During this video interview, respected trainer Naazim Richardson gives his take on the recurring situations we see of fighters testing positive for banned substances and how the lack of real punishment encourages fighters to continue doing it.
Richardson on what he makes of Luis Ortiz’s taking blood thinners in the past and other fighters using banned substances:
“My take is, man listen, ya’ll got too much money behind you, too many people behind you. Man listen, my young boy said something years ago — I don’t agree per se, but I understand — a young kid named Paulie Malignaggi, I’ve known him since he was fighting in the amateurs. He said ‘man, you’d be a fool not to use something ‘cause all these guys is using something’ so you couldn’t compete with them unless you’re doing something. I understood what he was saying. I don’t agree but I do understand what he’s saying ‘cause he’s right.
“Travis Kauffman said something, he said ‘if you cheating on your wife and she lets you cheat, you’re gonna keep cheating.’ There’s no incentive to make you do something different. I had two heavyweights, I had one guy test positive against both of my heavyweights — and he test positive against somebody else. So I’m like ‘what did he buy, a six pack of that shit and say I paid for the whole six-pack, I’m gonna use it?’
“But if boxing doesn’t step up and say something to him, say ‘hey man, no, you can’t use this’ — in baseball they don’t let you just keep swinging at the ball until you finally get a hit. They say ‘one, two, three, you’re out.’ How do you just keeping letting guys repeat their action?...Mistakes are for humans, it’s what we do. That’s probably what we do best, probably nothing we do more than make mistakes. How many times you gonna keep making the same mistake? How many times they gonna keep letting you do the same thing. That’s ridiculous.
“So Ortiz popped — from what I heard he popped more than once. The excuses pretty much go out the door. We had a young kid that I knew not too long ago — I won’t put his name out there — but he said he popped for something he was taking for medical reasons. ‘Okay,’ but I never heard of him popping again. So these guys are repeating offenders, I mean, the judge even send away repeat offenders...
“The sport can get dangerous. I don’t think boxing is violent, I don’t believe that. I believe it’s violent when you violate the rules of it, then it becomes violent. But when it’s rules set in agreement, cage fight or whatever, when you have rules two men agree [to], ‘okay, we can elbow each other, we can knee each other’ that’s an agreement...but when guys keep going outside of those rules, this sport can become deadly. And we gotta get on top of that, man, because everybody got a family...”