JoJo Diaz surveys the damage he left behind and looks ahead to a new beginning

Joseph “JoJo” Diaz is in familiar territory: in a boxing ring in training camp, weeks out from his next fight.

But it is a familiar situation with some notable differences. He is not sparring or shadow boxing but sitting on a chair, facing an interlocutor. His appearance has changed a little, and he is not immediately recognizable: his normally short hair is longer and darker, and his boyish features are partly hidden behind a thick beard. When the interview is over, he will return to his room in a neighboring treatment facility, where his days are strictly organized and his schedule is set for him, and from which he had to secure permission to be temporarily absent. That is where he will stay until he enters the same ring in November in more typical circumstances: gloved up, a crowd roaring, as he prepares to undergo the latest stage in a roller-coaster career.

It’s a career that once promised more than it has delivered, and for that, Diaz recognizes he has only himself to blame. But the choices he made and the addictions to which he succumbed did not only affect his boxing journey; he caused damage, hurt and trauma to others as well. 

But before we address how Diaz has let himself and others down as a person, and how he now plans to rebound from his actions and embark on a new, more positive phase in his life, we begin with the only reason most of us care or have any idea about his behaviors outside the ring: by revisiting his life inside the ropes.

***

Born in South El Monte, California, in November 1992, Joseph Pedroza Diaz Jr. was a small kid who was bullied at school for his lack of size, prompting his father to take him to a local gym to learn how to box. One of his bullies was also there, and after a young Diaz bloodied his nose and made him cry in a sparring session, he said in a 2014 Fox Sports profile, “nobody bullied me again, and we became friends.”

Initially drawn to baseball, Diaz faced a fork in the road when his high school coach offered him the opportunity to pitch on the varsity team – if he agreed to quit boxing. The coach gave him 24 hours to make a decision, and a day later Diaz dumped the baseball diamond for the squared circle.

He was a pretty good amateur: twice national bantamweight champion, national featherweight champion, a 2011 World Championships quarterfinalist, a 2012 Olympian. He turned pro after the London games; six years later, he was 26-0 and about to take on Gary Russell Jr. for the WBC featherweight strap. He lost that title tilt, but everyone not named Vasiliy Lomachenko lost to Russell in those days, and within two years of that defeat he had relieved Tevin Farmer of his IBF 130-pound belt. It was his first world title, but it would prove the high-water mark of Diaz’s career.

He lost the belt on the scales in his first defense, weighing in 3.6 pounds above the division limit, and was promptly held to a draw by opponent Shavkatdzhon Rakhimov. There was, in isolation, no great shame in failing to overcome an accomplished foe like Rakhimov, just as there was a way to rationalize the trio of successive defeats that followed shortly thereafter: to Devin Haney, William Zepeda and Mercito Gesta. Less defensible were the upset decision loss to Jesus Perez this past February and the stoppage defeat – the first of his career – against Oscar Duarte in April.

After the Farmer win, Diaz’s record was 31-1. Four years later, it sits at 33-6-1, and Diaz finds himself confronted with a dual task: preparing for a Nov. 8 bout against Nicholas Walters in what feels like a do-or-die venture for both men, while seeking recovery from the addiction that nearly consumed his life and career.

***

Diaz began drinking at age 17. But, he says, for years that drinking was no worse than that of any other young man discovering life’s various pleasures. “I was able to stop when I needed to,” he asserts, “and I was able to control it.”

That began to change, the 31-year-old claims, when he was about 25 and a rising star with a seemingly inevitable glide-path toward championship status and stardom. With fame comes attention and temptation; with money comes a freedom to indulge both. Some who find themselves thrust into the limelight are able to navigate its associated dangers; others are not. Diaz was firmly in the latter camp.

“I started getting bombarded with issues in my personal life and, you know, the lust of success: being in the crowd, going to nightclubs, buying bottle service, being the life of the party,” he recalls. “That’s when it really became a problem. And it got to the point where I started needing alcohol to live, to actually function. I got to a point where I was drinking every single day just to calm my nerves, just to act normal, just to feel normal.

“And it was the worst feeling of my life, because I know that I was not only hurting myself and hurting my career, hurting my house, but I was affecting a lot of people around me. At that time, I was unaware of it, because obviously I was caught up in the system, caught up in the cycle of just doing the same thing, doing what I wanted, having my ego so bombarding me. Man, it got to the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Asked what he was drinking, he laughs in disbelief at his excess.

