadi came, and everything he and I forged kind of gave me my own identity. That's when I went out onto my own. It all really started with Daijon and Bleu. Both won their first bouts. Bleu beat a guy trained by a trainer who hates me (but smiles in my face) and constantly tells people I don't know shit. But this is because one of his fighters left him and he thinks I put him up to it, which I didn't. Daijon beat a guy trained by Jeff Mayweather. Ever since that happened, it kind of settled the issue and now I function within the World of "Vegas Boxing trainers." But it took a while.
If you go back to the "Training of a Viking" thread, you can see the formation of it all, because both Merqui and I were working with Kolli. So I was really just beginning there.
We have a big community for MMA out here but it isn't anything like Vegas.
