The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Ed Latimore. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Ed Latimore. Ed is a bestselling author, a professional heavyweight boxer—how about that?—and a competitive chess player. Welcome, Ed.
Ed: Hey, Jim, thanks for having me.
Jim: I’m looking forward to this. Curious—what’s your Elo score in chess?
Ed: You know, it has taken a hit lately, and I only play on Chess.com because I don’t have time to go sit in OTB tournaments. My peak is 1850. Right now, I’m playing maybe 100, 150 points weaker than that, but I expect I’ll get back in form.
Jim: That’s good. Maybe we should play chess one day. I’m not a great chess player. I’ve never really studied the game, but I’ve played a lot since I was a kid. As I tell people, I’m a good barroom chess player, and I can usually beat street hustlers even if I’m not in the finest of condition, shall we say.
Ed: That’s pretty much my MO. Downtown, those guys—I don’t go downtown often, but when I’m down there, they try to play. It never goes well for them. And I don’t have any pity. If you’re willing to bet money on something that is not a game of chance, you’re pretty much hoping that you’re better than me. Most people you might be, but I should be better than most people. It’s a good time, though. It’s fun.
Jim: It really is. I’ve always enjoyed the game. Anyway, today, we’re going to talk about Ed’s new book. In fact, we’re doing the interview before the book comes out, but it’ll be out by the time we publish, and it’s called “Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life.” I also read two of Ed’s essays in preparation for it: one called “Five Reasons Why I Quit Boxing with Only One Loss,” and then the other one, “The Book Made Me Do It: Why I’m Boxing Again.” Ed has just very recently come back. He must have won because he looks pretty good. Doesn’t look too beat up.
Ed: I took a pretty good shot though. You know, I’ll tell you because you read that essay about why I quit. One of the reasons I talk about is the size difference. And coming back, I say in the essay coming back that my plan was to drop to cruiserweight, the weight class below heavyweight. Now that didn’t happen this fight. I actually ended up fighting a heavyweight fight. And I was quickly reminded of why I had that idea to drop in the first place. This opponent, not the best record of any guy I fought, but he was the heaviest and the strongest of any guy I fought by a fairly significant margin on both fronts. And in the first clinch, I was like, “Okay, this guy can hurt me.” And then he hit me with a great overhand right. And if I hadn’t developed and improved my skills the way I talked about in the essay while I’m coming back, that shot would have done some damage. But instead, I was able to ground my feet, stay balanced, and roll with it. It woke me up but didn’t do anything else, and my head was hurt for maybe a day or two after.
Jim: That’s a good thing. It’s interesting you mentioned in both the book and in your essays about your size. I went back and researched a little bit how big were the classic boxers of the past. Muhammad Ali, 214 pounds, right? Six foot three, a little taller than you. You’re six one as I recall.
Ed: Six one, yeah.
Jim: And Mike Tyson, my favorite, five ten, 220, you know, shorter than you and about your weight. And as I remember, my real favorite, Joe Frazier, he was about 200 pounds.
Ed: Yeah. You know, the game has really changed, and there are a lot of reasons why it’s changed in this regard. First, the Eastern Europeans entered the chat, and they really weren’t able to prior to the fall of—you know, there was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then all of those guys had to develop and come out. So you see these massive boxers now, like the Klitschko brothers, for example. They are here or they were here. And because they showed up, everyone else kind of had to evolve. There wasn’t really anything else to do. The other reason why these guys are so huge is that heavyweight boxing is the one division—yeah, I guess the heavier you go up, the more this is true with it being most true at the heaviest division heavyweight—where your body can mature into the weight class. Like if you box from childhood, you’re just not ever going to become heavy enough unless you’re like six five to be a heavyweight boxer. You need to go put some mass on and guys figured that out. So you got a lot of guys coming from other sports to become heavyweight boxers or who spend a lot of time in the weight room and they’re like, “Okay, I should go box because I’m a big guy.” And some of them learn, but now you look, crunch the numbers on it. The average height of a heavyweight boxer today is six four, and that’s heavily skewed to the left. So most of these guys are taller than six four, and the average weight is like 240.
Jim: Yeah. Back in the day, a guy 240 was like, you know, Ron Lyle or something. He was a hell of a hitter, but not that finesse of a boxer. He had a good winning record, but when he got to the top guys, he always got his ass kicked.
Ed: Yeah. You know, you see this in like the other sports too where size and strength matters. Football, you know, the size of a lineman in the sixties and seventies is a small running back today.
Jim: Yeah. I remember when my beloved Washington Redskins had the first guy in the NFL over 300 pounds.
Jim: Yeah. Back in the day, a guy 240 was like Ron Lyle or something. He was a hell of a hitter, but not that finesse of a boxer. He had a good winning record, but when he got to the top guys, he always got his ass kicked.
Ed: Yeah. You see this in other sports too where size and strength matters. In football, the size of a lineman in the sixties and seventies is a small running back today.
Jim: Yeah. I remember when my beloved Washington Redskins had the first guy in the NFL over three hundred pounds.
Ed: Yeah. Right. Now today, three hundred pounds—I mean, you’re definitely not playing the line if you’re under three hundred pounds. Elite offense, probably not defense either. Definitely not defensive tackle. Maybe a defensive end in the 4-3 scheme, but like maybe. The people get bigger, or rather the nutrition and our knowledge of the sport and how to train has improved. And that’s not even factoring in performance-enhancing drugs, which a lot of guys aren’t using, but many are.
Jim: Yeah. Within the legal rules or right on the edge of the rules and carrying baby piss in their pocket and whatnot.
Ed: Right. But even playing within the rules—like you said, creatine, for example, that’s a pretty big game changer. That allows you to really get after it in the weight room and have some serious hypertrophic changes in your muscles. I don’t think guys were using it, certainly not to the degree they are today. Liver pills, liver tabs are what the bodybuilders were using to put on mass back in the day. But talking to guys in boxing, the idea of liver tabs hadn’t made it to boxing, and guys definitely weren’t even lifting weights. I mean, there’s still a pretty big debate in boxing right now about whether you should even lift weights. So people just got bigger.
Jim: Indeed.
Ed: Indeed. And I’m only six-one and wasn’t blessed with that gene that gives you all that muscle for no reason.
Jim: You’re pretty muscular-looking dude though, in the pictures I see. I certainly wouldn’t want to get into a fight with you. I was a terrible street fighter growing up. We’ll get into that.
Ed: You street fight? Oh man, those are dangerous.
Jim: Actually, we’ll talk about that later. Fortunately, not in our town where we had rules, basically. It was quite interesting. Anyway, let’s get back to the story of your book, which basically starts when you were a kid, living up on the Hill.
Ed: Oh man. The Hill District is—
Jim: By the way, that’s in Pittsburgh.
Jim: Indeed.
Ed: Indeed. And I’m only six-one and I wasn’t blessed with that gene that gives you all that muscle for no reason.
Jim: You’re a pretty muscular-looking dude though, from the pictures I see. I certainly wouldn’t want to get into a fight with you. I was a terrible street fighter growing up. We’ll get into that.
Ed: You street fight? Oh man, those are dangerous.
Jim: Actually, we’ll talk about that later. Fortunately, not in our town where we had rules, basically. It was quite interesting. Anyway, let’s get back to the story of your book, which basically starts when you were a kid, living up on the hill. Tell us about that.
Ed: Oh man. The Hill District is—
Jim: By the way, that’s in Pittsburgh.
Ed: Pittsburgh, PA, Hill District, specifically the Terrace Village housing projects, which are now—I’m not quite sure exactly what they are, but I know what they’re not, which is like the projects I grew up in. When I think about my childhood there, I tell people all the time, I don’t have warm, happy memories of my childhood. It’s just not a thing. Like there are happy times I remember, of course. But when I think about the hill, I had a friend up there, and he was a cool guy—at least as cool as we could be at six, seven, eight years old.
I remember fighting on the school bus and in elementary school and a lot of the violence around. There was a lot of drug violence in particular, or drug-fueled violence because this was in the nineties. In the late eighties, early nineties, with the crack epidemic in full swing. This was right after gangs had really started using guns and things of that nature. I lived next door to some addicts at different points in my life. The hill was no different. You see a lot of crazy stuff that kids aren’t supposed to see.
Something that I don’t think I put in the book, but when it comes to your memories of things, your brain is really good at protecting you and making sure that you can function. When I was three or four, I saw this kid I used to play with—he went across the street one day to get ice cream. I didn’t cross the street because my mom had drilled into me, you don’t cross the street without adults. He crossed the street, and there was a police chase going on, and he got run over. It’s clear as day in my head. My mom told me that after that happened, I ran and hid behind the steps and they had to come find me. I just didn’t talk about it for almost ten years. Then one day I came down the steps and just started talking about it. My mom was like, “Oh, you remember now?”
I tell that story to illustrate what I remember about my childhood. A lot of it is miserable, but that’s what I remember. I wonder what else I’ve blocked out. That’s a really good way to sum up what it was like growing up in the hill. It didn’t get much better when we moved from the Hill District because they decided they were going to tear those projects down. They relocated the families to another project across town, Northview Heights housing project.
More of the same thing there. The difference was they put up this fence around the neighborhood—it was a gated community, but not in an elegant sense. We were gated because they were trying to figure out how to deal with the influx of criminals. As if the criminals were coming in—no, they were being bred in the environment. They wanted to track people coming in and out, so you had to show your driver’s license. If you were on a bus, it didn’t matter, so it was pointless.
I didn’t like my neighborhood, and I didn’t like my home life either. This was something that was really hard for my mom to understand. She used to be subscribed to a mailing list where I would write about my childhood. She’d say, “Well, you act like your childhood was so bad.” And I’m like, “Well, am I telling any lies here?”
I wasn’t happy. Between the traumatic issues at home—because my mom was, I could just say crazy and put a period on it—I think she loved us, but she didn’t do a great job setting an example. The discipline—I put that in air quotes—was heavy-handed, definitely abusive. She constantly cursed us out. So it was this constant, low-level stress at home. And school wasn’t any better until I got to high school. There I was dealing with fighting and all that. So there was never really a chance for me to feel safe and just hang out, relax. It’s like PTSD.
Jim: Cortisol levels were no doubt high, right?
Ed: Oh, for sure. I did research about my book, which ultimately ended up being a memoir, so I didn’t have to do it. I just didn’t know I was writing a memoir at first, so the first draft was a different kind of book. But one of the things I learned was when children have chronically elevated levels of cortisol and are chronically under stress, that permanently alters the shape and function of the amygdala. And so you are always in this low-level kind of fight or flight. They call it hypervigilance. And that really described a lot of me. Like, my wife and I joke about this—I’m like a stray dog that got brought in. And you know how you bring a stray dog in and you got to treat that stray dog with care because he needs the love and he needs the support. But boy, he really can’t trust anyone because everybody else has been treating him like shit and it’s terrible. That’s how I felt a lot of times once I got past that environment.