“I’d drink anything,” he says. “I’d drink tequila, whiskey. Bottles. Bottles, man. High-end stuff, 1942, whatever. You name it.”

And yet, Diaz says, his drinking only first truly affected his boxing when he threw beer into the mix.

“All those extra calories and stuff, man, made me overweight, made me fat, and it was just all those extra sugars,” he says. “When I was training, I was still working hard, and I knew that I was working hard, but I wasn’t seeing the results, and I was wondering, questioning, what was happening? I was doing everything that I had done since I was 17, 18 years old, but I was not seeing the results anymore. And it was because of all those sugars that were staying in my system that I couldn’t burn.”

And along with the beer came all the beer-drinking accouterments with hefty calories of their own. 

“The drinking caused me to have withdrawals,” Diaz says. “And those withdrawals would make me want to drink again – but also want to have burgers and fries to try to make my anxiety go away. And then my mind was just like, ‘OK, since I had that, I can have a milkshake, I can have candies.’”

The results were inevitable. In his next outing after dropping a decision to Russell, Diaz was given another title shot, against Jesus Rojas. He won the fight but not the belt, which remained wrapped around Rojas’ waist after Diaz weighed in more than a half pound over the limit.

Worse was to come, when he showed up to fight Rakhimov nowhere near the weight limit, although in many respects it’s remarkable that he came as close as he did.

“I ended up shooting all the way up to 196 pounds,” Diaz says. “And that’s when [my promoters] Golden Boy called me, telling me that they had a fight for me, a title defense against Rakhimov in Indio, California. It was a seven-week camp, and they asked me, ‘Are you ready for it?’ And for me, man, I knew that since I spent a lot of money partying, wasting my money, blowing my money on everything, that I needed to fight. I needed to have an income. So I accepted the fight. And two weeks into camp, they ended up calling me, saying it was six weeks instead, because the fight was brought forward a week. So, you know, it was a lot of stress on my mind, but I knew that I could do it. And I was dehydrating myself. I was running with sauna bags, being unhealthy in my training camp, just to try to make the weight. I ended up dropping, I believe, like 56 pounds or something like that. But it wasn’t enough, and I lost my title.”

***

Addiction damages the addicted. It arguably causes even more damage to those caught in its vortex. Diaz recognizes that he has left a trail of devastation in his wake.

“My father and I were training all the time,” he says of the man who first took him to a boxing gym and who has been in his corner, literally and figuratively, since. “But since I was still drunk and still hung over all the time, I would get easily mad at him whenever he tried to correct me. And he was trying to correct me in good ways, now that I realize it. But at that point in time, I thought that he was trying to criticize me, trying to judge me. We would always fight, and I would always curse him out and stuff, tell him harmful things. But the most important relationships that I really affected were with my mom and my son. I ended up losing my son due to alcoholism, and that right there is giving me the passion and the hope to stay sober so that I can continue my bond with my son and watch him grow up and just be a dad.”

The mother of his child, with whom he had been in a long-term relationship, left him in 2020 amid accusations (which Diaz refutes) of physical abuse. After three months of not being allowed to see his son, he was ultimately granted partial, and then equal, custody. One weekend in March 2023, he had left his son with his parents. They dropped the boy off with Diaz to return to his mother, but with time to spare before the deadline, Diaz acceded to the child’s request to have some father-son time.

“I ended up taking him to the arcade, but I had been drinking the night before and I took him irresponsibly, without the car seat,” he admits. As Diaz began to pull out of his parking space after the arcade visit, he hit another car. When police saw that he had failed to protect his son properly, he was charged with reckless child neglect.

It would not be the only harmful decision he would make under the influence.

In April 2022, a lawsuit filed by “Jane Doe” alleged that Diaz shared “sexually graphic material” via Snapchat in September 2020. Specifically, the suit claimed that he had sent a naked picture of himself to a then-17-year-old girl, who immediately upon seeing it showed the image to her parents. The girl’s mother used another phone to document the photo before it disappeared, as Snapchat images do after being viewed.

Diaz does not deny the allegation.

“It was related to a long night of drinking and doing cocaine,” he says. The girl to whom he sent the image was in his Snapchat contacts, Diaz said, because she was the sister of an ex-girlfriend. She also shared the name of the person to whom Diaz says he intended to send the photo – whom, he said, “was a girl that I was talking to at a time that I was being promiscuous, and I was cheating on my baby mama with.”

