What a difference 12 days makes.
On July 18, Regis Prograis was sweating it out in Las Vegas, his family vacationing in Brazil while he put in long hours in the gym preparing for an Aug. 24 bout with Jack Catterall.
But on Tuesday afternoon, word came that the fight was off due to a Catterall injury. “Devastated” might be the word to describe how most would have reacted, but from Prograis, figure “pissed off” to be the appropriate phrase.
“I have truly invested in myself for this training camp,” Prograis said. “I was working my ass off in Las Vegas, setting up camp, paying for everything. Every day, I was busting my ass and watching Jack’s fights before I went to sleep. And now this happens. It’s very upsetting.”
ESPN’s Mike Coppinger reported that the fight could be rescheduled for October, but Catterall told BoxingScene he won’t be rushed back before he is fully healed. In the meantime, expect Prograis to stay in the gym and stay sharp, and perhaps get started on the sequel to his book, “Stories & Lessons From Regis Prograis,” which was published in April.
Actually, that work has already begun.
“Right now, we’re just documenting everything right now,” Prograis said. “The same person that wrote the book with me – his name is Ross Williams – and he’s actually a childhood friend. So he’s already documenting all the stuff for the second one right now.”
If you know Prograis, you’re well aware that he’s a unicorn in the boxing business, a well-read historian who doesn’t just appreciate the old school but is doing his best to bring that attitude into the modern day.
“You can talk to my parents,” he said. “They’ll tell you that I always did the opposite thing. One of my coaches told me, ‘If you want something nobody else has, you have to do something nobody else does.’ So I’m not going to do the same thing. I look at the crowd and it’s like, ‘All right, I see what they’re doing, and I’m going to go a different way.’ I’m not going to do all the stuff that they’re doing. I’m my own man and I’m going to do what I want to do. And I feel like when it’s all said and done, I’m going to accomplish some special things in boxing, but it’s going to be the way I want to do it.”
That means writing a book while still an active fighter, and even a trip to the hottest place in the U.S. for a summer training camp that emphasized suffering above all else – suffering he didn’t expect Catterall to be experiencing.
“He’s not,” said Prograis earlier this month. “I know he’s not. No way. If he’s suffering, he’ll have to have the heat on nonstop, but even that won’t work because it’s not just the climate. We’re doing the mountains and all that stuff. So I definitely don’t think he’s suffering. I’m suffering.”
Of course it’s physical. Triple-digit temperatures guarantee that. But for the 35-year-old Louisiana native, the physical part of the toll is only part of the story.
“Most of it is mental,” Prograis said. “To know that I’m doing all this stuff every single day, I’m suffering every single day. Like today, I woke up at five [a.m.] I had to go hit the pool at 6 a.m., and then it is just really hot. As soon as you wake up, it’s just really hot all the time. And then you go to the gym and it’s really hot, and I’m just putting all this work in, and then I have to go work out again. I just know he’s not doing what I’m doing. Can’t be.”
Needless to say, traveling to England to face the local hero wasn’t going to be an issue. Going on the road never has been one for Prograis, who was handed his first pro loss by Catterall nemesis Josh Taylor at London’s O2 Arena in 2019.
“At the end of the day, a fight is a fight,” Prograis said. “It’s two men fighting. Yeah, you have a lot of distractions, and the first time I went [to face Taylor], I did some things that I learned from. Not saying I probably shouldn’t have done them, but I did some things that I learned from. So the first time, you live and you learn. But now I’ll be adjusted, and I feel like the people over there love me. Obviously, I won’t be the hometown favorite. But the people in the U.K., they appreciate boxing and they love good boxing.”
Good boxing is what Prograis has always delivered, and after coming up the hard way, he’s been sitting among the elite at 140 pounds for much of the last decade. He has a pair of world titles to prove it. But he’s not done yet. There’s another book to write and another title (or titles) to win, so he keeps suffering for his art.
“You never get control of the future, but right now, my goal is to become a three-time champion,” Prograis said. “That’s something I really want, but I really feel like that’s going to come way earlier than last time. To become a two-time champion, it took me three years. I don’t feel it’s going to take another three years to become a three-time champion. So I do feel like that’s going to come. Then, after that, unified champion, probably have a big fight in New Orleans, in the Superdome. That’s how I see it now. It might surpass that, but that’s kind of how I see it right now.”
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