American heavyweight Richard Torrez Jr is one of the country’s best hopes of challenging for a heavyweight world title in years to come.
However, the 24-year-old has admitted that he got his ‘butt kicked’ by the current undisputed welterweight champion, Terence Crawford – albeit not in the boxing ring.
Torrez won a rare Olympic super-heavyweight silver medal for the USA at Tokyo 2020 and has made a stellar start to life as a professional. The 24-year-old southpaw has gone 6-0 since debuting in March 2022, with each of those wins coming via knockout and four of those stoppages occurring in the opening round.
However, that power proved to be no match for Crawford, who showed he can handle himself against the bigger men in a wrestling match, Torrez told FightHype.
“Terence Crawford dropped me with a headlock or something like that man. Terence Crawford and I wrestled, he kicked my butt. Ever since then I was like, ‘it is not for me, man, this wrestling thing is not my forte’.”
“I was in his house and he said ‘you ever wrestled, Richard?’, I was like ‘nah’ and he goes ‘do you think you could take me?’, I was like playing it off a little bit, and he goes ‘come on let’s try it’.
I thought we were going to kind of joke around a little bit, we get in there and all of a sudden I feel his grip and I’m like ‘oh, I am done. It is over.’, he already had that lock in place, there is no way out. So he got me, but kudos to him, he is a super strong guy.”
Torrez Jr will aim to make it seven straight knockouts as a professional as he takes on Tyrell Herndon (21-4) on Saturday night on the Alimkhanuly-Gualtieri undercard, live on ESPN.