The bright blue boxing-ring floor is smudged and pocked with ugly brown stains. "You see that? That's Echols' work," barks trainer Dan Birmingham. "It's blood from guys he sparred with."Antwun Echols, middleweight contender, self-described "rock 'em sock 'em type guy," is due in for a training session on this sweltering Tuesday at St. Pete Boxing Club, although it's not clear exactly when. Echols keeps his own clock, and admits to having a general distaste for authority figures.
With his wary demeanor and palpable air of menace, Echols will never be easy to market. He'll probably always be seen as the dangerous and unpredictable outsider. "I grew up in the 'hood, so I'm gonna have that rough look," he says. "They want pretty boys, or somebody that's gonna give 'em a sales pitch."
Birmingham, who also trains Jeff Lacy and Winky Wright, is a Seminole paint contractor whose stock has soared on the world boxing scene in the last year or so. He's an intense 53-year-old, a former fighter who looks much younger than his years. After a quarter-century of working with fighters, Birmingham is astute at handling a complex array of boxer temperaments.
"Antwun's a good kid," he says. "But you gotta get his respect. The first week he trained here, the first couple of days he punched me in the arm — right in the muscle, it hurt like hell — and I let it go. The third time he did it, I put a switchblade to his throat and said, 'If you do that again, I'll gut you like a fish.' He never did it again."
Sitting on the couch in his bare-walled, one-bedroom apartment in northwest St. Pete, fiddling with the remote control of his big-screen TV, Echols lets out a low, guttural laugh. Having a knife held to his neck is not the sort of thing that's apt to shake up Antwun Echols. Last summer, three months before his Sept. 3 championship fight in Australia against homeland hero Anthony Mundine, Echols was at a keg party in his old stomping grounds of Davenport, Iowa, when a guy shot him in the left arm. He swears there was no prior altercation, no bad blood between them. Echols turns his sleepy eyes from the television and drawls, "I don't think he liked my presence there," and then slowly winds into a grin, "I was getting' a little too much attention, probably."
Most fighters would have postponed the match, but Echols climbed into the ring as scheduled — with a chunk of the bullet still lodged just below his armpit. Birmingham says his client basically fought with one good arm, losing a judges' decision. In retrospect, it was a bad call to go ahead and fight, especially with the World Boxing Association super middleweight belt on the line. But Echols is a man with mouths to feed: He has four young children with his live-in girlfriend, Standisha Walker.
As far as boxing with a depleted left arm, Echols mumbles, "Them cats made me fight."
That seems like a throwaway line, but it speaks volumes. It's about control, or lack of it. Echols has endured a career filled with bad breaks, poor timing, shaky advice and iffy business decisions. He's had to slug his way through the prize-fighting quagmire pretty much by himself, without benefit of a mentor or consistent counsel. He's signed contracts against his better judgment, entered into partnerships when they didn't smell quite right, accepted paydays well below his market value. For most of his career, Echols has earned $30,000-$40,000 per fight. He says his best purse was close to $200,000.
Twice he battled Bernard Hopkins, a marquee opponent, for the International Boxing Federation middleweight crown. Both times he did so without adequate handlers. "My coach [in Davenport] was older; he told us to beat the dang bag and that's it," Echols muses. "I didn't have no trainer, no manager, didn't have nothin'."
Both times he lost, first by decision, then by technical knockout. At the emergency room after the second fight, when both boxers were being examined, Echols challenged Hopkins to scrap some more. "I wasn't through fightin' yet," Echols says with a wry chuckle. It was later reported that he'd fought nearly five rounds with a dislocated shoulder after being slammed down to the canvas in the sixth round.
It's testimony to Echols' toughness and resolve that he's still in the hunt, just a few victories away from another title shot. He was recently ranked the No. 4 super middleweight (168 pounds) by The Ring magazine, and No. 5 by the World Boxing Association. Echols has since moved down to the middleweight (160-pound) ranks. Influential boxing columnist Steve Kim logged a July 6 Internet piece titled "For Boxing's Sake — Five Fights That Need to Happen"; among them was No. 3-ranked Jermain Taylor vs. Antwun Echols. He called Echols "perhaps the most dangerous 160-pounder in the world." (Echols didn't know this until I told him about it. His response was muted. "It's cool," he said, "adds fuel to the fire.")
These days, Echols vacillates between optimism and general disgust with his chosen profession. "I never looked at it like that when I first came into boxing," he says. "These people were gonna be on your team, look out for your best interests, 'cause they wanna make money like you do. That's the proposition. This is the business. As the years went on, I've seen all the bullshit in boxing. Boxing is always gonna be around, but I don't think the fans gonna keep hangin' around. It's like it's turnin' into wrestling. Some fake-ass shit goin' on."
