"I don't know if excited is the right word, but I'm glad that we finally got the fight. I'm not really excited because, as you know Perc, in boxing, when you get excited, your emotions can be played with and people will yoyo you and pull you back and forth. You will think you have something and they will dangle something in front of your face and then they will take it away from you. I got enough experience in boxing to not get excited just because somebody said that they are going to take a fight; anything can happen in boxing," stated Stephen "Breadman" Edwards, world-class trainer of jr. middleweight contender Julian Williams, who talked about their upcoming clash with IBF jr. middleweight champion Jermall Charlo. Check it out!
PC: You have Kyrone Davis and Julian Williams coming up in November and December. Kyrone is coming off of his first career defeat. What are you looking for out of him?
SE: He's actually fighting a formidable opponent. The kid is 12-1, he's from Argentina, and he can actually fight, so we got a fight on our hands. Kyrone is always better than he has been. He's improved a lot. We had a lot of time to sit down and reflect on what happened in the fight. It was a very close fight that could have went either way. He wasn't embarrassed and he wasn't dominated. People say a loss is a loss, but I believe that it's how you lose. It's one thing to get embarrassed, dominated, and then knocked out. It's something different when you ask 10 people who won and 5 people say you won and 5 people say the other guy won. That's a little different. I still believe in Kyrone and he still believes in himself. He has to be like a cornerback in the NFL; he has to have short-term memory and get back in the ring and do his thing.
PC: Is this the right amount of time you would like for him to have after his first loss or would you have liked to see him get in there a little sooner?
SE: No, I would have liked to have seen him back in the ring sooner. When a fighter is not injured or suspended or anything, you don't ever want a fighter with 10 or 11 fights to be out of the ring for 7 months. It's never something that you want. The more you do something, the better you will get at it. I don't ever want that; not at this stage of his career at least. It's just the era that we are in where fighters aren't as active as they once were, so you kind of gotta make up for it in the gym. I don't ever want to see him out of the ring for 7 months. I don't care if he was the ten-time reigning champion. You want to be in the ring and have activity.
PC: Finally we get to see Julian Williams fight Jermall Charlo on December 10th. I know 9 months was not the ideal timeframe for this fight to happen. At this point, are you guys just excited it has a date?
SE: I don't know if excited is the right word, but I'm glad that we finally got the fight. I'm not really excited because, as you know Perc, in boxing, when you get excited, your emotions can be played with and people will yoyo you and pull you back and forth. You will think you have something and they will dangle something in front of your face and then they will take it away from you. I got enough experience in boxing to not get excited just because somebody said that they are going to take a fight; anything can happen in boxing.
PC: Are you liking what you are seeing in camp so far?
SE: Everything is going good. We are the same way we have always been. We don't get along 100% of the time in camp. Julian's an ornery kid, but it's a good thing. Sometimes I gotta yell at him and sometimes I gotta praise him. It just depends on the day. It's not ever going to be 100% smooth in camp and we just get along perfectly. It's not going to be like that. It's a fight, at the end of the day, and a fighter has a fighter's mentality. He may not agree with something I'm doing and sometimes I may not agree with something he is doing, but we're right where we need to be physically. Because the fight took so long to take place, I had to hold him back a little bit, but now we got an exact date to shoot for and we're right where we need to be and everything is looking good.
PC: How difficult was the holding back phase for you, because Julian is hungry and he feels he has something to prove. Was it difficult to hold him back in waiting on the date and did you see a change in his approach once the date was solidified?