Jim: Yeah. It came through in the story. And, you know, we have a shelter dog now actually. When we first took him in four years ago, he was very skittish, and he’s gradually come around. Good dog. Very friendly, happy, but I don’t think he was abused, but he was certainly neglected a lot.
Ed: Yeah. Like, abuse takes so many different forms, or at least more forms than we tend to think about. And there’s like the active kind that you can easily see because it leaves bruises or wounds or psychological damage in the way someone is spoken to. But there’s also on the other end, you know, if that’s too much, too little is effectively neglect. Not always, because sometimes there’s overindulgence and that leads to another type of problem. You don’t have overindulgence problems when you grew up in poverty and public housing. Like, that’s not a thing. But what you can have is neglect, and I witnessed a lot of neglect.
One thing I can say very positively about my mom is we were never neglected. We were definitely somewhat food scarce—I would never say we were food secure as the sociologists describe it. But my mom did what she had to do to make sure we had food. And even though I still remember seeing eviction notices and my mom freaking out, we never got evicted. There were times where we had to ration food, but we never were without food for a day. And so I would never say I was neglected, but the other type of abuse, oh, absolutely. And the scars of that, you don’t realize how bad it is until you get around something that isn’t like that. And that’s what happened to me when I got to high school.
Jim: Yeah. We’ll talk about that in just a minute. Your mom was a single mom. Your dad existed, but he was a long way away. Why don’t you talk a little bit about your mother and her singlehood and maybe some of her funky boyfriends and your relationship with your father.
Ed: Yeah. So, I don’t have any memories of my mom and dad ever existing in the same house. I never seen it. At some point, they liked each other enough to not just make me, but my sister, because my sister and I have the same mother and father. And we know that for sure because my dad did the whole sue for paternity thing, or my mom did, however that works. But for all intents and purposes, other than the child support that my dad was forced to pay, he wasn’t around. He wasn’t around at all.
And normally when I talk about my parents, I start with my mom. That has changed now that I have a son. And now I think a lot about my dad, because I hadn’t thought about my dad most of my life. He died when I was eighteen. And so it’s to the point now, and I’m forty now, so twenty-two years ago, I just—it’s not like he did much when he was here for me. And when he was past, you know, my life didn’t change too much. But once I had my son, I was like, oh this is—we were like in month six or seven, and my son is being what babies do, and they cry and they don’t sleep, and you don’t sleep and you’re miserable and you’re tired and you’re like, what did I get myself into? But at the same time, you look at the guy, you’re like, but you’re adorable and I love you and I can never imagine being away from you. And when I had that thought, I was just like, you know, I don’t know what was wrong with my father that he decided the best course of action was to move to a completely different city. With no real justification, it’s not like he was making a bunch of money or something like that. I understand parents not working out and them living in separate homes and separate lives and going separate ways romantically. I get that. What I don’t get is how someone could move willingly for no good reason to another location. With all of that said, then I got even angrier when I was writing about in the book some of the boyfriends my mom had and how they abused my sister and all.
Jim: This guy, Fred, seemed like a real piece—
Jim: This guy, Fred, seemed like a real piece—
Ed: Of shit. So as part of the research, I looked him up. And in Pennsylvania—and you’re in Pennsylvania, so this is worth knowing—you can look up a person’s criminal cases, free to public. You can pull up their whole criminal history. Even if you get a non-moving traffic violation, those show up. I guess moving ones too.
So I went and looked this guy up. It took me a little while because I remembered—that’s how powerful this thing is when someone hurts you and messes with you—I remembered the guy’s full name. And so even though I hadn’t seen him since I was like five or six, I remembered his full name. I was able to look him up. And yeah, he had a bunch of other charges, a lot of stuff dealing with hurting women and harassing them. This is something that’s just like an MO.
But what made me angry, and I’ve had to reconcile and work with, because you still get angry about this stuff, but you gotta figure out a way to deal with it, is that my dad never stepped in, never did anything, never tried to get us out of that environment. And so what that left me with was, I had to square this in my mind one of two ways: either he was so uninvolved that he didn’t notice something was wrong, or he noticed and didn’t care. Either way, the fact that there was no reaction or intervention on his part really bugged me for a long time.
I’ve never actually talked to my sister about this particular thing. And I should. I did consult my sister for some parts of the early book because my memories are imperfect. And one thing I learned about the book is that sometimes you remember something that didn’t happen. It was still bad, but you remember it differently.
I thought, for example—there’s a story I took out of the book because I couldn’t be 100 percent sure it happened that way—I thought my mom got arrested. And that seems like something you would clearly remember, right? And I thought I clearly remembered it. I looked up the record on the Pennsylvania criminal history search. It showed there that she was released on own recognizance. My sister was like, “It didn’t happen that way. She didn’t get arrested.” And then she tells the story from her perspective and I’m like, maybe it didn’t happen.
With that said, in the book, I tell the story of a guy who tried to push his way in the house after my sister hit him with an egg or something like that. And as I’m talking to my sister about it, she was like, “No, he pushed his way in the house because he was trying to get to his girlfriend that was hiding in our house from him—the woman who I talked about in the story who we’d hear getting beat.” She said he was trying to push his way in the house, and she was trying to protect herself, and he pushed her over to get in there. So we both remembered that he tried to push his way in, right? I don’t have any memory of this woman being in our house, but apparently my sister does. And my sister has no memory of hitting this guy with an egg or his house or whatever, but I do. But both of our brains remember the very traumatic event of him trying to get into our home.
So these things are funny like that, the way trauma affects you and your interpretations of things. But I say all that to bring it back to what you said about my parents. It’s hard for me to really think about my dad. It’s fine talking about him. It’s hard for me to square his behavior. But it’s also hard for me to square my mom’s behavior because, to my mom’s credit, after she dealt with a series of these awful dudes, I don’t remember her bringing any guys around the house when I was in high school or middle school. But when we were the youngest and most vulnerable, that matters a lot and had a pretty big influence on how we interact with adults afterwards.
Jim: Yes. It really is a terrible, terrible story, some of the stories you tell in the book. But important to say, you know, tell the story of who you are. Right? That’s the foundation for both better and worse. But fortunately, you were able to transcend that. So let’s move on to the next stage of your life, which was middle school. And one of the themes in your book, as at least I took it away, is opportunity, luck, and do you take advantage of luck and opportunity when it shows up? Initially, middle school sounded like it was pretty bad. You know, as you described it, a war zone.
Jim: Yes. It really is terrible, some of the stories you tell in the book. But important to say you know, tell the story of who you are. Right? That’s the foundation for both better and worse. But fortunately, you were able to transcend that. So let’s move on to the next stage of your life, which was middle school. And one of the themes in your book, as at least I took it away, is opportunity, luck, and do you take advantage of luck and opportunity when it shows up? Initially, middle school sounded like it was pretty bad. You know, as you described it, a war zone.
Ed: The way the school system works, or the school system I was in here in Pittsburgh, is that there was a feeder system where your school was determined by where you lived. And then from elementary school, there were a few elementary schools, fewer middle schools, and the fewest high schools. At each level, you were merged with more people from surrounding areas. Where I was fed into was Allegheny Middle. That not just fed more kids from my project, but other projects and then a few poor neighborhoods we used to call “white trash neighborhoods.” They’re pretty much poor, barely working-class whites and poor blacks. That’s who went to this school. You get a lot of disruptive behavior from this group, which makes learning just impossible. If you’re a little better or a little smarter, you think you’re okay, but I very quickly found out that I had glaring deficiencies. I really didn’t like middle school either. I hated middle school. You know what the best part about middle school was? When I got to go to this gifted center one day a week.
Jim: Yeah. That’s the thing about, I was gonna say, an opportunity that you took advantage of. How did you get selected for that? And tell us a little bit about that program.
Ed: I wish I could remember how I got selected. I just know how they selected. Your teacher nominates you, you take a test. The test says you should be there and then you’re good to go. For me, those are the happiest memories of elementary school and middle school. Getting to go to that program one day a week because I just liked being in an environment where I didn’t have to worry about getting harassed. The work was a little more interesting and fun, but I could never discover it at my regular school because I was always dealing with some type of disruption or problem or assault on my person that I had to defend. I never got bullied in the purest sense of the word—people tried to bully me. But one of the things that was drilled into me growing up is you’ll never let somebody just pick on you. You’ll never let somebody just hit you. You take the altercation to a physical level as well. Let them know there’s a cost for bothering you. Some people will be willing to pay that cost so there’s nothing you can do about it. But the one thing that is gonna absolutely happen is that if you don’t make it clear that there’s a cost that comes with it—
Jim: More people are gonna take advantage of you. Yeah. That was certainly true where I grew up as well. I was steps above where your family was, but it was still in the physical tradition. I would say the neighborhood I grew up in was at the line between upper working class and lower middle class. My father dropped out of high school after ninth grade. My mother left home when she was 14, somehow managed to graduate from high school early at the age of 16, took her nickels, dimes, and quarters, bought a bus ticket from a small town in Northern Minnesota to Washington DC where she lied about her age and got a job as a telephone operator. So that was kind of typical for our home. Where I grew up, half the adults were high school dropouts, half were high school graduates. Nobody had gone to college.
Ed: But fighting was—
Jim: Certainly a thing that you either did or you were a pussy, basically, one or the other. I still remember very vividly—I think it’s one of the things that made me the person that I am. Our family also, for wonderful luck on our part, loved books. We had many books, and books were considered holy. If you ever bent over a corner of a book, man, you’d get smacked across the face. If you laid a book face down, you’d get whooped. One day, I went down to the bookmobile, and I loved—
Ed: Oh, the old bookmobile. We had that too.
Jim: Yeah. And I was seven years old, my arm so full, could barely carry six books. And a bad kid—I’ll just give his initials, BM—came up behind and knocked the books out of my hand, and they fell on the ground. Fortunately, they had those plastic library covers on them so the books weren’t harmed. Old BM was two or three years older than I am, outweighed me by 40 percent, six inches taller. But the assault on the books made me go berserk, and I attacked him and took him to the ground and got in two licks. And, of course, outweighed me by 40 pounds, he just flipped me over, got me down, got in a couple of licks. But this was the interesting thing. He then got up, extended his hand, helped me up, and patted me on the shoulder.
Ed: I mean, that’s how it goes.
