With just over a week left until the welterweight title fight between Terence Crawford and Shawn Porter, trainer Kenny Porter sets up for Shawn’s ‘high intensity’ sparring that includes a number of familiar names, including Gervonta Davis. Check out some excerpts of what Porter had to say about their training camp below.
Kenny Porter on if he has to keep Shawn and Gervonta from going all out in their sparring
“I mean it’s just like any other sparring session. It’s a high level sparring session for us but we have to make sure everybody’s safe...(Davis) is a southpaw, he’s got speed and power, you need that, but just like we can’t find a Terence Crawford, he can’t find a Shawn Porter to spar with.”
On how their training camp has gone so far
“We’ve had challenges to find the right sparring but the way I look at it is I’m sure Terence has had challenges to find the right sparring as well. We’ve had some really high caliber sparring but we haven’t had sparring with those high level guys for like a whole entire week, or two weeks. So we definitely got two, three sparring sessions in with Caleb Plant, we got a sparring session in with Dennis Doughlin, we got a great sparring session last week with Andre Dirrell when his brother was in town fighting — we got a great session with him. Doughlin and Dirrell were both above the weight classes that we used to dealing with but it was great work for us.
“Other than that, our conditioning level and everything we’ve had has been good, it’s been great, but we came up here to raise it to another level. Being 9,200 feet takes you to that level.”
On his son sparring Gervonta
“For those out there who think there’s a big weight class difference or whatever, we’re low in weight, he’s high in weight — it’s not like Shawn’s gonna be so much bigger than him. Shawn’s low in weight, he’s close to fight weight. But sparring Dirrell, Dirrell was 200 pounds. Sparring Doughlin, Doughlin was 180+ pounds. Sparring Caleb Plant, he was 190 pounds.”
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