FightHype.com takes you back in time to revisit all the action of fights gone by. In this unique series, get a firsthand look at what it's like to experience the physical, mental and emotional ups and downs of a professional prizefight. Find out what the fighters were going through before, during and after the fights as they relive some of the highlights of their most memorable bouts. On September 13, 1975, two of the hardest punchers in boxing went to war as Ron Lyle went to toe-to-toe with Earnie Shavers. Surviving an early knockdown, Lyle weathered the storm to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat as he turned the tide and stopped Shavers in the 6th round of an action-packed battle. Check out how Ron Lyle remembers what turned out to be one of the most definitive moments of his career.
TRAINING CAMP
The training for the Shavers fight was grueling, man. Before the Shavers fight, I had like 3 fights in a row. I was always in training, so I was in training for about 6 months when I fought Shavers. I had a couple tune-ups and then I had some grueling sparring sessions and put in a lot of hard work. I really didn't go out and get a lot of big punchers to spar with for Shavers. I was a pretty big puncher too, so I didn't really have to worry a lot about his power. What I did was work with a lot of guys that were fast and sharp punchers because, you see, Earnie Shavers was not only just a puncher, but he was a sharp puncher and he had fast hands; very fast hands and he was very sharp, but his foot movement was slow. So what I did was I trained with guys that had fast hands. I trained with a lot of light heavyweights that could punch and box with sharp hands. I was pretty much prepared for everything. I had a great trainer in Bobby Lewis and we also had Chickie Ferrara working with us too. I had two good trainers. Chickie Ferrara was a helluva trainer. He was an ex-fighter himself back in the day. He taught Angelo Dundee a lot of stuff about boxing. He was with Angelo for a long time.
Earnie was a great athlete and he was very strong. He took a good shot and he can punch. Earnie had the package. Everybody in that top 10 back then could either punch or box. There were only two boxers in the whole division, and that was Ali and Jimmy Young; everybody else was punchers, boxer-punchers and sluggers. It was a very interesting era.
PRE-FIGHT
Earnie didn't talk much. He was a lot like me. Neither one of us talked a lot. When the bell rung, we both got busy and that was our trash talk. We used our fists to trash talk for sure. There was only one guy doing the talking before fights back then and that was Ali. He was the only one that would build the hype up. All of the rest of us stayed quiet.
THE FIGHT
I got dropped in the 2nd round with a nice shot and after that, I was just trying to get my bearings back. Earnie Shavers was a helluva puncher, man. That's the hardest I had ever been hit. I think a lot of people just thought Earnie hit hard, but he was a very sharp puncher. He didn't just hit hard; it was precise and sharp. He threw a lot of very sharp punches. He wasn't a puncher like Foreman to where he threw one bang. It wasn't none of that. Earnie Shavers' punches were very sharp and crisp and he threw a lot of them. After he dropped me, I just had to listen to what Bobby was telling me. Bobby told me from the beginning that Earnie Shavers was a hard puncher when he was in close, so when you were in close to him, you had to keep your hands up. I was an inside fighter too. My thing was throwing in close too, so I had to get close to him as well. I got close to him, I got comfortable where I was, and a couple of times, I got close to him, dropped my hands, and raised my chin and he dropped me. But I got back up, corrected those mistakes, and went right back to the same process; inside fighting, keep my chin down, punch from close range and try to survive. I never put too much emphasis on knocking out any fighter. Knocking out Earnie Shavers was like any other fight where I knocked my opponent out. When you win, it's over. You don't think about whether it was a knockout or decision; you just congratulate the other guy, as well as yourself, and you leave it at that. So to me, there wasn't any special emphasis knocking out Earnie Shavers. I would have took a decision, and even if I lost, I would have fought on and moved on.
POST-FIGHT
Many people called me crazy for fighting back-to-back big punchers like I did. You know I fought George Foreman about 4 or 5 months after I fought Earnie Shavers. Fighters pretty much fight anybody that's put in front of them. Fighters really don't have a say in who they fight or where they fight. We just pretty much get to what it is. I bet all of us have been through the same thing. We done all had to fight back-to-back punchers, come off of back-to-back losses, and fought back-to-back boxers. If you don't go through the same process, trust me, you don't get to the top. There is only one way to the top. There is only one highway and that's straight ahead. You gotta fight everything in front of you and if you don't, then you don't get there. If you do and you're fortunate enough to get there, then it's a blessing from God. That's how that goes.
[ Follow Percy Crawford on Twitter @MrLouis1ana ]