Jim: Yeah. And I was—I was seven years old. My arms were so full, could barely carry six books. And a bad kid—I’ll just give his initials, BM—came up behind and knocked the books out of my hand, and they fell on the ground. Fortunately, they had those plastic library covers on them so the books weren’t harmed. Old BM was two or three years older than I am, outweighed me by 40 percent, you know, six inches taller. But the assault on the books made me go berserk, and I attacked him and took him to the ground and got in two licks. And, of course, since he outweighed me by 40 pounds, he just flipped me over, got me down, got in a couple of licks. But this was the interesting thing. He then got up, extended his hand, helped me up, and patted me on the shoulder.
Ed: I mean, that’s how it goes.
Jim: Yeah. Because he knew that I would come after him if he came after me. And bullies, they want easier victims than that.
Ed: Easy targets. That story reminds me—I always try to be fair and I gotta give my mom credit for the things she did well. One of the things my mom did very well, I still remember: books are treasures. You don’t mess with books. Even when we were grounded, we could read.
Jim: That was our family’s tradition too. Books were wholly important, because neither parent was educated. They were self-educated in their adulthood by reading lots of books and such. And again to this fighting thing, especially in middle school, everybody had to fight some. Right? Or you were just socially dead or something. But as I mentioned in our pregame, there was fighting, but it wasn’t the vicious, dangerous kind of fighting. Though you could still get a tooth knocked out or a broken collarbone, we did have rules with it, which I later called the code of Adelphi. Never hit somebody when they were down. If they stay down, fight’s over. If anybody produced a weapon, all the state bystanders would grab them and beat their ass.
Ed: Oh yeah, with rules like that, man. To my mind, that kind—
Jim: Kind of fighting is probably fairly healthy for middle school males. And the attempt to totally suppress fighting, I’ve long suspected, has something to do with these school shootings. Right? Because if you’re being bullied, you can’t do a goddamn thing about it. What the fuck do you do?
Ed: Not only that, but when you build a culture that teaches this kind of pacifism and doesn’t let guys direct it in a—healthy is probably not the correct adjective, but relative to what could happen, i.e., a shooting, definitely a healthy outlet—then you’re gonna end up with what I think are a lot of guys with suppressed rage, guys that don’t feel confident. And on top of that, like the story you told, it’s a way we bond sometimes. That’s not just showing—you see at the end of a boxing match, the guys are hugging. You just went to war, you respect each other. Hey, I know you can handle yourself, we’re in a good spot. Even if no matter who wins or loses, you stood up for yourself and you didn’t get pushed around. And that is something that is often lost now. I’m not going to say we should endorse fighting in schools. If for no other reason, in my experience, it’s probably different than your experience. With that said, we also need to recognize that the urge of aggression is going to show up and you should channel it one way versus another. This is why I tell all guys, I think all guys should engage in a combat sport. They don’t have to compete professionally. Heck, they ain’t even got to compete as amateurs, but they should learn how to go and get in the ring and spar. Because even that confidence and knowing that you can deal with a problem physically—like the realest kind of problem is physical—that I think is good for one’s mental health.
Jim: I absolutely agree. And again, in our day, your father taught you how to fight. Right? It was just part of growing up. And my dad was a former marine and a cop.
Ed: Oh, so there you go.
Jim: He knew some pretty good tricks. Right? He taught us all of them. Anyway, let’s move on to another luck story, the cocaine prank that you pulled.
Jim: I absolutely agree. And yeah, again, in our day, your father taught you how to fight. Right? It was just part of growing up. And my dad was a former Marine and a cop.
Ed: Oh, so there you go.
Jim: He knew some pretty good tricks. Right? He taught us all of them. Anyway, let’s move on to another luck story—the cocaine prank that you pulled.
Ed: Ah, the cocaine prank. I’ve got this sense of humor, and you’ve been doing your research. I’ve found out, by the way, anyone listening, Jim really does his research on the guests. Told me things I don’t even know were sitting out there as public knowledge. Not on some stalker level, but I’m sure I mentioned it somewhere and he found it.
If you look at my social media, I make jokes all the time about crackheads and the crackhead hustle and things of that nature. My sense of humor is really built on shock. That’s just built into me. I’m not a prank guy in the sense that I’m going to do those things on the street with the camera—that’s weird. But I do like socially pranking people, people going “What is this guy talking about?” kind of deal.
When I was in middle school, seventh or eighth grade—I’m pretty sure it was eighth grade—I decided I would get a bag of sugar and take it to school like it was cocaine. I had no idea what I was doing. If my son came and told me that he did something like that, I’d freak out because I know how bad that situation could get. And it got fairly bad for me when a kid finally used that as an excuse to fight me. To be fair, he probably should have fought me because if I was on the street, somebody would have probably shot me for approaching them and asking if they wanted to buy cocaine and showing them what I thought was cocaine. Meanwhile, now I know sugar looks nothing like cocaine. Well, I would say if you fall for sugar when somebody’s giving you cocaine, you need to stop.
Jim: Now if you’d used powdered sugar, it would’ve worked better.
Ed: Yeah, but if you use regular crystalline sugar and you fall for that, you need to stop buying drugs. You’re not—
Jim: Yeah, you’re a fool.
Ed: But yeah, so I got into a fight with that kid, a pretty big fight. And then after the fight, they arrested me. The police arrested me and I’m like, “What is going on? Why are you arresting me? It wasn’t real.” And they explained something called the cosmetic lookalike law. Anyone out there listening, if you act like you’re selling something, they’re gonna arrest you as if you were actually selling or trying to distribute the thing that you have. That’s a law, at least in Pennsylvania. I looked it up—it’s called different things in different states, but many states have some variation of this.
You can’t act like you’re selling drugs when you’re not actually selling the drug. Because what a lot of dealers would do—I know this—they’d make “dummy rocks” where they’ll take breadcrumbs or gel for the numbness and sell them as crack. You can’t act like you got it when you ain’t really got it. Then when the cops bust you, you can’t say “Oh, it was just crumbs” or whatever.
So they arrest me and I’m thinking this is the end. I don’t know how bad this could get. But then they decide not to book me and let me go. They just say, “This is a lesson. If you’d done this on the street, it could have been way worse than just a kid having a fight with you.” It took me a while before I understood how close I came, but I also didn’t want to be in trouble, so it’s not like I ever tried something like that again. My entire life could have been altered. I could have been thrown in the system merely for something that I thought was a harmless prank.
Jim: And also consider, you know, a young Black man and an asshole cop, it could’ve easily gone the other way.
Ed: Right? It could’ve easily gone a different route. And it’s one of those things that I hadn’t really thought about until I was writing. I mean, I’ve told the story occasionally, but yeah, sometimes all it takes is somebody giving you a chance. Like, that luck, man.
Jim: Let’s go on to the next stage. Your experience with the gifted program showed you that there was another way to be, and you decided to apply to a special high school program. Tell us about that a little bit.
Jim: And also consider, you know, a young black man and an asshole cop—it could have easily gone the other way.
Ed: Right? It could’ve easily gone a different route. I hadn’t really thought about it until I was writing. I mean, I’ve told the story occasionally, but yeah, sometimes all it takes is somebody giving you a chance. Like that luck, man. But then you took it.
Jim: So let’s go on to the next stage. Your experience with the gifted program showed you that there was another way to be, and you decided to apply to a special high school program. Tell us about that a little bit.
Ed: So I talked about the feeder system where you go based in your neighborhood, but you could also apply to another school if they had something you wanted to study. My high school had a high-tech program as they called it, like a vocational program where I learned electronics, but I had to apply. And I applied because there was no way I was doing four more years of being in the environment that I had just dealt with in middle school.
So I applied and got in and I get to this high school, it’s clear across town. An hour bus ride there and an hour bus ride back, so I’m spending two hours a day commuting. But the classes are great. It’s like a truly diverse environment in both an intellectual and physical appearance standpoint. And I meet some really great people there—friends that are still my friends to this day and their families are my friends because those people really showed me a different way of living.
They weren’t trying to show me, like, “here’s how we live in civilized society.” No. We became friends over video games, and then I got exposed to other people as you become friends with people in high school. And their families really embraced me like I was their own. None of them ever said anything like, “yo, this kid is from the ghetto” or nothing like that. I’d show up there, like, I spent every day after school at my buddy Eli’s house and his family. And then his dad would drive me home. All the way home, this Jewish man drove to the projects every night to drop me off.
I said to them at my son’s baby shower, “You guys never said anything, but you knew my home life was a wreck. You driving me home meant the world to me and I could never repay you.” And they act like it was nothing. But it was way more than nothing. That’s a watershed moment in my life. I don’t know where I would be if I didn’t feel welcome somewhere.
Jim: And you’d be a nerd dude in the hood. Right? Probably not a great thing to be.
Ed: And I’d just sit in my room and play video games, because what else would I do? But no, it made a big difference in my life.
Jim: Now you struggled a bit academically, right? Even though you’re really a smart guy, but your background in middle school had been something less than exemplary.
Ed: Oh yeah. I didn’t learn because of all those disruptions. And when you get to high school, what you realize is that everything scaffolds. Math was by far my worst subject because I never learned algebra properly. I had a tough time with everything after that. And on top of that, I didn’t want to be home studying.
For whatever reason, my brain does great with languages. When I went into high school, I hadn’t taken a single foreign language class. There were six levels of Japanese offered at my high school. I didn’t take a language class until my tenth grade year. And in three years, I transcended six levels of Japanese because I get the way languages work. I didn’t have to study that hard, but math busted my ass.
I pulled up my transcript to write an article about how to get better at math. Because, you know, one gets a physics degree—we can assume that I eventually figured this math thing out at some point. And I wanted to pull up my transcript to show it. Like, I’m not just the guy telling you some learning hacks, but I happen to be gifted. And I looked at my transcript and I was like, “Wow, this is even worse than I thought it was.”
Middle school just—our high school just gave me fits because I wasn’t really studying. I was tired when I got home and I didn’t want to go home. So aside from just the part of high school where you just kind of put one foot in front of the other and turn in assignments, I wasn’t doing it. And I also wasn’t learning because I wasn’t studying. So ultimately at the end of high school, they let me walk at graduation, but I did not graduate. And they actually gave me a chance to graduate again in summer school by making up a class, but I got caught plagiarizing an essay. And so they’re like, “Ah, that’s it,” and then that was the end of that.
Jim: It didn’t make a difference. So that’s a failure of the system in many ways. But fortunately, while you struggled academically, you also found something you were really good at, which was football.
Ed: Yeah. Totally bad luck.
Jim: And it was amazing. You had never even watched a football game, it didn’t sound like.
