"This was the climax of the tournament and really of my career until this point. It was a career-defining fight, but I must say, I'm most excited about the fact that we were able to look good, do what we had to do, but it still wasn't my best. I'm still a young pup, I still got a lot of work to do, and I'm excited to be able to fight and put on that kind of performance knowing that's not my very best. So I'm just excited, man. I'm looking forward to my next fight already. I'm letting my body rest, but I'm looking forward to my next fight. I just know there's a lot more in the tank. I feel like I'm approaching my prime now. I'll be 28 in February. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm looking forward to the 28, the 29, the 30-year-old Andre Ward and just what's going to evolve. I'm just excited, man. It was a great fight, but it still wasn't my best performance," stated unified WBA & WBC Super Middleweight Champion Andre Ward, who spoke in-depth about his performance in his victory over Carl Froch last weekend in the finals of the Super Six Tournament. You don't want to miss what he had to say about the hand injury he was dealing with prior to the fight, what the win means to for his career, and much more. Check it out!
BT: I'm sure you've already heard this from quite a few people now, but once again, congratulations on the win.
AW: I appreciate it, man. Obviously it was a great victory, with this being the grand finale of the tournament and going against the fighter I was fighting. This was the climax of the tournament and really of my career until this point. It was a career-defining fight, but I must say, I'm most excited about the fact that we were able to look good, do what we had to do, but it still wasn't my best. I'm still a young pup, I still got a lot of work to do, and I'm excited to be able to fight and put on that kind of performance knowing that's not my very best. So I'm just excited, man. I'm looking forward to my next fight already. I'm letting my body rest, but I'm looking forward to my next fight. I just know there's a lot more in the tank. I feel like I'm approaching my prime now. I'll be 28 in February. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm looking forward to the 28, the 29, the 30-year-old Andre Ward and just what's going to evolve. I'm just excited, man. It was a great fight, but it still wasn't my best performance.
BT: You've done a lot already in your boxing career. Obviously you can't really compare the tournament to the Olympics, but how big of a win was this in your eyes? Where does this moment rank as far as your career is concerned?
AW: Man, you know what? I always take the Olympics and I always say it's a separate entitiy. It's totally different just because the Olympics, obviously, we went to war in 2003 and here we are in a foreign country in 2004, so the USA wasn't well-liked at the time. It wasn't about money, it wasn't about fame, it wasn't about any of that stuff. It was just the love of the sport and just the opportunity to represent my country up on that stage. It was just totally different and that has it's own place. I don't think anything will ever surpass that just based on the nature of the win and just the nature of the Olympics and what it represents. But as a professional, to date, this is the biggest win of my career. That's how I approached it. That's what I told the broadcast crew during the fighter's meeting. I told Antonio [Tarver]. He said, "Do you feel like this is a career-defining fight?" I said, "You know what? Every fight is a career-defining fight, but this is absolutely another one of them." That's how I felt going in, you know? Obviously it was a level of pressure that I was putting on myself, but I felt like I would respond to the pressure the right way, and we were able to do it. But again, I'm just excited because there's room to grow. It's exciting to see that. It's one thing if you look at the performance and say, "Man, hey, that's all I got. I won, but that's me; that's the best you're going to see." But, you know, there's room to grow and that room to grow, man, it's exciting because I know there's a lot more that we can show and display and it just comes with time.
BT: What did you think about Carl Froch's performance? Would you say he was your toughest fight during the tournament? Was Kessler tougher? Was it Abraham? It's kind of hard for me to tell simply because it seemed like you breezed through everyone fairly easily.
AW: You know what? It's tough to rate. I would probably say...you know, one of the toughest fights of my career period, just due to the circumstances of it being sort of my first big fight and first fight at home, was probably Edison Miranda. A lot of people said he was past his prime, but you gotta understand that he was still a hungry fighter. He came in tremendous shape for that fight. He was in tip-top shape. You know, the guy can crack. He was a very physical, tough fight and that was probably one of the toughest fights of my career. In terms of in the tournament, each fight was different. I mean, Kessler was a very tough fight because he brought several different things to the table. On one hand, he was one-dimensional, but he had some speed. You know, he could box if he wanted to, he could slug if he wanted to, and he had a lot of confidence. Beating a guy with a lot of confidence is not an easy thing to do. He had no reason to worry about me. I mean, he had more knockouts than I had wins, so he was difficult in terms of his own right. Abraham obviously was just a physically tough fight, dealing with the fouls, dealing with his style, and having to still try and get off and do my thing in the midst of him fighting the way he's fighting. And Froch was just a different type of guy. He was very long. He reminds me of myself in just his terms of my competitiveness, because I would be inside and I would get off 3 or 4 or 5 shots and he would come right back. He reminds me of myself in that department, the competitiveness, just not wanting to let another fighter get one up on you in the ring. He'll be champion again. I like his chances against Bute. I like his chances against any super middleweight because he comes in shape, he's gonna bring it, and like I just said, he's a competitor, so he ranks up there as a very difficult, tough fight, but I don't think it was my toughest.
