by “I’m calm but also a little anxious and definitely nervous,” Regis Prograis says in his room at the top of a posh hotel in downtown San Francisco. Books, bags, shirts, shoes, water bottles, and boxing gloves are set aside as he makes room for me to sit next to him on a couch. He is the WBC junior welterweight world champion, but his title defense against the undefeated Devin Haney carries a magnitude and risk that Prograis faces with characteristic honesty.
The 25-year-old challenger may not hit as hard as Prograis, but, coming into this Saturday night fight as the former undisputed world champion in the lower lightweight division, many experts consider Haney the likely winner of one of the boxing championships. The most important fights of the year. Haney, who calls himself The Dream, has great skill and returns to his hometown and where he spent the first seven years of his golden life.
Prograis, on the other hand, survived the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in his hometown of New Orleans and overcame poverty while educating himself through his keen intelligence and voracious appetite for reading. He is nine years older than Haney and, with his dry wit, has to remind everyone that he is a two-time world champion and that he is in control of his own destiny. Prograis also points out with a shrug that even his own promoter, Eddie Hearn, seems to favor Haney by treating him as the top fighter in this compelling contest.
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As a boxing historian and champion fascinated by the psychology of elite sport, Prograis is more interested in coming to terms with the tension and fear that all fighters experience before a brutal test. “You need these nerves because they give you an advantage,” he continues as he recalls Mike Tyson’s legendary first trainer. “Cus D’Amato used to say that if you’re not nervous, you’re either lying or crazy. So you have to have this nervous energy. I visualize the outcome and I see a real good night for me and the destruction of Haney, but until we get to the arena I have this anxiety. “I want to fight now.”
D’Amato also said: “Fear is like fire. It can warm you, cook your food and give you light in the dark. But if it gets out of control, it can hurt you and even kill you. “Fear is the friend of exceptional people.”
Prograis is one of the most interesting men I have met in 30 years of writing about boxing. No other fighter talks about boxing literature with the knowledge and insight he does and I’m curious to know how he controls the fire of fear before the most important night of his life. “You know me,” he says. “I’m always reading and now I’m immersed in this.”
Pick up a worn, heavily underlined copy of a book on psychology. “I’ve already read this twice, so I’m just going over a few things. I have been training four months for this fight and I want to make sure all this hard work brings me victory. Although I’m still cutting weight, I’m pretty close. [to the 140lb limit] and I am full of energy. I am fast, strong, sharp and my mind is good. “I’m just looking forward to time passing so I can reach my destination.”
Haney acknowledges that Prograis is probably the best champion and biggest puncher in a fiercely competitive division. But the older man has not yet received the recognition he deserves. After his solitary loss, when he was unlucky not to get at least a draw in a Fight of the Year contender against Josh Taylor in London in October 2019, Prograis lost his WBA world title and then fought just three fights. Over the next three years she flitted between various promotional outfits. Last November he finally became world champion again by outlasting and stopping Jose Zepeda to win the WBC belt.
“I was in boxing purgatory,” Prograis says quietly. “The first fight [after Taylor] was on the card and none of those three opponents in three years made me nervous. But all that frustration made me stronger and I have a good family. I have my [Brazilian] wife and three children, we travel a lot and I am a good husband and father. So I kept that life separate and never stopped believing in myself, even when things felt bad in boxing.
“That’s how it’s been since Katrina. [when Prograis and his family lost everything to the hurricane, which decimated New Orleans in 2005, and they had to start again in Houston]. “My dad always says I had a harder road than everyone else, but I keep going.”
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By examining his past adversity and admitting his nerves this week, Prograis shows real courage. For all of boxing’s bravado, there’s something far more powerful about hearing a world champion speak so openly about the restlessness that grips even the best fighters. He believes that he “learns most in failure or defeat” and spelling him in the desert has strengthened him. By comparison, Haney appears untouched by life, and even immature.
“I’ve tasted defeat and frustration,” Prograis says. “I’ve been in a locker room after losing and I never want to go back there again. When you taste failure it makes you much stronger. Devin has never failed, so it’s hard to know how she will react. He up until now he’s been winning [with a 30-0 record compared to Prograis and his 29-1] but when things get too difficult on Saturday, he could retire.”
