“I’m calm but I’m also a little anxious, and definitely nervous,” Regis Prograis says in his room high up in a swanky hotel in downtown San Francisco. Books, bags, shirts, shoes, water bottles and boxing gloves are swept to one side as he makes space for me to sit next to him on a sofa. He is the WBC junior-welterweight world champion but his title defence against the unbeaten Devin Haney carries a magnitude and jeopardy that Prograis confronts with trademark honesty.
The 25-year-old challenger might not hit as hard as Prograis but, coming into this bout on Saturday night as the former undisputed world champion in the division below at lightweight, Haney is regarded by many pundits as the likely winner of one of boxing’s biggest fights of the year. Haney, who calls himself The Dream, has great skill and he is returning to the city of his birth and where he spent the first seven years of his gilded life.
Prograis, in contrast, survived the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in his home town of New Orleans and overcame poverty while educating himself through his sharp intelligence and a voracious appetite for reading. He is nine years older than Haney and, with his dry wit, he has to remind everyone he is a two-time world champion in control of his own destiny. Prograis also points out with a shrug that even his own promoter, Eddie Hearn, appears to favour Haney by treating him like the A-list fighter in this compelling contest.
As a boxing historian and a champion fascinated by the psychology of elite sport, Prograis is more interested in embracing the tension and fear all fighters experience before a brutal test. “You need these nerves because it gives you an edge,” he continues as he recalls Mike Tyson’s legendary first trainer. “Cus D’Amato used to say if you’re not nervous then you’re either lying or you’re crazy. So you have to have this nervous energy. I visualise 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 let it get out of control and it can hurt you, even kill you. Fear is a friend of exceptional people.”
Prograis is one of the most interesting men I’ve met in 30 years of writing about boxing. No other fighter speaks about boxing literature with his knowledge and insight and I’m curious to hear how he controls the fire of fear before the biggest night of his life. “You know me,” he says. “I’m always reading and right now I’m deep in this one.”
He picks up a dog-eared and heavily underlined copy of a book about psychology. “I read this two times already so I’m just going over stuff. I’ve been training four months for this fight and I want to make sure all this hard work brings me victory. Even though I’m still cutting weight I’m pretty close [to the 140lb limit] and I’m full of energy. I’m fast, strong, sharp and my mind is good. I’m just anxious for time to pass so I can reach my destiny.”
Haney acknowledges that Prograis is probably the best champion, and biggest puncher, in a fiercely competitive division. But the older man has yet to receive the recognition he deserves. Following his solitary defeat, 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 only three bouts in the next three years as he flitted between various promotional outfits. Last November he finally became a world champion again when outclassing and stopping Jose Zepeda to win the WBC belt.
“I was in boxing purgatory,” Prograis says, quietly. “The first fight back [after Taylor] was on the undercard 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 kids and we travel a lot and I’m a good husband and father. So I kept that life separate and I never stopped believing in myself even when things felt shitty 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 daddy always says I had a harder route than everybody but I just keep going.”
In examining his past adversity, and admitting his nerves this week, Prograis shows real courage. For all the bluster of boxing there is something far more powerful in hearing a world champion talk so openly about the disquiet that settles over even the greatest fighters. He believes “you learn more in failure or defeat” and he has been steeled by his spell in the wilderness. Haney seems untouched by life, and even immature, in comparison.
“I’ve tasted defeat and frustration,” Prograis says. “I’ve been in a locker room after I lost and never want to go back there again. When you taste failure it makes you much stronger. Devin’s never had failure so it’s hard to know how he will react. So far he’s been winning [with a 30-0 record compared to Prograis and his 29-1] but when it gets really hard on Saturday he could potentially fold.”
I ask Progais how he feels about his promoter’s apparent support of Haney, with whom Hearn has just a one-fight deal. At the opening press conference Hearn turned to Prograis and his camp first, which is the role of the underdog before the champion gets the last word, to reveal the pecking order in his promotional mindset. The same routine unfolded at Thursday’s final press briefing. But, both times, Prograis insisted on being introduced second.
