Tony Thompson – A ‘Tough Guy’ Fights for The Sport’s Biggest Prize

www.maxboxing.com
By Thomas Gerbasi (July 8, 2008)


In a sport where most of the greats have laced up the gloves before reaching puberty, Tony Thompson took an alternate route to the top of the fight game, deciding at the age of 27 that maybe boxing was a good way to spice up the life of the typical suburban father.

“I’ve always taken care of my body, and I’ve always been body-conscious,” explains Washington, DC’s Thompson, a married father of seven children. “I don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t party too much, and I always worked out.”

Then he gets to the root of his desire to fight, just three years shy of his 30th birthday.

“You’d like to think you’re a tough guy,” he laughs. “Everybody thinks they’re a tough guy.”

Boxing, sports’ ultimate truth machine, will usually separate the tough guys from the wannabes pretty fast. It could happen on the first day of sparring, with the first broken nose or hand, or in the first amateur fight. It’s then that the weekend warriors go back to their couches, content to say ‘yeah, I used to fight,’ to their bored buddies every time a fight is aired on Saturday night.

As for the ones who make it, well…among 27 year old debutants, there really is not much to talk about at the elite level of the game. It’s just unfathomable that someone starting in boxing that late can compete with fighters doing this for most of their lives. There are too many nuances, too many tricks, and too vast of an experience gap for it to happen outside of Hollywood’s silver screen.

Well, in Thompson, boxing has its ‘Rudy’. But in stark contrast to the Notre Dame walk-on who just wanted a chance to play on the gridiron, when Thompson steps through the ropes at the Color Line Arena in Hamburg, Germany to fight for the world heavyweight title against Wladimir Klitschko, he’s not content to show up. At 36 and against all odds, he wants to win. Or let me re-phrase that – he knows that he’s going to win.

“He (Klitschko) is a guy with superb boxing skills, great power, and he’s just a great champion,” said Thompson of the IBF and WBO titleholder. “That’s what’s gonna make this so wonderful for me, because when I beat a guy of his caliber, people are gonna know that I have truly arrived.”

Confident? Yes. False bravado? Absolutely not.

“I know how I’m gonna respond in a difficult situation, I know what to expect from myself when things aren’t going my way, and quite frankly, I’m tired of being on the bottom,” he said. “I want to be on the top. And I’m gonna do anything I can to get on top.”

In an odd mix of boxing clichés, it has been both a meteoric rise and long road to the top for Thompson, and I’ll explain. For most title challengers, the journey to the Promised Land is been one that has probably taken anywhere from 10 to 20 years from the first trip to the gym to the shot at the belt. Thompson, from his pro debut at 28 to now, has been fighting for eight years, a drop in the bucket for most aspiring champions, but a long trip for ‘The Tiger’, who has had to fight more than 32 fights to get to Klitschko.

“I’m a tall, lanky, unorthodox, left-handed fighter,” said Thompson matter-of-factly. “Anytime they can keep somebody like that out of the loop, they’re gonna do what they can do to do that. But they couldn’t keep me out for long, because the ranking system allowed me to get my opportunity.”

He’s not kidding. Even in this day and age, when quality American heavyweights are almost extinct, Thompson has had to fight for recognition, television time, and press coverage outside of the internet. No, he’s not Mike Tyson, but he has a great story, is a gregarious personality, and he owns wins over then-unbeaten Yanqui Diaz, Vaughn Bean, Dominick Guinn, Timor Ibragimov, and Luan Krasniqi. Not Murderer’s Row, but an impressive enough resume for the 31-1 (19 KOs) fighter to deserve a title shot. Jeez, if Andrew Golota and John Ruiz can keep finding their way to championship fights, is Thompson’s style that unpleasing to the networks and the general public? Apparently so, and Thompson admits that at times he questioned whether his day in the sun would ever come.

“You always wonder,” he said. “I held out hope, just did my job, kept winning, and let my manager and promoter do their jobs.”

And he wasn’t about to change who he was for anything – he would rise or fall behind what got him to the dance in the first place.

“I’m gonna be me,” said Thompson. “I’m not gonna go outside who I am just to satisfy the ranking system or whatever. I’m gonna do what I do and force their hand, and I was able to do that just by winning.”

Thompson’s fifth round TKO of Krasniqi in their WBO title eliminator a year ago sealed the deal, but he had to go to Krasniqi’s adopted home of Germany to do it. Oddly enough, he’ll be returning to the same arena this weekend to take on Klitschko. That should reduce the stress level on the night of the fight, right?

"I never really had a stress level about any of that stuff, but it does help because I’m familiar with the place, the people are familiar with me so they’re more apt to help you out with things and stuff like that, and I’m not worried about a decision because it’s not gonna get that far,” said Thompson. “I go over there with a job to do, and I’m just confident in myself that I’m gonna get the job done. So I never really had those type of concerns, outside of maybe jetlag. I’m not letting anything get in the way.”

As a 6 foot 5 southpaw, he could give Klitschko problems as he tries to succeed where fellow left-hander Sultan Ibragimov failed against the champion in February. Don’t expect Thompson to sit back and waltz the night away with Klitschko though; he knows he will have to fight at times and take some risks to win the belt. That shouldn’t be a problem, considering that this whole crazy trip has been one giant risk. But he’s not about to let anyone get away with that kind of thinking; just ask him when he knew he could do something special in boxing.

“When I put gloves on,” he deadpans. When pressed though, he admits that after his first and only loss in 2000 to then-unbeaten Erik Kirkland, he had to do some soul-searching.

“The truth is, when I got my first loss, I had a real good talk with myself and I was honest with myself and I wanted to do this,” he said. “And I knew I could do it if I put my heart and soul into it. I knew I could do something special, and to say that I was gonna be heavyweight champ of the world, you hope that you would get that chance, but you never can tell because I had a lot of things working against me – time, left-handed, all that. But I never had any doubt in my skills.”

On Saturday, he gets his chance to silence those who have doubted him. And he’s not going to hold his tongue if he gets his hands on those belts.

“I ain’t too big to let a few ‘I told you so’s out,” he said. “I might remind a few people.

After he does, Tony Thompson will get a night’s sleep that he has been dreaming about for eight years. And when he wakes up, he will be the heavyweight champion of the world. How’s that for a Hollywood ending?

“Of course I’ve thought about July 13th,” he muses, “what it could mean to me, my family, to the American public. This isn’t just me – there are a lot of people involved in this and just waking up knowing that you’re the heavyweight champion of the world has got to be awesome and I just can’t wait for that feeling, to actually realize it and not just dream about it.”

Not bad for an old man.

“I’m a prodigy baby,” laughs Thompson.

Larry Rosoff
Goossen Tutor Promotions
(818) 817.8001
larry@goossentutor.com