Teofimo Lopez Isn’t Just Fighting to Retain His Title – He’s Outrunning a Generation of Pain [Exclusive]

On Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, two of the world’s premier pound-for-pound talents will step into the ring to settle a smoldering rivalry as Teofimo Lopez Jr. makes the fifth defense of his WBO light welterweight title against undefeated Shakur Stevenson, who’s aiming for a belt in his fourth separate weight class.

One of the most highly anticipated championship fights in recent memory, Lopez vs Stevenson is a dream matchup for boxing enthusiasts in a day and time where social media influencers are generating the most buzz (aside from Canelo Alvarez and Japanese sensation Naoya Inoue with their international appeal) and the biggest purses.

The matchup hearkens back to a time when little guys like Floyd Mayweather, Felix Trinidad, Manny Pacquiao and Oscar de la Hoya headlined the sport and kept the flame of the sweet science aloft in terms of talent and blockbuster box office appeal.

Oscar De La Hoya vs Floyd Mayweather | IMAGO / Newscom / GDA

But given Boxing’s shifting dynamics, with the brilliant Terrance Crawford recently announcing his retirement, Canelo nearing the end of his lucrative run and Gervonta “Tank” Davis in limbo due to his continuing legal issues, the winner of Saturday night’s fight will be primed to step into that vacuum and assume a prominent role as one of the sport’s preeminent American faces moving forward.

Lopez and Stevenson, both 28 years old, will step into the ring in their athletic primes with an equal opportunity to initiate a much-needed paradigm shift that could reinvigorate a sport that seems to be sagging stateside.

It’s an appealing, coveted, and long-sought-after role that Lopez, who despite his titles, dedication, unique craftsmanship, and a stylish ring incandescence that’s punctuated by his signature post-knockout backflips, has long yearned for.

The making of Teofimo Lopez

Since first donning a set of gloves at the age of six, he’s felt the spotlight beckoning, but has often been relegated to fighting for respect as much as he has championships.

Lopez can’t recall when he wasn’t immersed in the distinctive sights, smells and sounds of boxing from his very earliest days.

“My dad fought in the Daily News Golden Gloves in New York City when I was little, and he’d take me to all the gyms, from the ones in Redhook, Brooklyn to the old Gleason’s and others all over the city,” said Lopez. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t around boxing.”

With his three-year-old son in tow for one of his workouts in Redhook, an old man who was a fixture on the local boxing scene saw Teofimo Sr. and his boy and said, “Wow! You’re going to be a world champ one day.”

“Thank you,” Teofimo Sr. replied.

“I’m not talking to you,” the old man said, nodding toward the shirtless little kid standing at his father’s side. “I’m talking to him.”

“He’s just a baby,” said Sr. incredulously.

“I know, but I can tell by his physique and the muscles in his back.”

Teofimo Lopez Sr.’s journey up to that point - before traipsing around the city with his young son looking for something beyond his arms' reach in those sweaty, funky city gyms - was not for the faint of heart.

He split his childhood living between a father in his 50’s with means in Honduras and a poor mother in Brooklyn who gave birth to him as a teen.

He loved going with his mom to 42nd Street, a seedy stretch littered with second-rate movie theaters, drugs, prostitution and peep shows, then known as The Deuce, to catch the cheap Kung Fu triple features. While his mom slept, exhausted from her work in a soap factory, he gaped at the choreographed fighting gymnastics in films like The Five Deadly Venoms.

Prior to adolescence, Teofimo Sr. was a vicious street-fighter with an explosive temperament who hustled to keep cash in his pocket by robbing houses and selling $5 bags of oregano to folks who thought they were buying weed.

When he was 14 and in Honduras, his father died suddenly. He self-medicated with cocaine and alcohol while back in New York. Then his mother committed suicide.

The resulting rage, anger and hurt still lives with him, still haunts him, still hovers around every perceived sleight.

By the time his son was born in 1997, Teofimo Sr. was no longer touting burn bags of oregano. He was scrambling along a wide stretch of Fourth Avenue between Bay Ridge and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, selling crack, coke, and heroin.

But despite running afoul of the law, he always looked out for his loved ones. When a group of men once disrespected his wife, Jenny, in a Redhook bar, he laid them out with a supreme display of hand-to-hand combat skills, knocking them unconscious one by one like one of his heroes in those old Kung Fu flicks.

His own untamed streak was an heirloom passed down to his two older daughters.

He once enrolled all three of his young children in Taekwondo classes, but the instructor kicked the girls out, saying he couldn’t deal with them. Teofimo Jr., on the other hand, despite weighing only 40 pounds, was a revelation.

“He was the smallest, baddest kid out there,” said Teofimo Sr. “He was fast and athletic with twitchy muscles and he looked like a little Bruce Lee. Everybody in the class loved him. He was like their mascot.”

