Brandon Rios still motivated, fights on
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that there’s nothing that gives Brandon Rios — who fights Humberto Soto on Saturday in Tijuana, Mexico — as much pure exhilaration as the sport of boxing.
For Rios, there is his family, first and foremost.
“Being home with my kids, my kids always give me joy. Spending time with them,” said Rios, who has been married to his wife, Vicky, since 2010. “Actually my daughter’s in karate and she’s doing really great and it brings great joy to me because I get to be with her, enjoying it.
“And not only that, I get to practice with her at home, practice with her on her form and her methods, all that. So that’s badass.”
Rios told ESPN.com prior to his last outing that he made a pact with his daughter, Mia, that while she works to attain her black belt, which she will hand over to her father, Rios will do the same in regard to one more world title belt.
Back in mid-November, Rios (35-4-1, 26 KOs) began that process by stopping Ramon Alvarez in nine rounds, this after stating he would hang them up for good nine months earlier after suffering a ninth-round knockout at the hands of Danny Garcia.
But as he contemplated that hasty announcement, Rios, 32, just as quickly decided that he didn’t want to look back in five or 10 years with any regrets. Boxing was still very much in his system.
“Yeah,” said Rios. “At 35, I’ve already made up my mind that I’m done with boxing. At this moment, when I said I was going to come back, I made a promise to myself, I made a promise to my wife, and I told them, ‘I’m going to come back, but I’m going to do it 100 percent right. I’m going to be more dedicated than ever and I’m going to be focused to get back to the top, make as much as I can make in boxing and do as much as I can do before 35.'”
Perhaps Rios, who is now admittedly in the twilight of his career, appreciates the sport more, even the everyday rigors of it.
“I’ve always appreciated the sport, that’s why I started doing it since I was 8 years old,” Rios said. “It gave me wealth, it got me over here [to Oxnard, California] to have a family. But not only that, I see it now, you’ve got to be more dedicated to rise to the top, again. Before, I was young, I didn’t [care], I was one of those crazy kids, but I was still competing and winning because I had that love for the sport.”
There is a saying that youth is wasted on the young. Perhaps it does apply to Rios, who in the past, despite his hell-bent-for-leather style inside the ring, didn’t always have a Spartan mentality in terms of preparing for battle.
“Now I appreciate the sport more, and you have to be more dedicated, 100 percent, you’ve got to be ready because the fact that the fights are getting tougher and some of the younger guys are up to date on the new technology that’s going on. So you’ve got to be ready for that stuff,” Rios said.
It’s been a hard, grinding career for Rios — with his fighting style, he was never meant to have the longevity of a Bernard Hopkins or Floyd Mayweather. The warranty comes up quickly on hard-nosed fighters like him. There are some who believe he should’ve stayed retired after getting halted by Timothy Bradley Jr. back in 2015.
But fighters fight. This is what they do.
As he prepared for the last chapter of his entertaining career, back in his corner was Robert Garcia, who had separated from his longtime charge after the Bradley fight. By the time he faced Danny Garcia in February 2018, Garcia had reunited with Rios. The veteran trainer believed at the time that it would be the last fight for the native of Garden City, Kansas.
“In the locker room after the fight, he said that was it,” Garcia recalled. “A couple of weeks later, he said he wanted to give it one more shot.”
Rios, through his attorney, Guadalupe Valencia, had inked a lucrative three-fight deal with Eddie Hearn and DAZN that began last fall.
Rios then called Garcia to tell him about his new contract and whom he planned to train with moving forward. Garcia says he was compelled to make the drive up from his home in Riverside to Oxnard to confer with Rios. His feeling was that if this were to continue, he would have to be there as a buffer between the wants of the promoter and Rios’ current capabilities.
“I met with him and his wife and said, ‘Look, Brandon, I’m still going to be involved.’ I had said I wasn’t going to be involved, but I said, ‘I’m going to be there just to make sure they don’t put you in against guys that you shouldn’t be fighting.’ So that’s why I’m here.”
Two-time lightweight world titleholder Brandon Rios and said Thursday that he believes a victory Saturday over Humberto Soto will position him to fight for a world title for a fourth time.
Rios-Soto would’ve been a great fight back in 2011, when Rios captured the WBO lightweight title and Soto was considered among the better fighters in the division. As they meet in 2019, they are now junior middleweights, and Soto, 38, is a veteran of 79 professional bouts (68-9-2, 37 KOs). So there’s certainly plenty of miles on his odometer.
“I’m going to make sure they’re not going to put him in with a young lion. I don’t want them to use Brandon’s name,” Garcia said.
A guy like Rios needs to get all the fighting out of his system before moving on with the next phase of his life.
“That’s what he needs; Brandon loves to fight,” affirmed Garcia. “He comes to my gym and he spars all these young, talented fighters that I have — and most of my guys are very, very talented — so he spars all of them and he gives them good work. Most of them can’t even do 10 rounds with Brandon, because Brandon puts a lot of pressure and keeps coming. After four or five rounds, they’re dead tired.
“So Brandon has the energy to win the fights we’re picking for him.”
Rios, for lack of a better term, is the type of guy you’ll have to drag out of the ring. There was no such issues for Garcia, who during his career won the IBF 130-pound title but retired at age 26 with a record of 34-3 (25 KOs).
“I just didn’t have the fire. I never really wanted to be a boxer; it was my dad forcing me to fight,” Garcia said. “By the time I had my last fight, I was sick of the sport, I was tired of it.
And he has vivid — if not pleasant — memories of scoring a fourth-round TKO of John Trigg on Sept. 22, 2001, at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
“I thought about walking out of the ring in the second round,” Garcia said of his last professional outing, on the Fernando Vargas-Shibata Flores undercard. “I was like, ‘What am I doing here trying to beat up on this guy? Or this guy trying to beat up on me?’ I felt like just walking out and just going to the dressing room. I didn’t because it was on Fernando’s undercard, it was a big card, a lot of people from Oxnard were there.
“So I just finished the fight. But then after the fight, everybody was celebrating in the locker room and we got the win, this and that. I told everybody, ‘There’s nothing to celebrate; this was my last fight’ and I never had the thought of fighting again.”
Rios has never had such conflicted emotions about this sport. This isn’t what Rios just does, in many ways it’s what he is.
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I love it so much,” Rios said. “I do not regret any moment that I’ve had in it — even the bad and the good. So I enjoy everything of it. Of course, boxing is always going to be number one. Is there anything besides that? I doubt it.
“I don’t see myself doing something else besides boxing.”
The reality is that he won’t be fighting too much longer. But chances are he’ll stay in the sport in some capacity.
Rios notes that he has a friend who owns a gym.
“Maybe I’ll come over there and help him out with some of the amateurs and stuff, maybe get an amateur team or something like that,” Rios said. “So maybe I’ll help him out with some of the amateur kids.”
There will also be plenty of time to travel to his daughter’s karate tournaments. “I know there are options that will open up for me. So it’s good,” he said.
But first, he’s still got a little bit of fight left in him.