I ask Progais how he feels about his promoter’s apparent support for Haney, with whom Hearn has a one-fight contract. At the opening press conference, Hearn first addressed Prograis and his team, which is the role of the underdog before the champion has the final say, to reveal the pecking order in his promotional mentality. The same routine was developed in the last press conference on Thursday. But on both occasions Prograis insisted on being presented second.
“It’s great,” Prograis says in his languid accent. “I told him, ‘Eddie, I know Devin is your guy, but he’s fine. “I’m going to give him a good beating.”
Prograis is a fun talker, but for this fight, he’s mostly let Evins Tobler, his loud strength and conditioning coach, yell at Haney and his father, Bill, who trains him. Tobler used to be a prominent long jumper in the 1980s and often competed against Carl Lewis. He is a fiery and funny man and lashed out at Hearn for not respecting Prograis as champion. Since then, Tobler and Haney Sr. have punctuated a rowdy buildup with street-style slander fights. Prograis was just as profane and vocal on Thursday.
“Bill is like everyone I met on the street,” Prograis says now. “He knows the lingo and I’ve been around these guys my whole life. Devin has had a privileged life and needs his dad to be the big dog. Devin doesn’t look comfortable, but my entire team comes from that street background, so all this trash talk means nothing to us. But we are not going to allow them to treat me like the challenger. I am the champion and I told Devin that he was going to hurt him a lot. He’s a cocky kid who thinks it’s an easy fight. His dad knows I’m going to take him into deep water, but I don’t think Devin understands.”
Haney’s confidence was boosted by Prograis’ last fight when, fighting at home in New Orleans after many years away, the champion became caught up in pre-fight distractions where he spent more time doing countless interviews and arranging tickets instead of concentrate on the uncomfortable Danielito. Zorrilla. A judge gave the decision to Zorrilla while the other two cards were awarded to Prograis for seven and nine rounds. It had still been a bad performance.
Prograis believes Haney would never have agreed to fight him if he hadn’t seen that laborious defense: “I think he might underestimate me, which is a good thing.”
It is Prograis’ credit that he opens up in a long and introspective interview in the midst of the usual and devastating weight cut. “We are reaching the most difficult moment now, which is the night before. [Friday’s] weighing. That night is miserable.”
He talks vividly about taking one steam bath after another, with a temperature so high he can barely stand it, while starving and dehydrating. “Last time, the night before the weigh-in, she weighed 146 pounds. So I had to lose 6 pounds that night. This time it will be easier.
“You have to come from a certain background because it is very difficult. You have to be very disciplined, very dedicated, to endure this pain. I’m not even talking about the emotions of boxing, when you have so many feelings running through you. It’s a lot and you get doubts in your head when you’re losing all that weight because you don’t feel like yourself. But once the weigh-in is done and I can eat again, I feel like myself. Okay then. It’s showtime.”
Prograis is one of the most outspoken critics of boxing’s terrible anti-doping record. Just before beating Zepeda he lamented to me that neither he nor his opponent had been tested. “This fight has been very different,” he exclaims now. “I have been tested six times [during his training camp]. That’s crazy. Last fight [against Zorrilla in June], they didn’t do any testing. But now six Vada have passed [Voluntary Anti-Doping Association] tests and they say that Haney is also being tested.”
He nods when I suggest he can at least prove he’s clean while his coach, Bobby Benton, follows the insidious rise of doping. “Bobby has been in the sport much longer than me and he believes that more than 90% of fighters cheat. I say, ‘Man, no!’ I’m so clean because I don’t even take supplements in case they have something in them. We know that many of the best fighters in history were [doping]. “I just never want to believe it.”
Prograis differs from most boxers in his willingness to talk about taboo topics, from hidden vulnerabilities to systemic doping. But he’s also determined to get the recognition he deserves and, as he approaches the most crucial night of his career, he speaks forcefully. “Last night I had a dream and it was after the fight. “I was with Eddie Hearn.”
He laughs. “It sounds like a nightmare, but he had just beaten Haney. We were in the car together and I had won the fight. That’s what I see all the time: come out on top. “I’m trapped in that vision.”
Prograis lies back on the couch as, at least for now, the intensity fades. “When that happens, I will be super happy, so much so that I might cry a little, because I will be grateful to show the world what I have always known: that this is my destiny.”
He won’t be the only one likely to shed tears Saturday night in San Francisco. “My mom is very nervous,” Prograis says with another smile. “She cries all the time. She can make everyone cry. But I know you will cry tears of happiness once it is all over.”