BT: When the fight was over, you had to have a pretty good idea that you won the fight. I only gave Froch like one round. Did you feel like you won the fight in a dominant fashion?
AW: You know what? It's wierd, man. It's wierd. I feel like every one of my fights is nip and tuck. The Kessler fight, watching the tape and looking back, I said, "Wow! I really dominated this fight," but in the moment, it feels nip and tuck; I just don't know. Even when they waved off the fight in the 11th round with Kessler, you know, you see everybody get excited like we got the win and I'm kind of toning everybody down just saying, "Let's wait until we hear the announcement." It was the same way in the Froch fight because I knew we had a judge from England, I knew there was a judge from Canada, and I knew there was a judge from the US; I just didn't know what they looked at and what they were seeing. I obviously felt like I had won the fight and I felt confident, but you just don't know, and I'm just one of those guys like, man, I'll believe it when I hear it. When Jimmy Lennon was doing his thing and kind of prepping everybody for the winner, I was listening very intently because you just don't know. You know, I was surprised and taken back by the 115-113 [scores]. Honestly, I think those judges kind of owe the commission an explanation because if there were any close rounds, those judges could have decided the fight in his favor and we just didn't like the way those scores looked.
BT: That's exactly where I was going with that. When you heard those scores, were you like, "Huh?"
AW: I just knew one of those judges was from England and he wasn't; he was from the US.
BT: (Laughing) I know, right? The judge from England was the only one who had it scored right. He had it 118-110 I believe.
AW: You know what? I told Dan Goossen at the press conference, while Eddie Hearn was talking and while Froch was talking, and I don't know if they were doing it intentionally, I don't know if it was gamesmanship, I don't know, but they made a big deal about the Lamont Peterson and Amir Khan situation. They said, "European fighters, we've been getting kind of the short end of the stick lately. There's been some bad decisions here in the US." They just kind of put it on really thick in terms of just saying that they really want a fair shake. I leaned over to Dan and I said, "Dan, we gotta kind of make a comment to kind of combat what they're saying because it could potentially put the judges in a position where they overcompensate, and if anything is close or anything is remotely a situation where you can give him the round, they're going to overcompensate based on all this noise that they're making." I think that that possibly could have been what happened with those two judges.
BT: When the fight first started, it looked like you were just feeling him out, touching him upstairs and downstairs and keeping him at bay with the jab. Then I think maybe it was towards the end of the second round, it looked like you kind of made the decision to just switch it up, get on the inside, and control the rest of the fight from there. Was that by design? Did you game plan that or was it just something that you noticed as the fight progressed?
AW: Well, we studied Froch. Virg [Virgil Hunter], he studied Froch, he watched a lot more tape than I did, and we knew that obviously he had a longer reach than I had and he uses his reach pretty well. He's got a good jab and he's got a long right hand. For example, watching the Kessler fight, Kessler had some good moments, but Kessler would pull right back out in front of him, and you know like clockwork after you get off on Forch, he's coming back. I mean, you can expect that and we didn't want to be on the end of the shots. Glen Johnson stayed on the end of his shots all night. We didn't want to be there getting picked, and poked, and jabbed, and hit with long right hands, so we worked on attacking him in certain spots. We knew that we could fight him on the outside, but that's not where we wanted to stay. I watched Froch when I was ringside for the Glen Johnson fight and the times that Glen would attack him, Froch couldn't defend that ballistic type of first step. He would always come back, but he'd get hit if you jump on him real quick. A) He wouldn't be able to respond, and then B) inside, he didn't know how to defend himself because that's not the style of fighting that they fight over in England. It's almost like he was uncomfortable inside, so we saw those two things, plus other things that we saw on tape, and we knew that there were times we were going to have to attack him. That's just the way it had to be, and we trained that way. I sparred that way. I had five guys that were tall and rangy. We boxed at times, but a lot of times, I worked on that first step, getting inside real quick and going to work. That's what we tried to do. I didn't execute it the way I wanted to. I wanted to do a lot more body work, but, you know, he's got good defense, an underrated defense, and he battled, man. He didn't pack it in and get into survival mode. He fought and I take my hat off to him.
BT: He did look uncomfortable on the inside. A few times, he was looking to the ref hoping he would break you guys up. I think what surprised me the most was that Froch looked a lot bigger than you, but it seemed like you had no problem getting inside, pushing him back to the ropes and keeping him there. Do you think guys underestimate your strength and abilities on the inside?