Ed: No. Nope. Never watched a football game. I was learning everything in high school about football. And I just happened to be physically gifted, and so I was like a natural fit on the team. Though when I tried to be a linebacker, I sucked because linebackers, you need some experience. I wasn’t that gifted, but they put me on the line as a defensive lineman my senior year and I just exploded. And I had a really great senior year. I got the attention of Georgetown University, but they looked at my grades and they were like, “Whoa, we can’t do this.” And just to show you why it matters, being naturally intelligent just isn’t enough. You gotta work hard because if you don’t work hard and you don’t apply the right way, it won’t manifest and people will think you’re an idiot. You’d be better off if you had played dumb the whole time. When Georgetown was interested in recruiting me, I was told that I simultaneously, of all the recruits, had the highest SAT score and the lowest GPA.
Jim: Mhmm.
Ed: And they could not square that. They would have been like, “Look, if your GPA was just like a two something, we could work with that.” But it wouldn’t matter how—and my SAT score wasn’t nothing crazy. I think it was like 1,300 on the old SAT. Don’t know what that is now. But they were like, “We can’t do anything with this.” So they lost interest and then we were going to take a visit, and then this was right around when the DC snipers showed up. And they were like, “We’re not really doing recruiting business right now because there’s a guy killing people randomly in DC.” So that went by the wayside, but the University of Rochester showed up. And here’s a school that I definitely shouldn’t have been in. Like, definitely shouldn’t have been. That’s a very elite school. It was like a top 30 when I went.
Jim: Yeah. I looked it up before the show, and its average SAT is 1440, which is like—
Ed: Which is nuts. Right? But they looked at me and my background and my SATs—
Jim: Were pretty impressive in those days. I mean, 1,300 then is probably not far from 1440 now.
Ed: Right. And they were like, “We’re just gonna ignore that GPA thing and have you come play football.” Because the guy—rest in peace, he’s not alive anymore—I think I got his name right, Jason Bendekovich. He recruited me and he was from the area, and really he wanted me to go really badly. And they were able to look past my GPA because of my SAT score and my physical performance. Now it was a Division III school. It’s not like they got a scholarship—something I learned the hard way—but it was college. And I was like, everyone else says you should go to college. A few of my friends and their upper-middle-class parents, they had gone to the University of Rochester. They were like, “You should go to this school. It’s a great opportunity.” And you hear that enough and you’re like, “Alright, I guess I’ll go to this school.” When I went, it didn’t take long for it to be revealed how much I should not have been there.
Jim: Oh, interesting.
Jim: Oh, interesting.
Ed: I really didn’t belong on any level. The academic part is obvious. That’s just clear. But socially, I ended up making one friend. It took a while, but you don’t realize how much culture matters until you’re placed into a completely different culture and it’s like an island. Everyone is super different. Everyone comes from a very different background. And, you know, I talked to black kids who didn’t believe I was from the projects. They were like, “What do you mean you’re from the projects? What is this place, the projects you speak of?” I’m like, wow.
But I ended up meeting one guy up there who I became real good friends with. I just felt isolated. It was my first time really being away from the little bit of familiarity that I had. Even though this was an objectively better environment to live in than the one I would have lived in back home, because I didn’t live at home anyway and I was just moving around, floating around the city, I missed my friends. We weren’t doing anything crazy—we were just hanging out, drinking over the summer. But I missed that. I felt lonely. I wasn’t doing well in school. I didn’t really know anybody. I wasn’t really good at making friends. People liked me, but I didn’t bond with anyone.
Then I met this guy Kai Jay, who also happened to be a Rochester local who had a similar background. I think he was from the projects, but he was definitely from the ghetto. We got along really well. That friendship ultimately helped me out because when I dropped out—they were gonna kick me out, but I was like, you can’t fire me, I quit—I didn’t know what I was going to do once it was time to leave the apartment, which was coming within a week. Jay was like, “Hey man, I happen to be going to Philadelphia this week. You want a ride back to Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh is nowhere near any route from Rochester, New York, to Philadelphia. That was just somebody being a good friend and looking out for me.
My dad died when I was eighteen, my senior year of high school. He had a life insurance policy—I got $55,000 in cash. I’d never had money in my life, never seen anyone with money. This was not something I knew what to do with. I spent all of it within eighteen months. I don’t remember a thing I bought. Worse than spending it all, I was overdrawn on my bank account. Eventually they were like, “Go away, you don’t have any more money left. Oh, and you owe us $500.”
When I dropped out of college, I was at a low point. I was worse than broke and had nowhere to live. A lot of my friends were away at college. I had one good friend who went to Carnegie Mellon, so he was in the city. It was kind of an isolating period, but we did manage to find this crummy apartment. We didn’t have any furniture, we had mice. It was rough, but it was a spot where everybody would come to drink and party.
Jim: You developed a taste for the hooch, right?
Ed: Yeah. I actually don’t think I mentioned this in the book because of the linearity of the story, but college really hooked me. I drank a lot when I first went to college. When I got back, I drank a lot. This girl I was dating—the same one whose mother makes an appearance in the story—her father had actually died when I was twenty. He died from alcohol, died in his sleep drunk one night, I believe. I know he died in his sleep, but I’m pretty sure he was drinking. So I said, let me be a good dude and stop drinking around her. I did that for like two years. But then I got right back on after we broke up. I wasn’t not drinking because I had a problem at this point—I was not drinking because I wanted to try to be a good example for somebody I was with. I wish I had known how good that was for me because I wouldn’t have had to endure the next seven or eight years of heavy drinking once I got back on the bottle in my twenties.
Jim: Well, let’s move along with our story here. Let’s jump to the—
Jim: Well, let’s move along with our story here. Let’s jump to the—
Ed: Point where your girlfriend’s mother tells you off. Yeah. Because, you know, that’s the same girlfriend whose dad was drinking and died. I used to talk about how pointless college was for everyone. And I would tell this to everybody because I felt like you could become successful without college. And I still feel that way. The difference is now I got a degree in physics, you can’t really say anything to me when I say something like that. But at this point, I was not anything close to that.
And I would complain about it to everybody. And one of the people I would complain to was my girlfriend’s mom who happened to be a professor of biology at the University of Pittsburgh. So that’s talking shit on somebody’s profession to their face. And to her credit, she was polite about it for a long time. And then finally she snapped one day and was like, “You know, let’s pretend you’re right and college is a waste of time. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve done with your life for the past four years other than show up and eat my food?”
And she was right. Like, that’s how I was surviving. I wasn’t making enough money to eat on my own completely. And then she kicked me out. And at that point, I was mad and embarrassed and all that and sad, but she was right. I had not done anything. I didn’t have anything to show for myself whatsoever.
So I started looking at things that I could do. I wasn’t going to try and go back to college. I still had no confidence in my abilities to learn things at all. I didn’t feel like I’d be a good student and I didn’t have the money. I thought about joining the army, but that was right back when we invaded Iraq. And I didn’t want to change my life so badly that I was going to risk taking a bullet in the desert to do it.
And there was YouTube. YouTube had just really come out. And I was watching fight videos on YouTube. And I said, you know what, there’s something I could try. Let me go try this fight thing. Let me try boxing. That’s how I ended up in boxing because I was looking to do as the Most Interesting Man in the World used to say “beef up my obituary.”
Jim: That’s a great line. I don’t think I ever heard that, but I saw that in the book. I go, I think I might steal that.
Ed: Yeah. You know, those Most Interesting Man in the World commercials are entertaining. Apparently, they boosted Dos Equis’s sales by like 600 percent. But yeah, that was how it started. I just didn’t want to be like a regular person. And actually, just didn’t want to be a loser for real. I wanted to, if somebody asked me what I had done with my life for the past four years again, I wanted an answer. Because I didn’t have an answer then. And not even close. I mean, I had an answer. I had worked at Starbucks and worked at GameStop. Like, that’s what I had done. Oh, and I had started drinking again. You know, as we had started to drift and go our separate ways, that was just kind of a nail in the coffin.
Jim: Gotcha.
Jim: That’s a great line. I don’t think I’d ever heard that, but I saw that in the book. I thought, I might steal that.
Ed: Yeah. You know, those “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials are entertaining. Apparently, they boosted Dos Equis’s sales by like 600 percent. But that’s how it started. I just didn’t want to be like a regular person. Actually, I just didn’t want to be a loser, for real. I wanted to have an answer if somebody asked me what I had done with my life for the past four years. Because I didn’t have an answer then. I mean, I had an answer—I had worked at Starbucks and worked at GameStop. And I had started drinking again. As we had started to drift and go our separate ways, that was just kind of a nail in the coffin.
Jim: Gotcha.
Ed: So I found a boxing gym and started boxing. I was bad. I was terrible. I won my first fight by knockout, but I found grainy footage of that thing, and it looked like a street fight. I had a record of like thirteen and five in a three-year period. All thirteen of those fights I won by knockout, and all five of those fights I lost on points. That might sound impressive, but what that means is all I could do was swing big. I didn’t have any technique. I wasn’t learning how to hit and not get hit. I wasn’t really learning how to box—I was just brawling within the rules.
That will take you so far, but it won’t take you far enough. You won’t be able to get out of your region. The tournaments that go national come up—there’s the Golden Gloves and the USA Boxing tournament. Those are the two that have brackets that go from regional to national. There was this guy I couldn’t beat, Fred Latham. He had been fighting for a long time, so he knew what he was doing. First time we fought, he couldn’t hurt me, but I couldn’t touch him. He’d just move around, dance around my sloppy swings. The first time we fought, I actually swung and missed so badly, I knocked myself down.
I got with this guy, Chris Williams. He’s still coaching now and doing a great job. Chris worked on my footwork, worked on how to move in the ring. When I started training with Chris, the improvements really showed up. I beat this guy that I had lost against before—I beat him by knockout. Fun fact, Wesley Triplett in the book—Wesley is now serving around twenty-five years in prison. Boxing is a crazy sport with crazy people. But we fought before he went to prison, clearly.
Then I fought Fred again and this time the fight was close, but I lost. I felt like there was something I should know but wasn’t being told. That made me switch trainers. How I switched trainers was crazy because I should have just switched gyms, but I didn’t. Instead, I went to both gyms for a while because I was trying to feel it out. In my mind, I didn’t know it didn’t work like that. I wasn’t trying to be sneaky, like go to one gym and then go to another one. I thought I could just try it out, do a trial period. No, it didn’t work that way.
Eventually they found out that I was going to the other gym up the road and they kicked me out, as they should have. Now that I know the rules, I agree—they should have been like, “Get your ass out of here.” Now me and Chris are cool, but at that time, he was not happy, as he should have been. He was well within his rights.
I started training with Tom Yankello at that point. He’s a hall of fame coach. In fact, funny story—he gets inducted into the PA Sports Hall of Fame the same day as my book comes out, August 5. He broke down a lot of my weaknesses and built on what Chris had done with my footwork. It turned me into a pretty good fighter. So good that on our third fight between me and Fred, the guy I couldn’t get past who was the gatekeeper to get to the next level, I knocked Fred out in the second round. That was after setting him up with shots—it wasn’t just some crazy swinging punch.
