Trainer Kenny Porter spent some time chatting with reporters and discussed a big upcoming lightweight fight between Devin Haney and Joseph Diaz Jr. Breaking down the fight Porter reflects on his time spent with both fighters and why he thinks it’s a difficult fight to make a call on. Check out some of what he had to say below.
Kenny Porter on who he sees winning Haney-Diaz
“That’s a tough one for me. There’s two things going on there, and I know all these guys take this stuff personal. You should not. You signed up for this, people gonna talk about you…So here we’ve got Devin, ultra talented fighter, born in the gym basically, been around some of the greatest trainers — not some, been around the greatest trainers in the world, everybody from Mayweather to Roy Jones Jr, greatest fighter Roy Jones Jr…He’s been around all these great people. I even spent a year or two in the gym with him. So he’s absorbed so much from being with these people.
“I used to say if you go to college you can learn a lot of things from a book. But if you are also able to travel the world and go places and experience things, you can learn a lot of things through the experiences. So you balance that out, right. This kid (Haney) has got all these great experiences with all these great people, right.
“Now switch it over to JoJo. I was with JoJo for a year in Colorado Springs on the Olympic team. I was a technical coach for the 2012 Olympic team. Pound-for-pound on that Olympic team — no knock against anybody, my job was to do an assessment on everybody on the team and also an assessment on everyone we were going to fight. Not just who was in the tournament but who had medaled in any tournament leading up to that or even in the previous Olympics. So I had to look at tape at guys all the way from 2008 up to 2012 because some of those guys from ‘08 was returning again in ‘12. Oleksandr Usyk, who we got a decision over, was one of those guys.
“So that was my job. Pound-for-pound, JoJo was the most technically sound fighter on the team. And he’s had all these experiences of national tournaments, going to world championships, going to the Olympics. So this is what’s going on between him and Devin, the ultra talent and then this guy who’s fundamentally extremely sound and has been to all of these different tournaments. So I haven’t decided who I think is gonna win that fight but I think it’s gonna be a great one.”