The Boxer Who Always Had a Plan For Getting Hit

There’s an old saying in boxing.

If you do this long enough, somebody’s going to hit you hard enough to make you question whether you want to continue.

But when Ed Latimore got hit, he kept fighting.

“When you take a shot that does damage, it’s the ability to move through it that is so important,” he said.

For decades, Latimore has taken a variety of shots, some physical, some more abstract.

He grew up in public housing in a hardscrabble section of Pittsburgh, was kicked out of college, and battled alcoholism in his earlier years.

With his life seemingly on the ropes in his early 20s, Latimore made a critical pivot, choosing to pursue boxing in hopes of gaining some discipline and structure.

He eventually became an amateur heavyweight champion, then turned professional, signing with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation.

Latimore has since written several books, including the recently-released “Hard Lessons From the Hurt Business,” and also serves as a keynote speaker and competitive chess player.

“Life isn't about how hard you can hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving,” he said.

Best of 7 spoke to Latimore about navigating a critical life crossroads, lessons from the best coach he ever had, and why he feels the difficulty of a task is largely irrelevant.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Best of 7: Ed, how did some of the hardships you faced growing up shape your early outlook on life?

I was raised by a single mom who had a boatload of issues. There was a lot of abuse, emotional and physical. To live in public housing, you had to have an income below the poverty level, but when you’re born into that in the 80s and 90s, you don’t know anything else — that’s the normal you grow up with. I didn’t even realize I was poor until probably high school.

One of the things that happened to me, which was small but great, was in elementary school and middle school, they had something called a gifted program, so if your teacher identified you as somebody who was intelligent or creative, they gave you a test. One day a week you would go to a school with kids from all over the city who had been selected for this program.

It was a very different environment, and you got to see a different way of thinking and living and how people interacted. That was enough for the first time to say, “O.K., things don’t always have to be this way.” It made a difference and created a contrast for me. Otherwise, I probably would’ve grown up thinking fighting all the time was normal.

What led you to boxing?

I went to college the first time, and I wasn’t ready academically or emotionally. They kicked me out. I would tell anybody who would listen how stupid college was and how you could be successful without it. One of the people I used to tell that to was my girlfriend's mother. She was a professor of biology at the University of Pittsburgh and had been patient longer than I think most people would have been for somebody disrespecting her career, especially somebody in my position. One day, she just said, “Why don't you tell me what you've done with your life for the past four years, besides showing up at my house and eating my food?”

She threw me out. But I've never had a problem accepting the truth — whether it hurts or helps me, how I feel about it is irrelevant — and when she said that, I was like, “You're right.” If I died today, nobody would know or care.

I was going to join the military, but that was right around when we had just invaded Iraq — I wanted to change my life but not that much — so I said, let me try boxing. It wasn't about making money. It was about not being a dud in life and chasing a goal. I just found a boxing gym and I said, “We'll see how this goes, but if I stop fighting, it's going to be because I get injured. I'm not going to quit.”

I know your long-time coach, Tom Yankello, had quite an impact on you. What made him so effective as a teacher?

The boxing community is great at identifying strategies that make a fight work. But with technique, if you ask a coach how to throw a hook, you get 10 coaches with 10 different answers. Tom’s got an open mind, but it's not so open that he’s going to waste his time on a lot of different things. He modified how he was training and a lot of what he was doing.

I also think part of being a good teacher is always being a learner. There aren’t a lot of guys like that, especially in boxing. Most don’t coach full time. But all he thinks about and does is boxing. It's actually kind of obnoxious, but it gives him insight into how to train and develop tactically and strategically.

It’s those two things combined: The obsession and the open-mindedness. Then, Tom lives a very clean lifestyle. He was the first male I had met who I looked up to and said, “Here's somebody I want to be like and emulate.” He lives that life.

People who don’t know much about boxing probably associate the sport with throwing punches. But can you tell me about the mindset of also being able to take a punch?

Taking a punch has three aspects to it. One, you don’t want to take any punch you don't have to. With that said, the average hit rate for a boxer is about 30 percent — you’re going to get hit — so you need to have some type of resistance to the punch. The last thing is, no one's perfect, and we become a lot less perfect the more tired we get and the more stressed we get.

