I haven’t seen Mike Tyson and if he is in this hotel, I’d be very surprised. Putting fighters in the same hotel is just a bad idea and they definitely wouldn’t do it for this.
It was Thanksgiving on Wednesday and one of the guys in Roy’s team is friends with Chris Brown’s mum… we went over there for Thanksgiving dinner. Very random!
But we’re here to do a job.
Roy has never left the gym life. If he wasn’t boxing, he was playing basketball, if he wasn’t playing basketball, he was teaching.
He lives in Pensacola with a big farm, his gym and his family. And that’s what he enjoys – it’s just him, his people, and all his animals: chickens, peacocks, dogs and ducks.
It’s taken me quite a lot of getting used to. Most days you’ll see a cockerel or a chicken just run through the middle of the gym.
But even though this is an ‘exhibition’, Roy has been training five or six days a week. He’s doing eight two-minute rounds comfortably and he still has energy to go and hit the bags and do some pad work. That says it all.
I don’t think Mike has eight rounds in him. The life he’s led over the last 15 years – the drinking, the drugs… to then turn around and say: I’m going to do eight rounds with Roy Jones? That sounds like Mission Impossible to me.
Yeah, you look great in your 20-30 second Instagram clips. But that’s not eight rounds of boxing. And I’ve heard he’s still smoking… so how are you going to have the lung capacity?
It’s going to come down to the first few rounds – Mike’s going to throw big shots and as long as Roy doesn’t get caught with anything crazy, he’s got it in the bag.
This week in training I’ve been emulating Mike’s body movements. Swaying the head from side to side, the pressure – I would just come at Roy. He’s moving around, getting used to what Mike is going to do. I’d grab him, wrestle with him and clinch because we think that’s what Mike’s going to do: use his weight and presence to try and bully Roy.
They say power is the last thing to go as you get older, so that’s going to work in Mike’s favour. I haven’t tested Roy’s chin but he has been having full-contact spars with some big boys and I haven’t seen him get hurt in this whole camp.
For a while we trained in Pittsburgh, in this cabin in a forest in the middle of nowhere. Complete isolation, which is what he says he likes and needs before a fight. He’s been there for quite a few of his fights and there is nothing there. You can’t even order Ubers, Uber eats. Nothing.
That was a big problem for me because I don’t cook and the hotel I stayed in had shut down their restaurant because of Covid. I had to drive into Pittsburgh and buy a load of meals and put them the fridge.
What else can you do? You watch movies, you talk, you relax. Most of the time I just gave Roy his own space. I brought my Xbox so I had something to do.
The training itself wasn’t any different. But the way he trains, the way he thinks is what sets him apart – his knowledge of this game, which is obviously what he’s been teaching me over the last year.
People always say he was such an incredible athlete but a lot of it comes down to his boxing IQ. The most eye-opening thing was definitely his thought process – how to bait and trick an opponent into doing things, how to paint pictures and then deviate from that. It’s hard to put into words, but it’s gold.
Come Saturday night, I’m going to try and be in the corner – even if I’m passing up water, I’m happy with that!