The girl’s parents contacted Diaz’s parents. “My father drove over to me and asked me what happened. I said, ‘What do you mean what happened?’ And then he told me what I did.”

He and his parents apologized, but a year later the girl and her parents filed a police report. The Los Angeles Police Department elected not to pursue the matter, leaving the victim and her family to pursue Diaz through civil courts, a pursuit that is ongoing.

Diaz claims that “I thought everything was OK” after the apology and blames the lawsuit on lawyers for his former managers, Ralph and Moses Heredia. Diaz sued the Heredias to exit his contract in late 2020 and signed with MTK Global, prompting them to file a countersuit. In this ESPN piece from 2022, the Heredias’ lawyer acknowledged that he was helping the girl’s family but stated he was doing so after they approached him as a victim’s advocate and maintained that his involvement was unconnected with the other case. (After claiming that MTK and co-founder Daniel Kinahan used drug cartel money to sign Diaz, the Heredias in July were awarded damages in excess of $10 million.)

One might reasonably assume that this would be a sign to Diaz that he had hit rock bottom and that he needed to address his drinking and behavior. 

“I was like, man, I’m getting to a point that I’m sending photos to people because I’m unaware of who I’m sending it to,” he admits. “Like, I really got to stop. But I was still caught up with girls, man, just being around girls, having sex with girls and just being around the party environment, being around the scene, drinking all the time. It was hard for me to get out of that.”

***

On May 30, Diaz checked himself into SOBA, a drug and alcohol treatment center in San Antonio. Finally, he says, “I was just really focused on becoming sober and getting my mind right. My main focus was getting my child custody back with my son. But I started praying to God. Man, I started praying to God every single day.”

After a couple of weeks, he heard from former Golden Boy matchmaker Robert Diaz, who had been speaking with Garry Jonas, owner of ProBox TV (and BoxingScene) and the WhiteSands Alcohol and Drug Rehab Center in Plant City, Florida, which shares a campus with the ProBox TV Events Center where Diaz is now sitting and where he will soon be fighting.

“It was a great situation for me, because they said they could allow me to continue with my sobriety at the rehabilitation center, but also give me a big fight and let me do what I love to do,” he says. “So once I heard that, man, I knew it was a blessing from God, and I knew that it was what I needed to do and where I needed to be. And I immediately said, ‘Let’s do it, man,’ and I got on the plane and came here, and here I am today.”

As Diaz speaks, he has been at WhiteSands for a week, during which time he has also been able to train in the ProBox TV gym in anticipation of his fight with Walters, who himself is on the comeback trail after seven years out of the ring.

“The advantage of being here at the rehabilitation center is that I’m getting all the nutrients that I need, eating all the healthy foods,” he says. “They have me on a strict diet right now. They have no sodas here that I’m able to sneak in and drink, no candy bars or anything. I’m taking all my vitamins. But the challenges are, you know, still going to classes after hard days of work and having to focus my mind on still recovering, because I know that I still have to recover. I know that I still have to go through the processes because, yeah, I’m 78 days sober right now – but I know that it’s easy to just snap back into that alternate reality, because I’ve been living in that reality for so long.

“The staff here is great. The people here are great. Man, seeing people really want to change and get better for themselves really inspires me and gives me the motivation to keep on going.”

The journey to sobriety can be a long and winding one, full of fits and starts and false dawns until one is finally fully prepared to accept both the responsibility for one’s actions and behaviors and the consequences of them. There’s a case to be made that, by simultaneously seeking treatment and training for a fight, Diaz will be unable to give adequate attention to either. There is inevitable concern over the possible consequences should Diaz’s first fight as a sober man result in a heavy defeat.

Diaz, though, insists he is committed to making that journey, and that the man talking to an interviewer today is not the man whose alcohol-infused failings he has spent the last 30 minutes detailing.

He reveals that he was baptized while in San Antonio and that, as a result, he feels “reborn, rejuvenated.”

“I feel like a whole new person,” he says. “Man, I feel like Christ is living in me, and I’m able to live through Him as well, and I’m able to praise Him and give Him grace and mercy for everything I’ve been through. I thank God every day that I’m not in jail. I thank God every day that I didn’t die. I thank God every day that I didn’t kill anyone when I was out messing up and causing harm in the world. That right there is giving me, you know, the praise and the glory and the fulfillment and the motivation to keep on moving forward.”

Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcasted about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com.