“It’s cool,” Prograis says in his languid drawl. “I said: ‘Eddie, I know Devin’s your boy but it’s cool. I’m gonna whup him bad.”
Prograis is an amusing trash-talker but, for this fight, he has mostly allowed Evins Tobler, his rumbustious strength-and-conditioning coach to shout down Haney and his father, Bill, who trains him. Tobler used to be a leading long jumper in the 1980s, and he competed often against Carl Lewis. He is a fiery and funny man and he lambasted Hearn for not giving Prograis respect as champion. Tobler and Haney Sr have since peppered a vociferous buildup with street-style slanging matches. Prograis was just as profane and vocal on Thursday.
“Bill is like everybody I knew coming up on the street,” Prograis says now. “He has the lingo and I’ve been around these guys my whole life. Devin has had a privileged life and he needs his dad to be the big dog. Devin don’t look comfortable but my whole team comes from that street environment so all this trash talk don’t mean nothing to us. But we’re not going to allow them to treat me like the challenger. I’m the champion and I told Devin I’m going to hurt him bad. He’s a cocky kid who thinks it’s an easy fight. His dad knows I am gonna take him into deep waters but I don’t think Devin comprehends it.”
Haney’s confidence was boosted by Prograis’s last bout when, fighting at home in New Orleans after many years away, the champion was caught up in pre-fight distractions where he spent more time doing countless interviews and sorting out tickets rather than focusing on the awkward Danielito Zorrilla. One judge gave the decision to Zorrilla while the two other scorecards were awarded to Prograis by seven and nine rounds. It had still been a poor performance.
Prograis believes Haney would never have agreed to fight him had he not seen that laboured defence: “I think he might underestimate me, which is a good thing.”
It is to Prograis’s credit that he opens up in a long and introspective interview amid the usual ravaging weight cut. “We’re getting to the hardest time now, which is the night before [Friday’s] weigh-in. That night is miserable.”
He talks vividly about taking one steaming bath after another, with the temperature so hot he can barely stand it, while starving and dehydrated. “Last time, the night before the weigh-in, I was 146lb. So I had to lose 6lb that night. This time will be easier.
“You have to come from a certain environment because it’s so hard. You have to be so disciplined, so dedicated, to put up with 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. It’s all right then. It’s showtime.”
Prograis is one of the most outspoken critics of boxing’s terrible anti-doping record. Just before he beat Zepeda he lamented to me that neither he nor his opponent had been tested. “This fight has been way different,” he exclaims now. “I’ve been tested six times [during his training camp]. That’s insane. Last fight [against Zorrilla in June], they didn’t test at all. But now it’s been six Vada [Voluntary Anti-Doping Association] tests and they say Haney is being tested too.”
He nods when I suggest that at least he can prove that he is clean while his trainer, Bobby Benton, tracks the insidious rise of doping. “Bobby has been around the sport way longer than me and he thinks more than 90% of fighters are cheating. I’m like: ‘Man, no!’ I’m so clean because I don’t even take supplements in case they have something in them. We know lots of the greatest fighters in history were [doping]. I just never want to believe it.”
Prograis is different to most boxers in his willingness to talk about taboo subjects – from hidden vulnerabilities to systemic doping. But he is also determined to gain the recognition he deserves and, as the most crucial night of his career closes in on him, he talks powerfully. “I had a dream last night and it was after the fight. I was with Eddie Hearn.”
He laughs. “Sounds like a nightmare but I’d just beaten Haney. We were in the car together and I’d won the fight. That’s what I see all the time – me being victorious. I am locked into that vision.”
Prograis leans back on the sofa as, at least for now, the intensity drains away. “When it happens I’m going to be super-happy, so much so that I might cry a little, because I’ll be grateful to show the world what I’ve always known – that this is my destiny.”
He will not be the only one who is likely to shed tears late on Saturday night in San Francisco. “My mom is really nervous,” Prograis says with another smile. “She cries all the time. She can get everyone crying. But I know they’ll be crying happy tears once it’s all over.”