SE: I did see a change once the date was solidified. We knew a little bit before the public did. I saw a change in his demeanor. He said something to me that was profound. I never like to have a pitty party or a "why me" or "what's going on" type of deal, but he said something to me that stuck in my head and he was actually right. He said, "People tried to make me feel like I was thirsty for a fight, tried to make me feel like I didn't deserve a fight, but all I wanted was an opportunity that I earned and that I worked for. Throughout this time, I had to learn patience. I had to learn patience because I earned a title shot and for whatever reason, I wasn't getting it in a timely manner." He's going to be off 10 months after becoming the #1 contender. It will be exactly 40 weeks because I did the math. But he said, "I earned it! And I learned patience and it's all going to pay off come December 10th." And I was glad that he said that because I didn't want to say it. I was glad because it showed a lot of growth. It showed a lot of maturity. Boxing is won on the outside of the ring a lot of times. Boxing is won with character. Inside the ring is just something the fans and the public get to see the night of the fight, but a lot goes into what happens the night of the fight, so I was glad he said that. There has been a change in his demeanor, but I don't need him to be too happy or sad. I need him to be even keel. I need him to remain steadfast on the goal because even if he win the title, he has a ways to go. He wants to go to the Hall of Fame. He's not going to go to the Hall of Fame by just beating Jermall Charlo, so there is a lot that he has to do. And I'm not a killjoy, but he has to understand that and we have to be really focused, and at the same time, we have to enjoy the moment and that's what we doing.
PC: I'm not saying Julian is the type of fighter to get in and fight angry because he was made to wait for this title shot, but you mentioned the patience and the maturity that he developed in waiting for this fight to happen. Is that the key to victory for Julian?
SE: It made up for the 10-month process that we had to wait because we stay in the gym. The thing is, in this era, fighters who are fighting twice or even three times a year, Perc...the reason why fighters from a long time ago peaks were higher is because they fought more. People don't realize that and they don't understand that. We're never going to see another Julio Cesar Chavez or Ray Robinson or Henry Armstrong or those kind of guys because they got to practice their craft a lot more under the lights. You look at guys like Leonard and Hearns. Leonard didn't have a lot of fights when he retired, but if you look, when he fought Hearns, he was 25 years old and he had 31 fights in a 4-year span. So when you watch that fight, you see how high his peak was because he fought all of the time. Imagine that, 31 fights in a 4-year span. Hearns had 32 fights and that's why they were able to put on that kind of performance because they fought all the time. Their peaks were higher. But in this era, what you have to do is stay in the gym. And I'm not talking about overtraining. I'm talking about staying in the gym and working on your craft. If you only go to the gym when they announce that you have a fight, in a 12-month year, if you're averaging 2 fights a year, technically, you're only going to be in the gym 4 months out of the year. A training camp is approximately 2 months, so what are you doing the other 8 months? So we made up for the time by working and by practicing on our craft and doing the things that we needed to do.
Julian wants to fight. He's a real fighter, so he wants to fight all the time. He's asking and begging and when, where, and how. You kind of have to brainwash a fighter like, "Listen, while we're not fighting, we have to improve." I don't tell him things to belittle him; I tell him things to keep it in perspective, like, "Man, you're not good enough right now. If you want to be a Hall of Famer, it's a move you gotta work on it's a punch you gotta work on. You're not a complete fighter. You're not perfect. There are things you need to improve on." So that's what I did to make up for the lost time because it was trying, Perc. I'm not going to lie. Who wants to sit out 10 months waiting on a title shot. It was very trying and all kinds of emotions go through your head, and people in the media, like you, I used to always ask you, "Why do you think he had to wait so long." But you gotta make the best of the situation. It wasn't ideal, but you just gotta make the best of it and you can't complain and you can't make excuses. You play whatever hand you got dealt and whatever reasons he had to wait, he gotta make the best of it. We're not going to complain; there's not going to be any ring rust because he's always working on his craft. He'll have a little mini-camp in between. He's not a guy that comes to the gym when he has a fight. He comes to the gym all the time. It's his job. When he fills out his taxes, he puts professional fighter. That's what he is and that's how we made up for the lost time. We kept the faith and just kept working.
PC: So you're saying in this era, guys have to make up for lack of ring time with extended gym time.
SE: Yes, and the guys that don't do it, you see they don't improve. They just simply don't improve. They don't get any better once they reach a certain level. They don't fight often enough. The biggest improvement that you see in fighters are in their early number of fights. Look at a guy at 5-0 and then you see a guy at 15-0, you will only see improvements if he got those 10 fights within a 2-year span. It's just common sense, but for whatever reason, guys aren't as active and there's a lot of reasons for that. Some of it is out of the control of everybody; its finances, networks, TV slots, sometimes guys don't want to fight. There are a million different reasons. It screws up your peak if you don't do the right thing in between fights.
[ Follow Percy Crawford on Twitter @MrLouis1ana ]