It was an absolute honour to fight in Vegas. Every fighter dreams of fighting at the MGM Grand. That's where so many legends have fought before and so many legends will continue to fight.
I had dreams in 2000 of being an Olympian for boxing. I never talk about it.
For the birth of one champion, there are many young boxers behind them who had setbacks. In terms of that, I think boxing is very dramatic.
When I was young, I used to dream about seeing myself with the world title, with the WBC belt.
When I was about 12, I realised I wasn't going to make it as a top footballer, but I won my first British ABA title at 13. From then on, I wanted to be a world champion.
I'm honored and blessed by God to be in the sport I love, and I want to accomplish all the goals I set in the sport of boxing - to be successful and make history.
My trainer, George Francis, used to train a lot of African boxers. They're hungry guys, man. They've got no trainers, got nothing. They're so hungry to do boxing, to make some money.
Since I was a boy of five or six, I had it in my mind I would be a world boxing champion.
My dad would tell me stories about when he was an underground fighter. One day when I was 11, he told me he wished he had a son who could have been a real boxer.
I thought I would make so much money and be the next Ray Leonard. Maybe it was farfetched, but I thought I could be a megastar. I could fight, and I had a lot of crossover appeal that was necessary to promote myself. I thought I'd make a ton of money and live off of it the rest of my life.
When you start boxing when you're 7 years old, that's your dream, to become world champion, and after that you want to become something bigger than world champion.
I had always wanted to play a boxer, all of my life. I grew up watching great boxing films.
I love boxing. I really respect the guys and admire the guys who do it. But, I'm very, very happy with my career as an actor. I made the right choice and things are really working out for me right now, but I won't pretend that there isn't a part of me that always secretly wanted to be a boxer.
There's so much pressure on becoming the next Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson, and if you don't achieve that in boxing, you're nothing.
