"I was staying there with rats and roaches, bruh. And not only was I staying there with rats and roaches, one day I came in the house, it was holes eaten through my bread. So right away, I didn't think mice would do that," stated middleweight contender Willie Monroe Jr., who continued his tale about his ex-manager's suspect practices. Check it out!
WILLIE MONROE JR. ON EX-MANAGER AND HIS SUSPECT PRACTICES:
I'll give you another story. I did the movie "Southpaw". None of my parts made the movie. I don't know what happened. I played Tyrese's best friend. None of his parts made the movie either. They paid me homage. They put my name and my character that I played in the credits. I don't know if I'm on any of the deleted scenes, but they saw my personality on Boxcino and asked Artie Pelullo about me being in the movie and Artie was like, "Yeah, this kid is perfect. He has personality, he can fight, he's charismatic, and he's articulate. You got the right guy." So what Artie did is say, "Look, I'm going to pass you on to his manager because I'm not the movie star guy manager. Here is his manager's information," and he passed it off. My manager comes to me like, "I got you this movie deal." So he doesn't know that I already know that they came to Artie with the offer. I got paid what they call stag rate or something like that. I was on the set for 8 days and I worked for 4, so I got paid close to $5,000 and after taxes and everything, I didn't get that. But the opportunity was awesome. I'm a registered actor now and I made a little bit of extra money. It was great. Going into it, you know what my manager at the time said? He said, "Hey, look, I talked to my man and because I'm involved in your boxing and I'm your manager, I get 28% of that, but this is another branch of entertainment and I shouldn't be entitled to 28%, but I was thinking more like10 or 15, what do you think?" And I'm like, "Wait a minute! You're supposed to be a manager making all of this money. Why do you want 15% of my $4,500?"
This is the thing, as a manager, your job is to protect the fighter and to get your fighter the most money with the least risk. I know people don't want to hear that, but that's just the truth. You should be fighting to get your fighter sponsorships and things like that to keep him afloat financially. Say I'm getting $100,000 for a fight. My manager is getting 30%, that's $30,000, and the trainer gets 10%, that's another $10,000, and then the strength and conditioning coach may get 5%, and then a cut guy may get 2%. We're talking 48% of your money right there. Out of $100,000 that you worked to get, you're only walking away with $52,000. My job as a manager would be to get you as much money off of sponsorships as possible to make up for what you're paying out because you deserve that because you're putting your life on the line. It's not my job to get a percentage and to scrape all of your sponsorships too. After the Bryan Vera fight, we had a meeting in my hotel room because this was like the fifth or sixth time I caught this dude stealing. I'm talking $500 here, $200 there, and $150 here. I told him, "You don't have to steal from me. If you are hurting that bad, just come at me and ask if I could throw you an extra $500 because you busted ass to get me a sponsorship." I'm a good person. I would do that.
This one will trip you out. So after I have my comeback fight in 2012 when I first started working with this guy, I had been out of the ring for 17 months. After I lost to Darnell Boone, my team walked away from me. Everybody knows the story. I finally got my comeback fight and I'm training out of a garage for my comeback fight. I made all of $1,100. I didn't make a lot of money. I had to sell tickets to make my purse. I sold about $1,600 in tickets and I walked away withÂ…I signed for only $1,000 and then the percentage I got off of the commission on the tickets, so I made about $1,100-$1,200. It wasn't a lot, but I was happy to get back in the ring. So the promoter up here pays for the opponent to come in. Don't you know my manager at the time said he paid the $2,000 for the opponent to come in? He doesn't think that I'm cool with the promoters in Rochester. I'm doubling back on everything that he does. I let that slide. My grandfather also told me, "If you let a person know how smart you are, they'll get smarter." Sometimes you gotta play the fool and let them think they are getting away.