Amateur boxing doesn’t always get press, but a local newspaper covered it because it was such a big upset. No one was expecting it. The next week I went on to win the PA title against Philly’s champion. That’s how it works—Philadelphia and PA, and then whichever one you’re closest to, that’s where you’ll fight under. Then the best for each weight class will fight and get crowned the state champ. In 2011, I became a state champion and went to nationals.
The national tournament is where that theme of “luck is when preparation meets opportunity” comes in. At nationals, they put your name into a hat and pair you randomly. You could be paired with anybody—the best fighter in the tournament or the worst. I got paired to fight Dominic from California in the first round. I looked him up—this guy was massive, six-seven, former NFL player, D-one college player. On top of that, he was coming from California where there are many more big cities, so there had to be more fights he had to go through at a higher level to get to this point.
I went out and won our fight by a score of four to one. The other victories in the tournament don’t really matter—I eventually got knocked out in the semis. But that victory changed my whole life because I didn’t know that Dominic was being funded by this group called All American Heavyweights. They were paying their whole mission—they were trying to find former Division One athletes and turn them into boxers. Step one was to get a boxer to the Olympics, and then after that to build this whole stable like a promotion company.
Dominic was their top guy. When they saw me beat him, first thing they were confused—they had never seen me before. They had a pretty extensive surveillance system of the amateur fight scene so they could study tape of the guys coming up and prepare strategy. They had never seen me before because I had improved so rapidly in such a short amount of time, going from not being able to get even out of my city to my region, all the way up to getting to the nationals in a span of like four months. That is a very fast ascent in ability.
For them to see me for the first time, they gave me an invite to come out to California and see how I liked the program. This was great because at this point in my life, I was really hurting for money. I had like two months left where I lived and then didn’t know how I was going to get a place. But they’re like, “Can you come to California?” And I’m like, “Absolutely.” They were paying a salary.
Jim: Pretty good salary actually, right?
Ed: Great salary. And it was even better because they paid your rent and gave you food—you didn’t have to spend the money on any of that. So it was all money you pocketed. And that’s one of those events, you know, that luck versus when preparation meets opportunity. I could not control who I got paired up with. I could have got paired with a nobody, but I got paired with him.
Jim: He was probably one of the top guys, right, in the country?
Ed: He was the top guy in the country because he would go on to eventually represent us at the 2012 Olympics in London. But I got paired with him. But because I had spent so much time training and working on my craft at that point, that day I was better, and it made all the difference in the world.
Jim: So your hard work with Tom Yankello, your preparation, and your strategy with Dominic all worked out, and you impressed these guys from All American Heavyweights, and you go out to LA. Tell us what happens then.
Ed: LA is a miserable city. I don’t understand people who like LA, but maybe I like the rain, I don’t know. But for me, I lived in Carson, California, which is just north of Long Beach, right next to Compton. And I get to train full time, which is great because my abilities really improve. There are lots of fights. When I went out there, I had twenty-four fights in like three or four years. In nine months, I get that many fights. And that makes a big difference in terms of what you can learn and how you can improve.
I also had time. Time and money, and not a lot of money. And my license was suspended, so I couldn’t go anywhere. And if you’ve never lived in LA, you can’t do that city without a car. Maybe certain parts of it, but not from Carson to the rest of the city. But I could go buy alcohol, and I could buy alcohol very differently than I could buy alcohol here in PA. For people who don’t know, PA is one of two states where it’s still controlled by a state liquor board. So we have what we call state stores and that’s where you go and buy liquor. It’s not like every other state where you can just go to Walmart or Target and there’s a bottle of Jim Beam on the shelf as you’re checking out.
There’s this joke—I think it’s Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle, I hate that I mixed them up because then I’m like, “You know, all Black people look the same.” But no, they were just formative comedians for me. The joke is like, you know, you start seeing the signs in the hood. The tune in the hood is “liquor store, gun store, gun store, liquor store, liquor store, gun store.” I didn’t get that joke when I first heard it because the liquor stores were never in the ghetto in PA. They were like on the corner of commercial areas.
I got to LA and man, the only thing he left out was the pawn shop and the check cashing place. There was always liquor store, gun store, pawn shop, check cashing place. That was when you knew you were on a block in the hood like Gardena. But I would just go over to Target and pick up a bottle or on my way back from the gym pick up a bottle. And I drank a lot. I drank a lot because I still had that same issue that I had the first time I went to college, which was I didn’t really know how to socialize and form these bonds. People liked me, I got invited to go do a lot of stuff. But in terms of what made me feel at ease, I didn’t really find anybody I could really kick it with for a while. But I could always kick it with a bottle of alcohol.
I turned into a bit of a hermit. One of my favorite things to do—this is when The Walking Dead was big, this is when The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones were on. So I’m off my Sundays, I was so excited. I’d go get a box of wine, there was this taco spot up the road. I’d get a box of wine, some taco food, or I’d make tacos. And I would just sit there and watch my Game of Thrones and then Walking Dead. It was a great time. I could find something to do like this every night, though, but I got better. I got better at fighting, worse at drinking.
Jim: I got to ask you this question. I know if I drink too much, I feel like shit on a shingle the next day. How in the world did you booze like that and get up and bust your ass in the gym all day the next day?
Jim: I got to ask you this question. You know, if I drink too much, I feel like shit on a shingle the next day. How in the world did you booze like that and get up and bust your ass in the gym all day the next day?
Ed: Burning the candle at both ends. There were numerous times I went to the gym just hungover, in bad shape. But sparring was pretty predictable, so I never sparred hungover. But there were a few runs—I think I tell the story in the book about how they used to drive us up to Griffith Park. That was a pretty serious run through Burbank up there. It’s like six miles, and a lot of it is uphill—like two miles are uphill and then another mile is downhill, and then there’s the whole run around. I’ve always been a good runner, and I was a great runner that day because that was also the day I was the drunkest. I didn’t want them to think I had a problem drinking, so I had to bust my ass so there were no questions asked.
Part of it was motivation to keep the drinking under wraps. The other part is, not to toot my horn, but I’m just built different. But I paid for it because no matter how good I did, I could have done better. I think about how I trained when I finally kicked the bottle, and I go, if I had had this drive and this focus and this health when I was an amateur, who knows what my amateur career could have been. But I still had a pretty good amateur career. The best part about the program, aside from them paying for everything and the training, was that I got exposed to a lot of people. I made a lot of connections in the boxing world that I otherwise would not have been able to make. And I got to see what it was like to compete truly on a national level, which made me a better fighter because all of my competition was nationally ranked and were high-level guys.
Jim: During this thing, you had another opportunity, and it’s interesting—sometimes the luck goes against you. You’re gonna be fighting Dominic again, but this time, you have a bad case of the flu.
Ed: Yeah, what a crazy time. I don’t get sick that often. The Olympic trials in 2012 were at Fort Carson, Colorado. It’s a mile above sea level in February—I had my birthday right before we went. They flew five of us up there two weeks beforehand, paid for our hotel and food and everything so we could get acclimated to the altitude, which is a huge advantage because a lot of other guys couldn’t afford to come up and acclimate.
About a week and a half into the acclimation, I get wicked sick. It was bad. And you can’t really take any medicine because they piss test you. The active ingredient in a lot of those nasal decongestants—pseudoephedrine, I think that’s right.
Jim: Yeah, pseudoephedrine. That’s the one.
Ed: That’s a big no-no by the World Anti-Doping Agency. I couldn’t take that, and that’s what would have made a difference. I always say, if WADA says it’s okay, you’re probably wasting your money.
Jim: Yeah, the good shit’s the stuff that’s banned.
Ed: Yeah, for sure. And they piss test you right after the fight too, so it’s not random. I tried cough drops and Vicks, and none of it really worked. And then there was the fatigue—I couldn’t do anything about that. But I knew I could beat just about anyone in the tournament because of reputation. Fighting is interesting—if someone knows you can hit hard and you’re fast, they’re going to be a little tentative. You can really play that reputation up, especially when it’s only three rounds.
Since nobody knew I was sick, I’d be okay—unless I draw somebody who knows I’m sick, like somebody in the camps because we all came up together. And sure enough, I draw Dominic again. What perfect fate, like they’re writing this story for you. Not only are you gonna fight him again, but you’re gonna be sick. I go out there and fight, and I’m winning the first round. The second round becomes a little even, but I am winded—I mean, I’ve been tired before, but never that tired while fighting. It was another world. And I didn’t respond, so they call it RTD, retire in the corner at the pro level. I can’t remember what it’s called in the amateurs.
Jim: Don’t come back out for the next round.
Jim: Don’t come back out for the next round.
Ed: You don’t come out for the next round. And so I retired in the middle of the rounds between rounds two and three. Because I’m sitting there thinking, I’m like, okay, they’re not gonna cut me because somebody’s gotta win or nobody wins. But either way, at least four of us aren’t winning. And they’re not gonna cut all four of us because they sent five guys—they sent me, John Hamm, George Treval, Dominic Brazil, and Charles Martin, who also ended up becoming IBF champ as a pro. So they sent us up and I’m like, okay, only one of us can win. So I wasn’t really worried about getting cut at this point. And they knew I was sick. They knew I didn’t just get rolled over.
But what I did know is if I went out there and got knocked out, they’d put me on medical watch for a little bit because of the way they hired us—they hired us like employees because you can’t pay amateurs that way. They can’t get sponsorship officially in that regard, and they can’t get prize money. So instead they pay us like employees. Like, I had to pay taxes and got a W-2 and everything. But what that did was protect us under workman’s comp laws. So if you get injured at work, even though your job is boxing, they can’t fire you. But once you’re healthy, they’re gonna get rid of your ass, and they’re gonna speed track that, like get their own doctors.
So I said, you know what? Let me just call it in. This is not my day. This is not my time. And sure enough, Dominic goes on and wins the tournament and then wins the continental qualifier down in Rio. And in 2012, he makes the Olympic team. You know how great this is, though? Because Dominic made the Olympic team, and I beat Dominic even though it was before he was an Olympian. When we were looking for promoters as a professional, that’s a point on my resume. Like, that’s something that stands out, which is how I was able to get a promoter when I turned professional.
Jim: We gotta ask you this question. If you had been healthy, what do you think your chances would have been against Dominic?
