For Frank Gore and Deron Williams, a difficult part of their transition to boxing has been the jogging. It’s at a slower pace than they were used to.
For Gore, a running back, he always sprinted and pulled sleds, cutting into gaps and understanding angles. And for Williams, a guard, his sport consisted of sprints, shuttle runs and a “different level of cardio.”
“I ran 4 miles yesterday,” Williams said during a Tuesday press conference at the Edison Ballroom. “That’s four more miles than I’ve ever ran in my life in one continuous go.”
It’s why their fight on Jake Paul and Tommy Fury’s undercard, announced last week, was so surprising on the surface. Both participants were out of their comfort zones. They each retired from the sport that propelled them to fame. They never had boxed professionally. But at the same time, boxing, and their upcoming match against each other, injected the thrill of training for a competition back into their lifestyles.
Williams, a part-time owner of Fortis MMA in Dallas, said his boxing experience compared to getting thrown into a fire and having to adjust on the fly, and the two separate experiments will now clash at Tampa’s Amalie Arena on Dec. 18.
“There’s a lot of unknowns in this fight,” Williams said, “and I think that’s what makes it exciting.”
Williams always has been drawn to combat sports, and wrestling became the first sport he competed in while growing up. At 5 years old, his mother asked if he wanted to wrestle, and he replied “OK” without really knowing what that meant. That season, Williams cried as his mother dragged him to the mat because he was too scared. The crying, the pins by his opponent, and then the dejected walks back, became routine.
“ ‘Well, I already paid for it, so you’re gonna do this every weekend,’ ” Williams recalled his mother saying.
Around the halfway point of the following season, though, something clicked for Williams.
“I kind of turned into a little animal,” he said.
And from there, he went on to win two state championships in Texas, continuing the sport until he reached high school because it conflicted with basketball. Basketball then defined the rest of Williams’ life, just as football did for Gore.
In the NFL, Gore finished third all time for career rushing yards, and said that he started boxing for the first time in 2005, his rookie season with the 49ers, to help with cardio. He didn’t know the proper way to fight, and the people he trained with didn’t care about what he accomplished in football, he said. He also couldn’t “hide behind other guys” like he could in 11-on-11 football — the option to take plays off, to take a breather, didn’t exist, Gore said.
The length of their newfound boxing careers remains undetermined. When asked, Williams noted that he’s 37 years old. This opportunity had come out of nowhere, four years after he retired.
“I just want to see how December 18 goes,” Gore said, “and I’ll go from there after that.”
“Same thing,” Williams added from across the Ballroom stage. “I want to focus on Frank and that’s as far as it gets for me.”