It took YouTube boxer Deji three successive losses to finally get it right to land a victory before admitting he was a "d***head" during the initial bouts of his career.
The social media star is going to face boxing legend Floyd Mayweather in Dubai next month after knocking out Yusef 'Fousey' Erakat at The O2 arena in August. But as recently as March, he was still struggling to get his mentality right for boxing, and had just lost his third consecutive fight against Alex Wassabi.
He made his debut in 2018 against a fresh-faced Jake Paul, who at the time was solely an influencer with just a few weeks of boxing training. The American won a one-sided fight in the fifth round, before Deji took three years out of the ring ahead of a return against male model Vinnie Hacker.
The Brit was a massive favourite to stop Hacker given his superior boxing ability, but didn't train adequately and gassed out before being stopped in the third round. He changed camps twice before facing Wassabi the following spring, and looked much improved although he still couldn't do enough to win.
"I was a d***head, let's be real," Deji told True Geordie during an appearance on his podcast. "I was a d*** because the people who actually cared about me, I kind of just threw them away - I remember I went through a whole period after the Jake Paul fight where I was just unfollowing people if they said anything bad about me. Even if they were just joking I was unfollowing them, I couldn't take a joke and everything just p***ed me off."
However, the embarrassment of his loss to Paul, despite fans being impressed by the performance, wasn't enough to push Deji into action. He suffered two more defeats before knuckling down with head coach Daley Perales and enlisting the help of personal trainer and ex-fighter Leon Wills.
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"After the Jake Paul fight I took like a three-year hiatus and was just doing stuff," he explained. "But I wasn't enjoying the stuff I was doing, the content that I was making, like reaction videos. That whole angry phase was me letting the internet get to me, now I don't look at comments or anything, sometimes I look at Instagram DMs.
"Back then I was looking at all the nice comments and then you'd see the one hateful comment so I was very unhappy with all the content I was making. My viewership dropped, everything was going downhill, my subs were going down and everything was getting to me. I was kind of like 'oh I'm just fading away off the internet."
Deji will now face Mayweather in the shape of his life atop a star-studded fight card that includes Tommy Fury, Harley Benn, Jack Fincham and WWE star Bobby Fish. He will then return to facing YouTubers, with a number of big name opponents lined up for next year.
