Jessica McCaskill and her trainer-manager-husband Rick Ramos put their honeymoon plans on hold to prepare for Saturday’s fight with Lauren Price.
The 29-year-old Price challenges McCaskill for her WBA welterweight title at the Cardiff International Arena in Wales on the occasion of her first world-title fight, and the seventh fight of her professional career.
In addition to the improved financial package being offered, McCaskill favored the fight with Wales’ Price over that with the mandatory challenger to the WBC title she has since vacated because of her desire to again fight in the UK.
The uncertainty surrounding her next fight had previously led to her and Ramos delaying their wedding, and after the boxing schedule had already demanded that they get married at short notice, they are waiting to properly celebrate their marriage together as husband and wife.
“We got married in January,” the 39-year-old said. “We got married in Chicago – the place where he proposed. We were supposed to do things a little bit sooner but we work on the boxing schedule. We were supposed to fight Ivana Habazin and then planned to get married in September and then the Habazin fight didn’t happen, so the wedding got put back until January. I was just glad to get this done. So, when this fight ends, we can go get our honeymoon. We had two potential dates just in case anything popped up, and we were able to go with our first date.
“This will be the first fight with us being married. I didn’t think about that until now. But it’s always been us, and we’re very comfortable being the boxing team that doesn’t have an entourage and things like that. It’s always been the two of us and I think we’ll be fine.
“We didn’t even plan our wedding until 40 days before the date. Unfortunately – it’s a weird thing – boxing comes first. If you’re serious enough about it that’s the lifestyle and you just know what it is.
“We want to go somewhere warm. We go to Arizona every year – I love Scottsdale, and Rick mentioned Mexico. I can see he’s looking for some heat, so we’ll find something. We’ve been really good friends for a long time. I found him on Instagram as a coach [in 2019]; he was the only person that returned my calls as a fighter-coach, and I moved from St Louis to Chicago, fought on his card, became one of his fighters, and we just really looked out for each other as friends. In this game there’s a lot of weird things that happen, so it’s nice to have somebody that has your back and we just bonded, had a great friendship, started dating, and he popped the question.”
Their marriage, inevitably, tests their professional relationship as much as their professional relationship tests their marriage.
“It’s all about communication,” the American continued. There’s time we have to say, ‘We separate boxing and marriage’, and there’s times it’s like, ‘Okay, we can’t separate it’, so it’s about communication. He’s the coach – I look to him to make those calls, so if he says something, that’s what I follow, and if it’s not working then I have to communicate it’s not working so he can give me a different game plan. That’s the only thing that makes it work.
“We’re always training; we’re always prepared, because you may get someone that falls out of a fight or something like that. That’s always the mindset.
“The Sandy Ryan fight [a draw] was in September, so pretty much right back at it after that fight, and got married in January, so a couple off for that, and just preparing for anything. We always try to stick really close to 147lbs, if that’s the fight weight.
“This is a very skilled fight that I’m up for the challenge on. It’s a different world altogether. There’s going to be a lot of different tactics that I’ll have to use for the fight – it’s a bigger challenge [than Habazin].”
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