The girls soon started running with a neighborhood gang of young teens whose modus operandi was robbing people and stealing cars.

“They’d sneak out in the middle of the night and run away,” said Teofimo Sr. “They were wild.”

When they’d gone missing once, he kidnapped five of those young teens at gunpoint, tossed them in a van, and demanded that they show him where his daughters were. Or else.

“It was a BB gun because as a felon I wasn’t allowed to carry a real gun,” said Teofimo Sr. “But they didn’t know that. I put them in the van and told them to direct me to the house where my daughters were hanging out. Those boys were scared to death. They thought I was going to kill them.”

Florida, the gym, and a different direction

By the time his son was five, with the heat coming down from NYC law enforcement, Teofimo Sr. relocated the family to Florida. Looking for a fresh start, he reinvented himself as a limousine driver.

“My dad was driving a limo, but he was also still selling drugs when we moved to Florida,” said Teofimo Jr. “Him and my mom did what they felt they had to do to provide and take care of our family.”

Senior was looking for a place to work out when he walked into a Davie, Florida Police Athletic League gym near the family’s new home. As he spoke with one of the trainers, he realized he left his car idling out front.

“Can you watch my son?”, he asked the trainer. “I gotta park my limo real quick,” he said, turning his attention to little Teofimo, “I’ll be right back.”

“How old are you?” the trainer asked Teofimo Jr., who sat quietly as he stared at the fighters moving about.

“Six.”

“Go over there, find some small gloves that fit and come back.”

“He put the gloves on my hands with no wraps and put me in an orthodox stance,” Teofimo Jr. recalled. “He taught me how to throw a jab, a 1-2 combination and he couldn’t believe how fast I picked it up. When my dad came back, the trainer was like, ‘Yo! Check this out! Your son is different. He’s gifted.’”

“He was telling me, ‘1,2,3, slip, pull, roll’ and I learned all of the combos he showed me really quickly. I was executing them fluidly. It just came natural. He said I picked up things in a few minutes that took most people years to learn.”

Within a few days, Junior was training and sparring. Three years later he won the first of his many amateur titles as the 70-pound Florida Silver Gloves.

Lopez Jr. found his gift and purpose in fighting. The discipline helped tame his own wild streak, the same one that afflicted his father and older sisters.

But his feral tendencies would still surface from time to time, perhaps after a bad day at the gym or a poor sparring session when his father didn’t spare any words in telling him how bad he looked.

“When I got frustrated, I’d just bolt and run away,” said Lopez Jr. “I’d run until I was exhausted in order to just cool off.”

After one of those poor sparring sessions when he was around 12, his frustration boiled over while walking through a Dollar Tree store. His father kept repeating, in staccato, rapid-fire succession, “You’re better than that! You’re better than that! You’re better than that!”

“He kept lecturing me and the more he talked, the angrier I got,” said Teofimo Jr. “I was livid. I was furious at him, at me, and with everything. He looked at me and could tell by the look on my face that something bad was about to happen.”

Recognizing his son’s bubbling inner volcano, and knowing his propensity to run, Senior yelled, “Don’t you do it!”

By the time he’s hit that third syllable, little Teofimo made a break for it.

“I bolted out the store with him chasing right behind me,” said Junior. “He’s yelling, ‘Don’t do it, your mother’s gonna kill me!’ And I’m yelling back, ‘F--- you!’”

A few blocks from the Dollar Tree, the local police had an active stakeout for a nuisance group of kids who were stealing cars, nd when they saw Teofimo Jr. tearing down the street, they mistook him for one of those car thieves.

Within moments, it wasn’t just a pleading father chasing his irate son, it was officers on foot and patrol cars in pursuit of what they thought was a suspect.

The cops tackled and wrestled the boy to the ground.

“They were kicking me with their steel-toe boots and my legs were hurting so bad,” said Junior. “I kept looking up, saying, ‘You got the wrong person!’ One of the cops kept jamming his elbow into my head, saying over and over, ‘Shut the f--- up!’ My head kept bouncing off the concrete and I was bleeding all over.”

MORE: How To Watch Teofimo Lopez vs Shakur Stevenson: Date, Start Time, Fight Card & Live Stream

His dad’s pleas went unanswered as well.

“They had ripped up his face and blood was everywhere,” said Tefimo Sr. “I kept yelling, ‘Please don’t fucking kill him, that’s my son!’”

With his face severely cut and bruised on the ride home, Senior informed his son that he was done training him. “I ain’t fucking doing this no more,” he said.

“Dad, please, I can’t do nothing else, I’m sorry,” Junior pleaded. A few days later they were back in the gym.

“I was crying in the car on the way home, saying over and over, ‘Please Dad, I’ll never do it again,’” said Junior. “Three months later, I did it again.”

But the father and son kept working, kept striving, kept fighting.