Ed: At that point, he was better. I was better. I only know the first round is where I was like, okay. He ain’t gonna hate me if he hears this. I think I’d have won because he’s not gonna hate me because fighters all think they’re supposed to win. But even without my ego, man, being as objective as possible, just the way I remember the events and the way that fight was going, if I had my energy, let’s put it like this: I would have won on points or lost by getting knocked out because when you’re fighting a taller guy like that—and they did a good job with Dominic Ward, teaching him how to really use his distance way better than he did when we fought. And he’s just different. He’s tall, his distance. He’s taller than me by six inches, almost seven. He was really doing a great job keeping me away. And those are frustrating fights. So I would have had to kind of sell out and get in there. My defense wasn’t anything close to where it is now. So I would have had to take a few shots to get mine in, but when I got them in, they would have hurt. And so he would have had to get me out of there at one point.
Jim: So it sounds like it’d have been a hell of a battle, you’re telling me.
Ed: Oh, it was still a hell of a battle. Like, it just was one that I just didn’t have it in me. You know? I always wonder—it puts into perspective, you know, that game that Jordan played when he had the flu. That’s a hell of a feat because you get tired from running, and then there’s fatigue from illness. Very different types of tired and for different reasons.
Jim: Then you ended up getting hurt during sparring at about the same time that All American Heavyweight starts to unravel.
Jim: So it sounds like it’s been a hell of a battle, you’re telling me.
Ed: Oh, it was still a hell of a battle. Like, it just was one that I didn’t have it in me, you know? I always wonder—it puts into perspective, you know, that game that Jordan played when he had the flu. That’s a hell of a feat because there’s like tired from running, and then there’s fatigue from illness. Very different types of tired and for different reasons.
Jim: Then you ended up getting hurt during sparring at about the same time that All American Heavyweight starts to unravel.
Ed: Yeah. So All American Heavyweight unravels because when Dominic made the Olympics—and as I was writing the book, I made sure I interviewed Dominic so I could get his side of the story. I thought I understood it and I got it mostly right. But when he made the Olympics, now everyone’s courting him, not just All American Heavyweight. All American Heavyweight, to be fair, they took a guy who had never boxed before he was 22, built that guy up, invested in his whole career. He did not have a single amateur fight outside of All American Heavyweight. They built his career and his path and put a lot of money into it. They felt like he should stay with them even though they’re new to the pro game and didn’t know what they were doing.
He probably would have stayed if they had just flown his family out to see him fight in London. That’s not asking too much. That’s less than what a lot of guys who made the Olympic team got. I’m good friends with Terrell Gausha who was the 170-pounder that year from Cleveland. The city gave him a car, and he got to throw the first pitch at an Indians game. They treated their Olympians well, even if they didn’t win a medal—just making the team is pretty big. Because there’s no guarantee just because you won your country’s Olympic trials that you end up qualifying for the Olympics, and that’s a whole thing I go into in the book.
Point is, if you get to the Olympic match, you did a little more than just beat the best guys in your country. So Dominic was like, “I’m leaving.” And he went with Al Haymon and Premier Boxing Champions, which was a much more established promotion. When he left, that was like the end of All American Heavyweight. Their point was to get someone to the Olympics—they never considered what would happen when that person got there. One of those things being all the other promoters would come out of the woodwork. From a business perspective, they did the best they could because you can’t sign amateurs to promotional contracts. So they couldn’t lock him up. He was a free agent and he took the best option.
When he left, a lot of the money left. They started cutting down, dwindling everything. They started cutting guys—got rid of everyone they definitely weren’t going to work with. That left five of us: me, Dominic, John, George, and Charles. Dominic left, leaving four of us. George was a local kid—he wasn’t gang affiliated, but he had a lot of friends in gangs and every now and then he’d show up to practice with black eyes that he didn’t get from sparring. He was clearly still running in the streets. So it was a pretty easy choice for them to drop George. Plus George was my height but a little lighter.
That left me, John, and Charles. John Ham is six foot seven, Charles Martin is six foot five, I’m six foot one. They made a purely physical assessment—they just looked at the size and said, “Obviously, these guys are going to give us a better chance of achieving our goal than you. We don’t have the money to keep all of you guys.” Actually, they did have the money, but we’ll get to that.
My eye injury—I got sparring Charles, broke my orbital, and that required surgery. The workers’ comp thing kicked in, so they couldn’t get rid of me, but they were only required to pay me two-thirds of what they were paying me. I come back from my injury and start sparring and getting better. There was a fight for them to decide if they were going to keep me or let me go, but they didn’t tell me that. They just said, “It’s your first fight back, get better.”
I knew the game at this point because they had been pressing me to sign this contract. The contract wanted me to live in Los Angeles, and they were going to take away my stipend and my apartment. I’m like, “What are you doing? LA is like the fourth most expensive city in the world. You don’t even want to pay me that much for fights.” They were trying to pay like a thousand dollars a round. Right then they were paying me $3,000 a month plus covering my apartment. I said to them, “How am I supposed to survive? Break the math down for me. How am I going to live in this city?” You know what their answer was? “We’re just going to get you fights.”
That might work on somebody that doesn’t know anything. But see, a lot of guys that came into the program, including Charles and John who were left, and Dominic and George—none of them had fights beforehand. I had fought my way into the program, as opposed to the program saying, “You look like you’d be good for this program.” I had seen stuff and knew a little about the business. I knew they weren’t going to give me enough fights to live in LA. And even if they did, that’s no guarantee I’m going to win those fights because to keep me fighting at that pace, I’m going to have to fight some guys I might not be ready for.
They weren’t trying to hear any of my terms. I’m like, “Can you pay me more? Can you let me live where I want?” That’s another unusual thing—I’ve never heard of any promoter mandating the city that the fighter has to live in. They were trying to make that happen though because they wanted everything in-house in LA, and I’m like, “It ain’t gonna work.”
I knew my time was coming. My eye injury was protecting me from being cut. But once the eye injury healed, I had a fight and I think I won it, but I did not win officially. And I got cut. I got removed from the program. They didn’t really give me any time to get out of there—I had like two days to pack my stuff and get out of the apartment. Tough business. Very tough business. That would not be the first time I got the tough end of the business when things didn’t go well.
Jim: I think you returned home and fortunately, some friends took you in.
Ed: Yeah. If it wasn’t for them, I didn’t have any money. I had used the money I was being paid—I actually was smart about it this time, or at least smarter than I had been before—and used the money to pay down a bunch of debts to increase my credit score so I could get a car. Because if I hadn’t done that, I had no idea what the future would look like since I had to drive home. And that traumatized me, man. I was traumatized about driving for a long time because I did it broke. A trip across the country should be fun and relaxing, but this was not that. I had to sleep in my car most of the time and drive at night on, I think it’s I-80, the one that cuts across from Colorado all the way over to like Kentucky.
Jim: It was probably 70.
Ed: 70. Yeah. I was worried about tornadoes and stuff. Fortunately, I had great weather, like great weather the whole time. Very uncharacteristically good weather for that time of year. And it was a great experience in the sense that this was back before people were streaming—you remember when people had iPods? Now you talk to somebody who’s under 25, and they’re like, even really under 30 for real, but definitely under 25, I’m like, “What’s an iPod?”
Jim: We still have one in our car with 11,000 tracks on it.
Ed: Right. And crazy how technology flies, man. I remember when you carried the CD case around with you, and then it was iPod. And I was like, “Yo, what are you doing? Like, why do you even have music downloaded? You know, you can just stream this.” Like, different world.
Jim: You hung out with some of your buddies who took you in. You had a couple of jobs, none of which really kind of did much for you. And then—
Ed: You decided you better change your life and you joined the National Guard. Yeah, the Army, man. I needed money for school because I was selling phones. That was my job. And I was frustrated at just how terrible an opportunity it was. I didn’t like the work. I didn’t see the future. I wasn’t making enough money. And at that point in my life, it was like, okay, better go back to school. Gotta figure this thing out so I can get a degree and some real prospects for my life. I still wanted to box too, but I was an amateur. I wasn’t even a pro yet. And I said I need to go get money for school to go back. So that was why I enlisted in the National Guard, so I could get money to go to school. And then I would also be able to do the National Guard as opposed to active duty. So the whole one weekend a month, two weeks a year type deal. Now it doesn’t really work out that way, and sometimes you get deployed. That never happened to me. That would have thrown a wrench in my plans, but yeah, I did that and as a result I had to go off to basic training and do the whole AIT development thing. But before I left for basic training—I enlisted on January 4, didn’t leave till June 4—and I managed to get three pro fights in. And so my pro career started, and that was cool because it didn’t make that much of a difference in basic training. Though, at some point, my drill sergeants, they did like, they looked people up because we had to write this essay and they found who I was and that changed the perspective. First, I’m going into the Army as an older dude. Like, they’re—
Jim: I was gonna say you were, like, what? Twenty-seven or something?
Jim: Gonna say you were, like, what? Twenty-seven or something?
Ed: Twenty-seven. So some of my drill sergeants, I was older than. But that doesn’t matter because now it’s the rank and you got to treat them with respect. And that was easy for me. But they see I’m like there for a reason. So I’m not really messing around, and that buys me some good favor in basic training that made a difference at one point.
I was terrible at shooting, took a long time for me to learn how to shoot. And I had failed my shooting terribly. And if you fail shooting, you get recycled. You get sent back to beginning of basic training and your whole date for everything gets jacked up, pushed out. I ended up officially failing, but I got one more try and I made it, like barely made it. You got to hit twenty-three out of forty. I hit twenty-three out of forty. And I was like, okay, we’re in.
And then I got to AIT, and AIT is really where it was a really great experience. AIT for people who don’t know—so you go to basic training, BCT, basic combat training, and then you go to AIT, advanced individual training for your MOS, your military occupational specialty. And my AIT was twenty-two weeks, but it got shortened to eighteen weeks because it would have run through the holiday. And something I didn’t know, even in trade doc, which is what basic training and AIT are—the training portion—you still get a holiday break. Like, they’ll send you home and back. They’ll do it as efficiently as possible, but you still get a holiday break. They looked at our class and then decided we’re not gonna do that. We’re just gonna accelerate it and then cut it short.
So I did my AIT, and it was a really great experience because I really got to like be a person and make friends for the first time in my adult life without alcohol. Basic training, I tell people the difference between basic training and AIT: basic training is like prison without the violence, and AIT is like college without the booze. So the big thing to take from that is that in basic training, you don’t have any freedoms. There ain’t no socializing in basic training. In AIT, it’s pretty much like you wake up, you go to class, you could talk, you can have your phone, all that stuff. You can’t talk in basic training. And then the evening is yours to hang out, socialize, use your computer, whatever you want to do.