AW: Absolutely. I'm probably one of the most underrated fighters in the business. I've said it before and I'm okay with that because honestly, that's been one of our biggest assets in this tournament, not really getting a lot of respect until the final bell is rung and we're getting our hand raised. You know, I'm not the biggest guy, I just know that I'm physically strong. I may not be the strongest guy, but I just know that ring strength is different than maybe weightlifting strength. That's what Floyd Mayweather displays a lot. Obviously, Shane [Mosley] can probably outbench and outlift Floyd in a fitness club, but there's a ring strength that a fighter can display and have, and Floyd has that. You look at Floyd's body and it's not like, "Whoa! That guy's shredded. He's ripped," but you get into the ring and you can't really push him around like you thought you could. In a lot of instances, that's how my styles is. I've worked on physical strength for years. Virgil and my father, they said, "Hey man, we never want you to be a good boxer who's not physically strong. We want you to be a physically strong boxer where you can deal with the buzzsaw, you can deal with aggressive type fighters," and we just started building my body up since I was 9 years old. This has kind of been like an ongoing process, so I felt confident that I could push Froch back. He didn't give me credit for my punching power. A lot of people are writing a lot of stuff about, "Oh, he's not a power puncher." Froch felt my power. Trust me, we had plenty of exchanges in that fight. He was touted to be the big puncher and trust me, we buzzed him several times with punches. A guy like Froch, if he felt like I had nothing to offer, he would've tried to walk straight through me because that's his mentality. If he felt like I wasn't hurting him and there was nothing to offer, he would've tried to walk right through me. I just feel like we're doing something right. People are asking me about my motivation and am I relaxed since I won. In the back of my mind, it's like I'm processing what happened. I know it was a huge win, just a tremendous night for everybody on my team, my family, and everything, obviously just a great feat and a great victory in my career, but in the front of my mind, I'm already processing the areas where I need to improve my game, but also what's up ahead, because now that we got these belts, we gotta defend these belts. You know, I haven't read a lot of the press since the fight, but even some of the things I read on FightHype, there's still question marks. There's still question marks about my power, or, okay, he showed us that he was tough, but he's not fully a complete fighter. I read some stuff about me being tired in the 11th and 12th round. I was fine. My conditioning has never been a problem, but I had a busted hand. I hurt my hand; I reinjured my hand in the 6th round and my hand is twice the size right now than what it should be. I knew Froch was going to try to be aggressive because he was down, so all I was trying to do was be patient and time his attacks, time his advances, because he was coming so hard. I knew he was going to come hard, so I wasn't going to meet fire with fire in that moment. I wanted to pot shot him and just basically be patient because I knew we had the win. My conditioning was fine, I felt good, and I could've went as many rounds as we needed to go that night.
BT: I saw the picture of the hand you posted on Twitter. How bad was it going into the fight and how bad did you reinjure it when you cracked him in the 6th?
AW: It was a scary situation, Ben. We got to Atlantic City 10 days out, so the week before the week of the fight. We got there and I sparred Thursday against Dhafir Smith, a fighter from Philadelphia, and I just hit him on top of his head, simple as that. I hit him on top of the head and I felt something in my hand. We finished the round; I didn't think anything of it. I cooled down, took my wraps off, took everything off, and I'm doing my ab work and I'm like, man, I just kept telling Virg and the guys, "It feels wierd." I'm feeling around and it just felt different. It felt like something was wrong. We put some ice on it, I went back to the hotel, I woke up at 2 or 3 in the morning and called Virg and said, "Man, I'm concerned." We got up, went to a doctor, we got the x-ray and he said it's not a fracture, it's not a break. He said it's just soft tissue damage, almost like a deep bruise, but it hurt so bad. I'm thinking, "Man, this feels like a fracture." So from that point on, from that Thursday until the day of the fight, I literally iced my hand nonstop. I would put on a sandwhich bag full of ice; I would either wrap it with tape over the top of my hand or I would put a handwrap on and just squeeze it real tight so it would hold, and I mean, I would keep it on for hours. I would take naps with it on, I would sleep over night with it on, and I did the best that I could, so it got better. The swelling went down, but the day before the fight, I had Jacob Duran, my cutman, come up and show me what type of wrap he was going to use to secure it, put a 10 oz. glove on, hit Virgil's hand, and I wasn't even hitting that hard, and I said, "Man, I feel it." It was a major concern. I just couldn't believe that this was happening the week before the fight, but I had to go with it, so we wrapped it as best we could. The adrenaline took over early in the fight. I felt it, but it wasn't an issue, and then right around the 6th round, I was kind of by my corner and I hit him with a left hook and walked him back to the ropes, man, and I've never felt anything that painful in my hands before. I mean, the pain went all the way down to my feet. It just...it was one of those things, man, where for a split second, I said, "Man, I don't know how I'm gonna finish this fight like this. This is my lead hand." Somehow, some way, we were able to pull it off. The pain would come and go. It would subside and then I'd hit him with a certain shot at a certain place and it would shoot right back into my hand, and then it would go away. It was swelling up obviously round by round, but I think I probably could have been more effective if I didn't reinjure it.
CLICK HERE FOR PART 2 OF THIS IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW WITH UNDEFEATED WBA & WBC SUPER MIDDLEWEIGHT CHAMPION ANDRE WARD
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