“It became an obsession for both of us by the time he was 13,” said Teofimo Sr. “He’d be sparring against pros and beating them up. I’d never seen anything like it and thought to myself, ‘This shit could really become something.’”

That thought proved prescient when his son went on to win the 2013 National Silver Gloves and in 2015, the National Golden Gloves and the U.S. Olympic Trials.

But father and son were soon exposed to the shadier sides of the sport when Teofimo Jr. became the only American fighter ever not named to the Olympic team after winning the Olympic trials.

It’s a subject that still rankles them both.

“USA Boxing hates us,” said Teofimo Sr. “Everyone could see at the Olympic qualifiers and trials that my son was the sport’s next superstar. But they gave his spot to Carlos Balderas, who people were saying was the next Oscar de la Hoya. It was a political robbery.”

Lopez was allowed to represent Honduras at the last minute and lost a close decision to France’s Sofiane Oumiha, the eventual silver medalist. It’s a decision that father and son will never agree with.

“He fought the best dude in the 132-pound weight class and beat him,” said Senior. “The crowd was going crazy because Honduras had never won anything in Olympic boxing. The crowd was screaming for him the whole fight and they booed when they announced the decision. They straight-up robbed us.”

“It later came out that those boxing medals were all for sale, that the judges were dirty and many of them were arrested and brought up on corruption charges,” Senior continued. “Not one single gold medalist from the 2016 Rio Olympics did anything in the pros.”

Teofimo Jr. may not have achieved his goal of an Olympic gold medal, but he attained something greater in the process.

“He has an entire country behind him that supports him,” said Senior. “Whenever he fights, it’s considered a national holiday in Honduras.”

Fifteen fights after making his debut on the undercard of the Manny Pacquiao vs Jessie Vargas with a resounding knockout, Teofimo Jr. won his first world title with a vicious second-round dispatching of IBF lightweight champ Richard Commey on December 19, 2019.

The full depth and shimmering brilliance of his tool kit was on display against the great Vasily Lomachenko, the reigning WBS super lightweight and The Ring and WBO lightweight champion ten months later. Lopez dominated the generational great and won by a lopsided unanimous decision.

His first professional blemish came against the rugged Australian George Kambosos Jr. in his next fight, in which he struggled to make weight and experienced breathing difficulties throughout after battling Covid-19 during training.

Lopez has since reeled off six consecutive victories and walks into Saturday night’s fight at Madison Square Garden making the fourth defense of his WBO and The Ring light welterweight crowns.

Looking ahead

Lopez and Stevenson, who’ll be making his debut at light welterweight, have been eyeing each other since their amateur days, even prior to their appearances in the 2016 Rio Olympics, where Stevenson captured a bantamweight silver medal.

The dichotomy of each fighter’s perceived game plan has fans salivating for a matchup that many are already seeing as a Fight of the Year candidate. It’s an appealing pairing of two excellent tacticians with contrasting styles.

Stevenson will try to frustrate Lopez with a defensive-minded southpaw style by fighting behind a stiff jab and controlling the distance with his footwork.

MORE: Watch Teofimo Lopez face Shakur Stevenson Live On DAZN

Lopez will be looking to be equal parts boxer and puncher/destroyer while getting underneath Stevenson’s jab to make a real fight of it as opposed to a tactical chess match.

“I have never shied away from a challenge and always chased the biggest fights in the sport because I know I am one of the best boxers in the world,” Stevenson said in a statement when the fight was announced. “Teofimo Lopez will learn that firsthand on January 31 when I take his belt and show him that there are levels to this game.”

Lopez responded with his own statement once the contracts were signed - “Duck, Duck, Goose! Are you ready for New York City? Brick City in the concrete jungle, so let's get ready to rumble! The Takeover is here to stay, not play. Make Boxing Great Again is my forte. Shakur will fall in nine.”

As fight night approaches, Teofimo Lopez Jr. exudes a quiet confidence with training camp wrapping up. His days of running away in frustration are long behind him. Looking ahead, he sees a future pregnant with possibilities and greatness.

And looking back at the Lomachenko fight, when few thought he could win, and the ease in which he walked away victorious, he senses a similar outcome on Saturday.

“I’m the champion,” said Lopez. “Stevenson is trying to come in and take what I have. It ain’t happening. His people are telling him to play it safe because they know what he’s up against. But in fights like this, with so much on the line, you gotta take risks. You gotta be a dog to take it from a champion. And I’m the dog in this fight, a true champion. Always have been.”

This feature story was written by Alejandro Danois. Alejandro is a freelance sports writer, documentary film producer and the author of the critically acclaimed book The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope and Basketball. His feature stories have been published by The New York Times, ESPN, Bleacher Report, The Baltimore Sun, Ebony Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Sporting News and SLAM Magazine, The Baltimore Banner and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, among others.

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