I’ve made a lot of friends, people I still talk to this day. And I made these friends, you know, fondly—like it was weird. There’s that theme of me in college and in LA where I’m kind of weird at making friends, but there’s also the background of booze both times. In AIT, there’s no booze. And people kinda look at me like, “Okay, here’s this older guy here, but he’s kicking our ass in the physical stuff.” Because at this point, I’m in pro shape. I had no problem with the run test. I think thirteen minutes for the two-mile, which is blazing. I don’t think I can do that now. I might be able to, but definitely that’s fast. And I’m doing well in the class. So these people respect me. I’m building this friend group out of respect and making these connections without the booze. That really helped me finally get sober. It was one of the main reasons I was able to get sober and stay that way. Because I had a new identity for the first time without alcohol. Like, with new people, new place. Because, you know, that didn’t happen in fighting. Was shit in fighting. If anything, I probably drank more when I first started fighting than before because that’s part of the weird warrior culture, you know, drinking booze, and guys fighting. But here at AIT, where there was no booze, it was a pretty good time.
Jim: And you basically were in an advanced electronics program as I recall.
Jim: And you basically were in an advanced electronics program as I recall.
Ed: Yeah. My MOS was land combat electrical systems missile repair. What a mouthful—94 Alpha. And as part of that, you have to go through basic mechanical and electronic maintenance, or BMAT as we called it. It’s a six-week advanced electronics course, hands-on eight hours a day, five days a week. Then you start working on the weapons as well. We worked on the weapon system for the military: Javelin, ITAS, and something else. The Bradley tanks—that’s what the military uses, but we don’t really use tanks anymore. We still gotta know how to use them and fix them and all that good stuff.
When I got out, I was like, “You know, I’ve earned a drink.” Let me go drink. I drank too much—drank so much that I don’t remember how I got where I got for the night. I just knew I drove. When I woke up the next day, I was like, “This is rough, man.” Like, we’re taking a major risk with my life. I thought about how I’m in the Army now, my pro career is just starting, I’m enrolled in school finally, and I think I’m gonna really be able to do it this time. And I had just met Anna. Honestly, I was like, “You know what? This is a really nice girl.” That was my thought process. I was like, what a nice girl. I don’t want to expose her to the nonsense. If we break up, I don’t want it to be because I did something under the influence. I want it to be because we aren’t compatible. Let’s rule out the alcohol because I like her a lot, and let’s see where this goes. She’s still here—I have my son now. So, I had a great outcome.
December 23, 2013, that’s when I got my first full day of sobriety. I did go to one AA meeting, but it wasn’t for me. Every time I tell this story, I thought I was unique. What we learn in recovery is that none of us are really unique. We all got the same problem and we all have approached it the same way. I went to that AA meeting and I’m listening to—one woman told the group about how she lost custody of her kids because of her drinking. And this is drinking, not Narcotics Anonymous, to be clear. I was like, “Wow.” And another guy was like, “I’m here as part of my condition for my release from prison.” I was like, “Yo, this is a big deal. Like these people got problems. I have a drinking problem. That’s not me. I’m not these people.”
Four years later, a guy reached out to me on Twitter and was like, “Hey man, I’ve been following your stuff on sobriety. You really helped me. I’m gonna be in town. I’d like to meet you and let’s go to a meeting so you can get your chip.” For those who don’t know, you get chips for your sobriety milestones—first day, first month, year, and so on. So I go to the meeting with him to get my chip and to share. And I’m listening to other people share, and my reaction this time was, “Holy shit, I’m just like everyone else here.” Like everyone—down to the problems and the issues.
It wasn’t because they were different shares than the first time I went, but my perspective on why I drink—or why I drank at that point—had changed. I understood and knew more about myself. I understood why I was drinking. I understood what I thought I was getting from it. The only difference between me and those people the first time wasn’t the drinking or anything like that—it was that I had gotten lucky. That’s all it is, is luck.
While I was drinking, I’ve been pulled over four different times that I can count, that I’m aware of in my memory. Four times where if the cops decided it’s time to go to jail, I couldn’t have said anything. In fact, one time I got pulled over, they had me do a field sobriety test. I do the test, I think I do great. They’re like, “Alright, go sit in the car.” Then after a few minutes, they come over and say, “Look, you’re probably a little over the limit tonight, so you need to hurry up and get home.”
I didn’t take that as a sign that maybe I should stop drinking. Fortunately, I didn’t need to keep getting hit over the head with that same lesson repeatedly. I always say, look, I got to get lucky every time I drink and drive—the cops only got to get lucky once. I worked the math out on this in an article I wrote. It ends up being about one in every 2,700 times someone drinks and drives, like aggregate in the population, do they get pulled over. That’s frightening for a lot of reasons. One, because we like to think that if you get behind the wheel and drink, you definitely going to get pulled over and that’s going to be the end of it. You think about people you’ve met with a DUI, and you don’t think about what you’re not seeing, which are all the people who have driven and not got caught. I worked with a guy once at Starbucks—this guy had four DUIs. I’m like, “Bro, what are you doing?”
Jim: I have a friend who had five DUIs by the time he was twenty-one. He got revoked for five years, and he went back and bought a racing motorcycle and said the cops ain’t never catching me again. And they didn’t.
Ed: But to get it that many times, given what we know about, like, the math.
Jim: I have a friend who had five DUIs by the time he was twenty-one. He got revoked for five years, and he went back and bought a racing motorcycle and said the cops ain’t never catching me again. And they didn’t.
Ed: But to get it that many times, given what we know about the math . . .
Jim: Yeah. You gotta be all over the road, and you know, not just a little buzz. You’re like a drunk driver getting busted four or five times. Obviously problematic.
Ed: Yeah, exactly. That’s a really big deal there. And then on top of that, every time you get behind the wheel with a little bit of booze in your system, if you do get in any type of situation where something goes crazy, that’s going to be—I don’t know if this is the exact word—an enhancement to your charge.
There’s a great movie, Shot Caller, about this guy. The actor is the same guy who plays Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones. He plays this white-collar guy—I think he’s in insurance or the stock market, one of those finance careers. He goes out with his wife and friends one night for some wine, gets a little buzzed, and then gets into a vehicular collision and kills someone. Because he was drunk, I think he got two years. He goes to either San Quentin or Chino, one of those rough prisons in California. While he’s in there, he has to gang up to survive. And while he’s ganged up, he ends up getting an additional seven years in the end.
I always think about that movie because the whole reason he ends up doing life in prison eventually is it all started with two years from a glass of wine. That’s the worst-case scenario—you kill somebody. But I’m happy to be sober. Very happy to have gotten it under control because once I put the bottle down and really threw myself into what I was trying to accomplish, which was just not be a dickwad, not be losing life, things really took off in all phases of my life.
Jim: You sound like you were a madman, the amount of things you had going. You were starting a pro boxing career, you were taking hard courses in college preparing for a physics degree, you were working, developing tutoring—it’s just like you were a totally on kind of guy. Tell us a little bit about that period of your life.
Ed: So when I got back in 2013, then 2014 kicks off with a blast because I’m back in the gym training. I had to get a job because the Guard doesn’t actually pay anything except drill, and that’s like $150. I got a job at a bank, I still had the military drills, and I’m trying to manage this new relationship. So I’m just busy, busy, busy—gym, training, work, school, school, and school. I’m not taking BS classes. At this point they are kind of BS because it’s the community college prereqs, but it’s still like seventeen credits a semester. It’s still work. It might not be the most taxing work yet, but it’s still taxing.
For the first year and some months, I don’t even go out and socialize. I’m just always doing something. What that did though, is—I’ll talk about sobriety like it’s a habit because that’s what it is. Sobriety is a habit just like drinking. You got to give your sobriety time to get strong. I spent that year letting my sobriety get strong and continuing to build my identity as a respectable person, someone who people would want to look up to. It felt better than being liked, being respected from all this stuff I was doing.
By the time I was introduced to alcohol again in a social setting, I was not even interested at all. I had to trick myself to stop drinking first of all. I said, “I’m going to stay sober until I graduate from college, write a book, or win a major fight.” And after a year, I was like, I’m never drinking again. Why would I go back to this? I just felt so much better about me. I don’t know how much different my health was—I was exhausted all the time, living on coffee, making pots of coffee at like 9 PM. But I felt good because of that busyness. And I was making moves in fighting and school. I was just making progress the way I thought I should make progress in my life.
Jim: Cool. And so at this point, you have turned pro, against the advice of your coach.
Jim: Life. Cool. And so at this point, you have turned pro, against the advice of your coach. He wants—
Ed: Stay amateur as long as possible because the amateur career, the amateur game is where you learn to fight. When you go pro, you still can learn to fight, but the difference now is that your record is your bargaining chip. If you lose when you’re pro, it’s always with you. If you ever had any chance of getting better, you’ll have to lose a bunch of fights to get better. And then what do you have? You just got a beat-up body with this bad record that you can’t cash in for a big payday.
To put this into perspective, after I lost my first pro fight, I started getting calls for fights for like $20,000-$30,000 because I had a good record, but they thought I was beatable. Meanwhile, if my record had been like fifteen and seven, I’m not getting calls for those fights. I’ll get calls for fights, but it won’t be for five figures.
He wanted me to continue to learn how to fight. The better you do as an amateur, the easier your pro career will be, or at least the more profitable. But it starts at a point and quickly escalates. There are guys who won national championships who don’t get a promoter. If you get to the Olympics, you’ll always get a promoter, period, and it’ll be the best deal you can get.
There’s not really a middle ground. Obviously not everyone can be signed to a promotion company, but it’s not like the draft where there are only 252 spots. Amateur career, especially if you make any noise or beat notable people, makes your life a lot easier. Otherwise, you’re going to be stuck fighting in club shows until you build your record up.
I’ve seen this happen to many guys I know. They build their record up fighting local bums in West Virginia. Nobody that offers any real resistance. And because they got like a thirteen, fourteen and zero record, they get a call because everybody’s record is on BoxRec. They’ll say, “Hey, we’re gonna have you come fight this guy for $20,000 in Madison Square Garden on the undercard of the Canelo Alvarez fight. If you win, we’ll sign you. If you lose, well, we’re not gonna sign you.”
Jim: So you get a lot—
Ed: Of guys who end up going down that route. They pad their record. They don’t think they’re padding their record. Most fighters don’t realize there’s just a very real limit to what you can accomplish without the money and connections of a promoter. They end up being fed to the gods with promoters, unless they pull off an upset.
My coach wanted me to stay amateur because of all this. But I didn’t know what he was saying. I felt that with my experience in LA—Charles Martin hadn’t done anything yet, but I had beat him twice, and Dominic had become an Olympian, and I had beat him—I thought I had a pretty good chance of going pro. Worst case, I was just gonna see where this was gonna go. And I fought for, like, I won’t say no money, but like $100, $200.
Jim: Yeah. I was amazed at that. I mean, you’re like—one of your paydays is $700. You had to do most of the promotion. I go, damn. You can make more money as an assistant manager at Wendy’s.