Echols started fighting, like so many other boxers, in the streets. Born in Memphis, he moved to Chicago, then Florida, then Iowa as a youngster. For most of his school years, his mother shuttled him and his nine siblings between Dade City, about 40 miles north of Tampa, and Davenport. Echols — who was a small, wiry kid — says he lost two street fights, both to boxers. When asked how he got beat, he laughs. "You just down and quit," he says. "Enough of that ass-whuppin'. I got to quit."
Echols had a one-day fling in a Davenport boxing gym at 16, but didn't take up the sport until two years later. Despite minimal coaching, he racked up an accomplished amateur career. The budding pugilist encountered his first major setback during the 1992 Olympic trials. Echols says he ransacked his way through the 156-pound ranks, even though he weighed 147. "No one told me about going down to 146," he says. "I thought you had to fight your street weight. I coulda lost one dang pound."
During the Olympic box-off to choose the U.S. team, he met Raul Marquez, the most heavily buzzed fighter in the weight class. Telling the story, Echols breaks out of his languor and leans forward. "I wore [Marquez] out in the first round," he says. "The second round I let him work on me. I came back in the third round and was wearing him out. I hit him with an overhand right, then three more after that. He was goin' down. Then they ring the bell with a minute and 32 seconds to go. Some referee mistake or clock malfunction or something, they said. I knew right then, 'Oh, they cheatin'.' They let him recover for two minutes, and I couldn't take him out after that. They were not gonna let me finish him."
Marquez represented the United States at the Barcelona games. In hindsight, Echols thinks he should've waited four years for another shot. Olympics cred is the single best thing for a pro boxer's career. Instead, he unceremoniously turned professional. In his debut in Topeka, Kan., on May 22, 1993, Echols got knocked out by another rookie, a hometown guy named Anthony Ivy. After that, Echols ran off 13 consecutive victories, all by knockout or TKO, mostly in smaller Midwestern cities. He started winning and defending second-tier belts in '97 and got his first major title shot, against Hopkins, two years later.
Because he made his way without backers, Echols did not benefit from the long-time boxing tradition of bringing a prospect along slowly, setting him up with gimme foes early on to artificially build a winning record. "Looking at his fights, he's come up hard," says veteran boxing manager and Tampa resident Charles Farrell. "He's not been babied along."
What's remarkable is that Echols has come this far without being grounded in the finer points of boxing technique. He's always gotten by on sheer grit and viciousness.
But that's gradually changing. Three years under Birmingham has instilled more defense and finesse into an athlete who one boxing scribe has called "wild and unrefined."
"Where I came from it was all rock 'em sock 'em, just a street fight," he says. "I brought that into the ring with me. It worked for me for a while. Now I know how to box more, know how to set the punches up. My defense can tighten up a little better, but now I'm mixing it all in, defining the Antwun Echols style."
As his 30-5-1 record attests, Echols has generally fared well inside the ropes. The business side has been a different matter. In fact, the fighter does not seem to have a clear grasp of his myriad relationships through the years, although he was quick to notice when he was getting screwed.
About a year and a half ago, he got frustrated with his long-time promoter, Art Pellulo of Philadelphia, and sued him over the size of his purses. He then signed with New Jersey-based Murad Muhammad. His next payday was $12,500, about a third of his going rate.
Echols didn't like much else in his new contract, either. Now he wants out. He's back negotiating with Pellulo, hoping to drop his lawsuit. "I can work with Art, but we got to get the black and white right," the boxer says. "He had me fightin' all the time. [Muhammad's] thing was, 'Just stay in the gym and when something comes up we'll call you.' Fuck that. I don't wanna work like that. I wanna know my fight six, eight weeks ahead of time."
In mid-July, Echols was not sure about the particulars of his next fight. He knew it was coming up in two or three weeks and that it was supposed to be at a casino in Connecticut. He thought he was due to make $50,000. He didn't know the opponent.
As Echols sits in his modest abode, holding his beefy 9-month-old son Latwun, he turns pensive and shares some of his worries: "The promoters and everybody don't wanna give the fighter nothin', and he's the one in there fightin'. They don't have insurance for fighters. If I go to the hospital, I gotta pay for the whole damn thing. If my kids go to the hospital, I gotta pay for the whole damn thing. It's a job, but it's not a job. You don't have the benefits of a job."
Still, Echols never considered taking a regular gig and doesn't see one in his future. He plans to fight five more years, make a bundle of dough and get out. But what if his plan goes awry? What would Antwun Echols do if boxing no longer paid the bills? He pauses, seemingly thrown off by the question. "There's no tellin' what I'd do," he says. "I might … I don't know. I'm not gonna comment. The thoughts in my head are negative and I'm not gonna comment on it."
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2004.