“I’m calm, but also a little worried and definitely nervous,” says Regis Prograis, sitting in his room high up in a swanky hotel in downtown San Francisco. Books, bags, shirts, shoes, water bottles and boxing gloves are swept aside as he makes room for me to sit next to him on the couch. He is the WBC junior welterweight world champion, but his title defense against undefeated Devin Haney carries a magnitude and danger that Prograis confronts with characteristic honesty.
The 25-year-old challenger may not hit as hard as Prograis, but because he enters this fight on Saturday night as the former undisputed world champion in the division below at lightweight, Haney is considered by many experts to be the likely winner of one of the boxing matches. biggest fights of the year. Haney, who calls himself The Dream, has great skills and returns to the city of his birth and where he spent the first seven years of his gilded 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 a voracious appetite for reading. He is nine years older than Haney and with his dry humor he has to remind everyone that he is a two-time world champion who controls his own destiny. Prograis also points out with a shrug that even his own promoter, Eddie Hearn, appears to be favoring Haney by treating him like the A-list fighter in this compelling bout.
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As a boxing historian and champion fascinated by the psychology of elite sport, Prograis is more interested in embracing the tension and fear that all fighters experience before a brutal test. “You need those nerves because it gives you an edge,” he continues, recalling Mike Tyson’s legendary first trainer. ‘Cus D’Amato always said 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 very good night ahead of me, and the destruction of Haney, but until we get to the arena, I have this fear. 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 hand 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 my thirty years of writing about boxing. No other fighter speaks to boxing literature with his knowledge and insight and I’m curious to see how he controls the fires 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 it.”
He picks up a heavily underlined, dog-eared copy of a book on psychology. ‘I’ve read this twice already, so I’ll just go through it. I have trained for four months for this fight and I want to make sure that all this hard work brings me victory. Even though I’m still losing weight, I’m pretty close [to the 140lb limit] and I am full of energy. I’m fast, strong, sharp and my mind is good. I just want time to pass 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 lone defeat, when he was unlucky not to at least earn a draw in a Fight of the Year contender against Josh Taylor in London in October 2019, Prograis lost his WBA world title and subsequently fought just three fights in the subsequent three years. he flitted between different promotional outfits. Last November, he finally became world champion again when he outclassed and stopped Jose Zepeda to win the WBC belt.
“I was in boxing purgatory,” Prograis says calmly. “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 has made me stronger and I have a good family. I have my [Brazilian] wife and three children and we travel a lot and I am a good husband and father. So I kept that life separate and I always believed in myself, even when it felt like shit in boxing.
“It’s been like this 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 route than everyone else, but I just keep going.
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By examining his past setbacks and admitting his nerves this week, Prograis is showing real courage. For all the fuss of boxing, there is something far more powerful in hearing a world champion talk so openly about the turmoil that surrounds even the greatest fighters. He believes that “you learn more from failure or defeat” and he is strengthened by his spell in the wilderness. Haney seems unaffected by life, and even immature in comparison.
“I have tasted defeat and frustration,” says Prograis. “I sat in a locker room after I lost and I never want to go back there. When you taste failure, you become much stronger. Devin has never had a failure, so it’s hard to know how he’ll react. So far he has won [with a 30-0 record compared to Prograis and his 29-1] but if things get really tough on Saturday, he might fold.”
I ask Progais what he thinks about his promoter’s apparent support for Haney, with whom Hearn only has a one-fight deal. At the opening press conference, Hearn first turned to Prograis and his camp, playing the role of the underdog before the champion gets the final say, to reveal the pecking order in his promotional mentality. The same routine unfolded during Thursday’s final press conference. But both times Prograis insisted on being introduced second.
“It’s cool,” Prograis says in his languid drawl. “I said, ‘Eddie, I know Devin is your son, but it’s cool. I’m going to abuse him severely.”
Prograis is an entertaining trash-talker, but for this fight he especially allowed Evins Tobler, his loudmouth strength and conditioning coach, to shout down Haney and his father, Bill, who trains him. Tobler was a leading long jumper in the 1980s, often competing against Carl Lewis. He is a fiery and funny man and he berated Hearn for not giving Prograis respect as champions. Tobler and Haney Sr have since had a rowdy build-up peppered with slang matches. Prograis was just as profane and vocal on Thursday.
“Bill is just like everyone else I knew who came out on the streets,” Prograis says now. “He speaks the lingo and I’ve been around these guys all my life. Devin has had a privileged life and he needs his father to be the big dog. Devin doesn’t look comfortable, but my whole team is from that street environment, so all this trash talk means nothing to us. But we will not allow them to treat me as the challenger. I’m the champion and I told Devin I’m going to hurt him a lot. He’s a stubborn kid who thinks it’s an easy fight. His dad knows I’m going to take him to deep waters, but I don’t think Devin understands.
Haney’s confidence was boosted by Prograis’ last fight when the champion, after many years of fighting at home in New Orleans, became caught up in pre-fight distractions, spending more time doing numerous interviews and ticket picking instead of focusing on the troublesome Danielito. Zorrilla. One judge awarded the decision to Zorrilla, while the other two scorecards were awarded to Prograis in seven and nine rounds. It was still a poor performance.
Prograis believes Haney would never have agreed to fight him if he hadn’t seen that struggling defense: “I think he might have underestimated me, which is a good thing.”
To Prograis’ credit, he opens up for a long and introspective interview amid the usual devastating weight loss. ‘We now come to the most difficult time, which is the night before [Friday’s] weigh. That night is miserable.”
He tells vividly about taking one steamy bath after another, the temperature so high he can barely stand it, while he is starved and dehydrated. “The last time, the night before the weigh-in, I 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 environment because it is so difficult. You have to be so disciplined and so dedicated to endure this pain. I’m not even talking about the emotions of boxing, when there are so many feelings going through you. It’s a lot and you start to have doubts in your mind when you lose 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. Then it’s okay. It’s show time.”
Prograis is one of the most outspoken critics of boxing’s terrible anti-doping records. Just before he defeated Zepeda, he complained 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 battle [against Zorrilla in June], they didn’t test at all. But now it has been six Vada [Voluntary Anti-Doping Association] tests and they say Haney is also being tested.
He nods when I suggest he can at least prove he’s clean while his trainer, Bobby Benton, monitors the insidious rise of doping. “Bobby has been in the sport much longer than I have and he thinks over 90% of fighters cheat. I’m like, ‘Man, no!’ I’m so clean because I don’t even take supplements in case there’s something in them. We know that many of the greatest 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 is also determined to get the recognition he deserves, and as the most crucial night of his career approaches, he is talking strongly. “I had a dream last night and it was after the fight. I was with Eddie Hearn.”
He smiles. “Sounds like a nightmare, but I just beat Haney. We were in the car together and I had won the fight. That’s what I see all the time: that I am victorious. I am trapped in that vision.”
Prograis leans back on the couch as, at least for now, the intensity fades. “When it happens, I will be thrilled, so much so that it will make me 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 shedding tears late Saturday night in San Francisco. “My mother is really nervous,” says Prograis with another smile. “She cries all the time. She can make anyone cry. But I know they will cry tears of joy when it’s all over.