“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.
