Interview with my Pops: National Champion Boxer for Iran during the 1960s
So I joined the Armenian sports club called Ararat, which is the name of a mountain in Armenia, the most famous mountain. Yeah. So I started doing an amateur fight. So after a couple of years, I joined to fight for the capital state. So we had lots of boxes coming in. So that was our experience of the starting. Okay. I have a question and we have to stop and then go to the next swell in a second
First of all, we used maybe entire gym had two or three sets of gloves, and we used to change the gloves. Each one would spade. The other one had to wear the same glove which was wearing. I never had my own cup to a point. Even for National Championship, we exchanged the cups. We will give our cups. The other one. I never owned the mouthpiece until I was famous national. Wait. So you were boxing with no mouthpiece, someone else's mouthpiece?
The national team was one of the top three boxing clubs in that region in Mediterranean countries and all that stuff. So odds with me was 1200 to win. This guy because he was experienced and I wasn't. And I ended up fighting first night when you say, hold on. I want to touch on this because you keep saying I wasn't experienced, right. But at this point, you had gone to the Asian Games and the Olympics. You're representing your country
All right. So picking up where we left off, there's a couple of things that I want to ask you just in terms of the sport in general and how things have maybe changed and why you didn't continue in the sports bar first. What was your professional record? If you remember it? I was would say somewhere around in period of seven or eight years fight, I lost maybe seven fights and I won. I would say 50, 60 of them. 50 or 60 of them
But as somebody who fought so many times and has health issues that I think we would directly correlate to boxing, whether it's the arthritis in your hands or whatever, what would you recommend or what advice would you give to young fighters? Now that even with all of the medical help in the world, we're still seeing that they're suffering from pretty horrendous things
My idol of boxing was Cassius Clay, of course, which we call it Muhammad Ali. And I always pull that trick on athletes, which they say they are into boxing. I always tell them, give me the name of two best heavyweights in the world. Everybody says Mohammed Ali, and they say so and so. But my attitude always been Cassius Clay and Mohammed Ali. So he was your favorite. He was my favorite. I practically mimicked his style of fighting because I was tallest banter weight
For those of you listening, I'm not exaggerating was basically on his hands and knees at my dad's feet ended up giving us free parking. He said to me, you have no idea who your father is. He's one of the greatest fighters of all time. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that for me. I think I was seven or eight years old. Yes. Is the coolest thing that has ever happened in public
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Thank you both for sharing your father? S amazing story with us. I really enjoyed listening to that
Sophie B
@sophlamoph · 0:23
Just wanted to hop on and say that this was really, really cool, especially I'm an Iranian American, and this is just so interesting to listen to. And I especially loved the part where you jumped in, said that you are named after the Taylor, and that's amazing. So this is really cool
phil spade
@Phil · 1:46
But he had beaten TIO Stevenson, the great Cuban boxer and Pan and games the year before, and I could just listen to him tell those stories all night long and the same thing with your father. I can just listen to the stories of old boxers that just went through so much to get where they had to go. And it's just a time that is gone forever. I think I just don't think you'll see anything like that anymore, and it's just enjoyable to listen to