You can fight through a body shot but goodness gracious, a liver shot is really painful. Can you fight through it? Not everyone can. It’s the ability to minimize the damage, then when you take a shot that does damage, the ability to move through it.

It’s really an expected value problem. You can take a head shot, and it's not going to hurt, but your nervous system is going to go scrambling compared to a body or liver, where you're going to be able to function and think clearly, but that pain will drop you. So, what do we do? I don't want to take that shot on the chin or the liver, but I'll take one to the chest. I'll take one to the cheek instead of the temple. These are the ideas that inform every decision you make.

I don't even know how many fighters think like that. In the purest sense of the idea executed perfectly, it’s hit and not get hit. But the other guy is trying to do the same, and somebody's going to get hit. Do you get hit in a way that drops you or just annoys you with pain?

Some really good thoughts. I think some of that mentality applies beyond boxing.

Eventually, if you go far enough, you will come up against someone who is in shape, who has reflexes like you, who is just as athletic. The big deciding factor is how do they handle getting hit? Some people don't like it, so they never train their nervous system.

One of the things about defense is missing by an inch is the same as missing by a mile, but if you make someone miss by a mile, you've got to expend a lot of energy to get back into position, and you're not going to be able to do it fast enough. You have to make someone miss by as little as possible, meaning you have to take a little bit of the punch and stay in position to pay a better punch. You’ve got to train your automatic nervous system to not react and sit in there and stay calm under fire. If you can't do that, there is a real ceiling.

I want to ask you about some of your post-boxing career. You put out a lot of valuable content on social media, including this idea: “Someone with half your IQ is making 10 times as much as you because they aren't smart enough to doubt themselves.” Can you elaborate on that?

It’s a bias toward action. A lot of people think a mistake is catastrophic, but all it is is not getting what you aimed for. You learn the most valuable information when you make a mistake. If you look at it that way, you have to keep refining and iterating the process. What worked? What didn't work?

You have to get in there and break stuff. You can reduce your learning curve by academically understanding the basics, the rules, what works. But other than that, anything worthwhile I really believe is probabilistic, not deterministic. It’s not easy, because if it were, by definition of scarcity, it wouldn't be viable. So, we go do these things, and we take these risks, and we look stupid and we get our egos dragged through the mud, but we learn, learn, learn.

Before you know it, people are like, “How did you do that?” Well, you’re not going to believe this, but I sucked before.

What do you hope readers take from your book, “Hard Lessons From the Hurt Business?”

Identity is more important than motivation or discipline. I say that because all of the major changes in my life that took me from where I lived, where I started, where I should have turned into a statistic were all because I was not afraid to change what I thought I was.

That doesn't mean it was easy to go from living in the projects to interacting with people who had never even been in a street fight, or that it was easy to walk into a boxing gym and take on the life of a boxer, or to go back to school at 28, or to join the military, or figure out how life works being sober. But each time, I looked at it as an identity problem, not a discipline problem, not a motivation problem, an identity. I worked on changing that aspect of myself, and that made everything else flow.

The second biggest thing is that the difficulty of something is irrelevant, as long as it's vital to success. I think a lot of people get caught up in how hard this might be. But it doesn't matter. Everything is hard if you've never done it before, and there’s always some resistance.

But once you realize that’s the constant on both sides of the equation, you eliminate it. And you deal with what's left.

What I learned…

One of the most intriguing parts of the interview to me occurred when Latimore referenced expected value and the strategic calculations he would make of when and where to take a punch.

I found the notion of wanting to make someone miss by a very narrow margin to be especially fascinating, and it made me think of another concept I’d read about recently called the illusion of early progress. Essentially, just because our mind is fixated on something and we appear to be seeing some gains doesn’t always mean we’re actually closer to accomplishing the task.

Latimore appeared to utilize this concept and seemed willing to lure his opponent into thinking he was doing better than he actually was.

While a casual fan may turn on a match and see a boxer landing an impactful shot, that doesn’t actually mean he’s primed to win the fight or that it’s not part of a larger plan from the opponent.

Strategically calculating our suffering in the short term can lead to a far greater long-term outcome.