So then he lines me up to go spar with Randall Bailey. I wanted to go spar with Randall Bailey simply because Randall Bailey is an awesome freaking fighter. Come to find out after going to camp with him, Randall Bailey is just a good dude. It was one of the best camps I've ever been a part of. So he took me down there to spar with Randall Bailey. I'm not making any money. I'm making like $250 a week to spar with him, and I didn't mind that because I had paid my rent up with my income tax money. I paid my rent up through the lease. My son was like 3 months old and at the time, I was getting unemployment because I wasn't employed. I was only getting like $170 in unemployment, so if I was only getting that, I felt I would only be in Rochester training and looking for a job, so why not go to Florida and train and get paid for it? People was telling me, "That's stupid. You should get way more money than that." It just made more sense to go to Florida and train and get paid $250 as opposed to training at home for free and getting $170. A little bit of something is better than a whole bunch of nothing. I wanted the experience as well because I had my wheels churning. I had just fought and I was about to be sparring with a world champion, so it was a no-brainer to take it.
Randall didn't provide me with a spot to stay because it was last minute notice, so I stayed with the dad of my manager at the time. When I first signed with him, I told him, "I was going to need a quarterly expense report from you that includes everything you invested in me." This should have let him know that I was no dummy. I said, "Every 4 months, I'm going to need an expense report from you so I would know how much you invested so that at the end of the year, it will all add up." I needed a receipt basically. He said, "Okay, cool!" So after I spar with Randall Bailey, I come home, and this was in October because he was getting ready to fight the kid, Devon Alexander. So I came home and I said, "I need that quarterly expense report." He sends me the quarterly expense. Mind you, I'm staying with his dad and he was like, "Oh yeah, my dad charged me like $40 a night for you to stay there." I stayed at his dad's house for 3 weeks. Figure that, $40 a night for me to stay at his dad's house and then he put the $2,000 that he said he spent on the fight purse for the opponent when I know he didn't. And then some other stuff was on there.
But check this, when I stayed at his dad's house, right, I paid for my own food. His dad didn't pay for anything for me. I was staying there with rats and roaches, bruh. And not only was I staying there with rats and roaches, one day I came in the house, it was holes eaten through my bread. So right away, I didn't think mice would do that. He also had some family staying there and the kids were like really bad. They were just doing some reckless stuff. Whenever they were there, I would just bounce. My cousin didn't live that far away. I would just get on my bike and ride by my cousin's house. The first thing I thought was the kids ate through the bag because I'm thinking, who the heck would eat through the bread and just leave it on the counter like that? So I threw the bread away and I look at the rest of the bag of bread and it's like five more pieces with the whole top ate off of it. There were like little nibbles throughout the bag and I'm like, "Oh shit, this wasn't the kids. This was a freaking mouse." So I took pictures of the bread and sent it to my boy TJ like, "Yo, I think he got mice." My man said, "Nah bruh, he gots rats. Ain't no mice eating through no loaf of bread like that." I'm in there with rats and roaches and bruh, when I say roaches, I'm talking roaches in the house. My wife told me not to come home until I burned the bag and burned the clothes. My wife was heated.
His dad was in the military and his dad was going to have me sleeping on a military cot. I slept on the couch. I said, "Bruh, I can's sleep on a military cot." I'm from the hood, from the streets. I have been in some crazy positions, I done damn near been homeless before, but I was not about to sleep on no military cot. That wasn't about to happen. When he told me his dad charged him $40 a night to stay there, I said, "Number one, I know you're lying. If your dad charged you to let one of your fighters stay there, he's freaking wrong. And number two, through the job my wife had at the bank, I could have stayed in a 5-star hotel for $40 a night through her discount." If I was dumb, he would have really got over on me. He sent me this expense report for like $8 g's! I told him I know he didn't pay for that opponent because I was a part of that whole thing. He helped find the opponent; he didn't pay for him. I knew the numbers behind all of it and I just kept giving him chances. He wouldn't apologize. He blames it on Steve Nelson that the money got mixed up and that Steve Nelson stole $2,000 from him and he said, "It's okay. I let that slide." As greedy as he was, no way he was just letting $2,000 slide. You take $3-$400 from me, but you going to let this dude over here slide on $2 g's!
[ Follow Percy Crawford on Twitter @MrLouis1ana ]