Either way, both father and son would agree, he wasn't himself that night.

She'd hanged herself. She was a bartender at a strip club. Cynthia explained that she would not consider dating him until he'd turned 21. But the title, the fixation with Lomachenko, why? He was stopped 33 seconds into the second round. The blood rage is still there. Come Saturday we're gonna steal the show!". His mom, Jenny. Cynthia came with flowers, cake, champagne and a homemade card. IT WAS A panic attack, what happened on the return flight. "When it comes to boxing," Teofimo says, "my father is a magician.". Still, he says he’s staying in shape. I was almost turning into my father.". Man, honestly, we were lucky. It felt as if his heart was pounding through his chest. They went through everything: his parents, his parents' parents, from Brooklyn all the way back to Spain. To that point, the questions were all about knockouts, backflips and the selection of his celebratory dance. His father spoiled him, treating him to club sandwiches in hotel restaurants. Senior even had an altercation with one of Teofimo's previous backers, former heavyweight champ Shannon Briggs.

It only made him angrier. "I was 191, fighting a guy who was 220," he recalls.
I don't look for the KO, but when I hit that dude I'm gonna knock that m-----f----- out.". This kid will kill him," Senior said, nodding at his son. His father, Teofimo Lopez, Sr., began training Lopez in the sport of boxing from the age of 6 and the father and son duo have been inseparable. But temperatures remained in excess of 100 degrees through the night.

Pouting. Divisional rankings -- The top 10 fighters per division, WBA-IBF champ Taylor demolishes Khongsong. He beat Senior with a belt.

The Honduran-American had a strong career before turning pro, though. she asked her mother.

He went, finally. Teofimo scored knockdowns in the first and fifth rounds, a KO in the sixth. But he doesn't get that. Teofimo would rush him to the hospital; the vet would declare him DOA. Teofimo told his family at the last minute. Teofimo Lopez evidently wasn’t taking any chances. Teofimo Lopez was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 30, 1997.

Where do you rank Lopez among the opponents you’ve faced? What's this kid talking about? We left two or three days before it got hit hard. https://boxingjunkie.usatoday.com/2020/04/teofimo-lopez-and-family-have-been-riding-out-coronvirus-in-arkansas, Demetrius Andrade to face Dusty Harrison on Jacobs-Rosado card. "All he ever wanted was to make his family proud," he says. They watched the main event from a lounge in the Garden. But politics is about making friends, and Team Lopez, by their own admission, had a talent for alienating people. His father was tapping Leo with his foot, trying to wake him. But he never let anyone disrespect me. And he saw no way out. Teofimo knew what they were saying about her.

The camp, held in Vegas, was an unmitigated disaster. ON APRIL 23, four days after knocking out two-time European champion Edis Tatli, Teofimo married Cynthia in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where her family now lived. Teofimo Lopez seems the most explicitly Oedipal construct in sports, caught between the family he came from and the one he's trying to start, trying to figure out which demons are his, and which ones belong to his father. Teofimo Lopez Jr.’s response to all that? I told you from the beginning.". His parents had a complicated relationship, their passions and the distance they maintained beyond the grasp of a child's understanding. The kid who dances and taunts over the prone bodies of his victims has taken to wearing matching onesies, him and Cynthia, reindeer and snowflakes. Richard Commey, the Ghanaian champion, is a decade older, unconflicted with a fierce will and a dangerous right hand. Now he saw it again in what he was teaching Teofimo: the vision, the coordination, the catch-and-shoot style. He said, “Stay in shape, you fat f—!”, Sign up for the Boxing Junkie newsletter to get our top stories in your inbox every morning. 10:30 p.m. When people chant 'Teofimo,' it's not just for me. "Like Bruce Lee," she says, a gleam in her eye. Yeah, that hit home. 3 contender. ", Teofimo got quiet. But without the usual knockout, he suddenly found himself being called out as a fraud.
But Senior was shacked up with a girl and couldn't be bothered. All he knew was that the jagged shards of his memory had finally begun to make sense: His mother taking him to kung fu triple features on 42nd Street: "Enter the Dragon" and "Game of Death." He had a modest six-figure bonus from Top Rank (among the promotional company's prospects, he was considered a distant third behind silver medalist Shakur Stevenson and two-time Irish Olympian Mick Conlan), and a monthly stipend from his manager, David McWater, a professional poker player who became wealthy running bars and restaurants in New York. Oh God, thought the flight attendant, who smiled politely and quickly returned to the galley. There are two puppies, a morkie and a Pomeranian. ", "My mom's loyal," Teofimo says. It was a disappointing start to his career, but one thing he never seems to know how to do is to quit! Soon enough, they moved in together in Brooklyn. ", "Twenty-two years and my dad still doesn't see it," Teofimo said, turning to his father. (In fact, he went to check himself out in the mirror, make sure he looked OK.). It looks like this, this house -- what the "reality" genre would demean as a set for "Champs and Their Shrinks." "That's the day I started giving blood to the sport," he says. And when he wasn't pouting, he was angry.

This was a mean kid, still just 20, but ready to blow, bent on inflicting pain. Teofimo thought. The doctor's office was near the Garden. "You need therapy," she kept telling him. Then again, his dad pissed him off, too. He'd been tasked with the salvation of a profoundly damaged father. But as the JFK-bound flight reached its cruising altitude, his mind was racing -- each thought taken to its catastrophic extreme.