Jim: Yeah. I was amazed at that. I mean, you’re like—one of your paydays is $700. You had to do most of the promotion. I go, damn. You can make more money as an assistant manager at Wendy’s.
Ed: Man, I tell guys all the time. If you want to fight for money, go get a job. You’re probably fighting—the reason you’re fighting doesn’t exist. What you see is like the very top of the pyramid where you see this gossip money, and you ain’t gonna make it there because you’re fighting for money. You’re not gonna be willing to put in the hard hours and develop yourself as an amateur where there is no money. And you’re not gonna put in the time and make the sacrifices to do this for three or four years to develop your abilities because there is no money. I tell guys all the time, go do something else. If this is about money for you, nah, you could get a job. You’ll make more money. You’ll make it faster too. And you won’t get your head busted. Yeah. Like there’s gotta be something wrong with you in a very special way to fight and to fight well because you need to simultaneously be disciplined but reckless.
Jim: So that’s you. Was that you at the time?
Ed: That’s me now. Coming from my comeback fight, I can’t tell you—my coach is my friend. I can’t tell you how long he tried to talk me out of it. Here’s what he did. That’s a perfect example. After he showed me enough videos to just warn me about how dangerous it is, I’m like, “Dog, I did this for life. Like, it’s not like I’m fresh chicken. Like, you coach me. I know how dangerous the sport is.” Then he shows me a video of me sparring this guy, Tif Oberton. And Tif is like—I think he’s ranked eighth in the WBC and maybe something else. Point is he’s a good fighter. He’s been fighting for a long time. I’m coming off a layoff, a long layoff at that. And he shows me sparring, he shows me a slow-down video of something my foot does. He goes, “You see that? I think you still got brain damage from a hit you took eight years ago. You be careful.” And I was saying, “Okay, okay, okay. Tom, how about—I mean, maybe. Or how about this? Hear me out. Tif has been fighting continuously for a decade. I have been off almost a decade. Let’s see how I do in a month.” And it took two weeks, and he was like, “Okay.”
But there’s gotta be something wrong with you in a certain way. You gotta be fearless. It’s like if you get to be a surgeon, you gotta be comfortable—not just comfortable, but you kinda gotta like—I don’t wanna say enjoy. You gotta shut off that part of you that has a natural revulsion to blood and guts that we all have. And I think we all have that same aversion to violence as well, or at least getting hit and physical pain. But for whatever reason, there’s something off up here. And it’s often the right combination because you also gotta be disciplined. You can’t just be stupid.
Jim: Yep. Indeed. Indeed. You progress through your professional career. You have, what, about 13 fights, something like that. You’re looking pretty good. And then the big time, you get invited to be on national TV. And I actually watched that fight. Pulled it up on YouTube. The only one I could find.
Ed: Yeah. That’s the only one that’s out there. You know how long it took me to make sure that’s not the first thing that comes up when you look up Ed Latimore? And then now if you look up Ed Latimore boxing, it should be the first thing that comes up.
Jim: I put in “Ed Latimore fight,” and that was the first thing that came up. Anyway, will you tell the story and I’ll give you my perspective after watching it?
Ed: I thought I was doing great. And then he hit me—because it took me like seven months to watch this fight, by the way. I couldn’t watch it. And then he hit me with a right around my glove, if I remember right. And it was a great shot. Like, was just a good shot, and it disrupted my balance. And I thought I had slipped when he hit me. And that’s what I told myself. And then I got up again, and no, I didn’t slip. I was like, that was jacked up. And then he hit me again up against the ropes. And I took—I think I took a knee or maybe I fell, but I think I took a knee. I haven’t watched it in a long time. It took me a while to watch and I haven’t watched it since. But, yeah, it was first round smoked by just a good punch. That’s how crazy heavyweight boxing is. One shot landed and I’m not grounded the right way, I’m not defending the right way. Jacks me all up in one round.
Jim: Yeah. That was my take watching it that you guys seemed well matched, but you seemed a little bit more skilled and precise in how you were working the ring. And so my totally—I mean, I watched fighting since I was young. My father was a big fight fan. I even saw Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard fight one time. That was pretty cool.
Ed: That was the only time they fought. That’s when they say they brought Hagler’s—it’s close. I could see them giving it to Ray officially, but it—
Jim: Yeah. That was my take watching it that you guys seemed well matched, but you seemed a little bit more skilled and precise in how you were working the ring. I’ve watched fighting since I was young. My father was a big fight fan. I even saw Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard fight one time. That was pretty cool.
Ed: That was the only time they fought. That’s when they say they brought Hagler’s. It’s close. I could see them giving it to Ray officially.
Jim: Sugar Ray was from near my hometown, fought with the boys club boxing. That’s when he got started. So he was our hometown favorite. By my minimal knowledge, you seemed like you had better ring generalship. But once you took that hit, you were a different man. You were done. You made the count. You took your two steps forward. You raised the gloves. He let you go. But I could see this ain’t the same dude. The starch was taken out of him with that shot. So as you say, luck turned that way that day.
Ed: You know, I never call that luck, because for me to call that luck takes away from what Trey did and his training and all that. But what I will say is he’s got—it’s like Deontay Wilder. Trey’s no Deontay Wilder, but Deontay Wilder fought a lot of guys who were more skilled than him, but that power in that right hand completely erases any deficit in skill if it connects. And that’s what happened.
Jim: So you fought one more fight and it ended up as a draw, as I recall. Is that right?
Ed: Ended up as a draw. Yeah. Draw against the guy that I had beaten before. My heart wasn’t in it because at this point in my life, they fired me immediately. Rock Nation cut me immediately, which means I lost my money, so I had to get a job. The only job I could find was delivering packages, but I quit that job after the van malfunction almost killed me.
I’m still going to fight because that’s what I think makes the most sense. We had a deal because they screwed us a little bit on the money for that fight with Trey. They ended up guaranteeing us a second fight down there regardless of the outcome. But I just didn’t want to be in the gym. I had taken that semester off. I said I’m going to just take a year off from the sport. And that’s what I did. I went to school, ended up getting connected as a tutor, turned out to be the most—you know, really, you can miss being great at something by focusing on what you’re good at. That’s the way I think about tutoring. In another life, I would do that full time. It pays extremely well. It’s really satisfying. The only thing that sucks is the hours are dead smack in the afternoon when kids get off from school. I could easily see myself being a private teacher, but they just get paid even less than public teachers.
Jim: You laid off boxing for a year, but turned out to be permanent. Then you went and got your physics degree from Duquesne University. That’s impressive. Some of the courses you took—woah. Right? So from a kid who couldn’t do algebra, you came a long damn way.
Ed: Yeah. I credit boxing with giving me the confidence to do that because I went from seeing how much I improved in boxing. I went from being like a slugger that couldn’t even beat a regional kid, a kid in my city, not even a regional kid, to getting to a national champion level. And I said, well, if I did that with my body, why can’t I do that with my mind?
I went back and broke down where all my deficiencies were in math and worked them systematically. This was before all these tutorials on YouTube. Granted, this was still easier than had I attempted this ten years prior, but I found every book I could on every level of math. I was doing problems. I’m so comfortable with fractions now because of all that work I did, just rebuilding my mathematical base. And as you know, you can’t do physics without math. I laugh when people tell me they had a physics class without calculus. I’m like, how does that work? Calculus gives you tools where you can do these problems more precisely and with less effort. But what do I know? I’m just a kid who failed high school.
Jim: And so you got your degree. You’ve written a couple of books. You’ve got some following online. What’s next in life for Ed? You’re married? You have a child?
Ed: Yeah. The big thing that’s coming next is this book launch, this book we’re working on. But in terms of outside of that, one, I’m definitely fighting again, and we’ll see how that goes. Two, I’m working on booking speaking because I also found out I really enjoyed that. You know what I think it is? It’s like that part of me that fights. It’s like, here’s this stressful situation that makes people feel stressed. They try to avoid it. I’m like, I have no problem. My wife thinks I’m a psycho because I like singing karaoke. It’s the same idea. And I sing karaoke sober.
Jim: Oh my god. I got one karaoke song. I can do a pretty rocking version of “House of the Rising Sun.”
Jim: Of books. You’ve got some following online. What’s next in life for Ed? You’re married? You have a child?
Ed: Yeah. The big thing that’s coming next is this book launch, this book we’re working on. But in terms of, like, outside of that, one, I’m definitely fighting again, and we’ll see how that goes. Two, I’m working on booking out speaking because I also found out I really enjoyed that. And the act of public speaking. It’s like that part of me that fights. It’s like, here’s this stressful situation that makes people feel stressed. They try to avoid it. I’m like, I have no problem. My wife thinks I’m a psycho because I like singing karaoke. It’s the same idea. And I sing karaoke sober. Remember?
Jim: Oh my god. I got one karaoke song. I can do a pretty rocking version of “House of the Rising Sun.”
Ed: I love “House of the Rising Sun.” I can do that. I sing a lot of the Doors songs. Recently, you know what I came out to for this fight? I came out to “Big Love” by Fleetwood Mac. So that’s like the taste of my music.
Jim: Classic rocker. Right.
Ed: And also I’m working on fiction. So the next book project will be fiction.
Jim: I will say this, that you are a gifted writer. We talked about this in the pregame. I’m a good talker, but I ain’t much of a writer. I can write, but I’m slow, and I’m not very elegant. Out there, if you like what you’ve heard today with Ed, this is a very well-written book. I mean, it sucked me right in. I read it in about three days.
Ed: I wish people could see me react. That is—man, look. Someone else said this, and I gotta make sure I’m super clear because in the world of nonfiction, they don’t really care if you can write. It’s a nice bonus, but they don’t care because they’ll just hire someone else. I wrote my book.
Jim: I could tell after watching a couple of videos of you that you speak very similarly to the way you write, which is you have a certain cadence, and it’s very clear, and it’s engaging, and it’s personal all at the same time. So I was 99 percent sure you wrote the book yourself.
Ed: And I’ll fight anybody on it who’s like, look—
Jim: Old man. He will kick your ass too. He’s a professional heavyweight boxer.
Ed: No ghostwriters because ghostwriters are really expensive for what they do.
Jim: And most of them actually subtract value if you have any talent.
Ed: Right? That is very much they—
Jim: Make it bland. They don’t make it. This book is not bland. This book does not fuck around.
Ed: Right?
Jim: He tells some harsh shit. Right? And but yet does it in a very human way. So go get this book because it’ll be out right as we’re releasing this episode, “Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business” by Ed Latimore. I think you will enjoy this book. I know I did.
Ed: That means a lot, Jim, man. It really does. Like, you made my day.
Jim: You’ve made my day with a wonderful podcast. This has been a hell of a lot of fun.
Ed: Hey. Thank you.