Interview Dated August 2004

Willie Savannah

Willie Savannah is one of the pre-eminent figures on the Houston Boxing Scene. Originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, he became interested in boxing while serving in the Air Force, and opened the Savannah Boxing Club in 1980. His gym may be the most well-known in the city. Savannah manages several professional fighters, including Juan Diaz, who won the W.B.A. Lightweight title on July 17th in Houston.

HBScene - So you never were a boxer?

WS - No I never was a boxer. But I tell all the kids that I boxed under the name of "Killer Gorilla" and that I was 89-0 with 89 knockouts and that I'm the one that retired Joe Louis. The eight-year-olds believe it but the nine-year-olds don't believe it though.

HBScene - Even though you never boxed you've amassed a considerable amount of knowledge and skill about how to teach others to box. How did you acquire that knowledge?

WS - Actually boxing is almost like anything else. You just sit around and you watch and you learn. It's a lot different than baseball or football which is something everyone does on the playground, play basketball and that's what I played was football. I think I just had a knack for it, just sitting around watching. Whatever I've done in my life I've worked very hard at it and I've worked very hard at boxing. I could stay up all night long almost, studying films and studying records of different people. When I opened my gym in 1980, Ronnie Shields turned pro, and in a year and a half he was in the top ten in the world and it usually takes a person five years to get into the top ten. In three and a half years we were fighting for the world championship. We were ranked number one WBC, WBA and IBF, so I've picked up a little bit here and there. They used to have this book out on this business of boxing, I'd read that and one thing I always did was talk to people, pick people minds about different things. When we used to box with Don King I would always talk to his vice presidents Bobby Goodman and Duke Durden and just ask them off the wall questions that didn't seem to mean much to my trainer. He'd say, "Come on man, let's go eat." He didn't realize that I'm dissecting. He thinks I'm just shooting the breeze but I'm not. At the time I'm finding out how much NBC, CBS pays for fights and how much money the casinos pay for site fees and that kind of stuff.
I've always been very hands on, even when I was working. I'd get to the gym about 5:00, 5:30 in the evening and I set up everything. I always did. I set up how much this guy goes on the heavy bag, how many rounds he spars. I'd take the guys running every morning like at 6:00 in the morning before I went to work and my trainer just had to follow orders and I just always let them know what I wanted them to work on. I can tell them what I want to work on but I'm not a demonstrator. I don't pretend to be able to demonstrate to the guy but I can tell him what I want him to do. A lot of people ask, "How do you train Hispanic fighters that don't speak English?". Boxing is universal. Just like you want to date a girl. She don't have to speak English to get that across. The same thing with boxing. So you can tell when a guy's throwing his punch right. If I see a punch and I think it's not thrown properly it may take me two or three days and a light will go off in my head and then I'll come up with why. And then I'll get with my trainer and we'll discuss it and go over it and that's what we'll try to work on.

HBScene - So recently you had a fighter that you brought from ground zero all the way to the WBA Lightweight title. Describe that feeling for you.

WS - Actually I'm more amazed now than I was the night of the fight. People don't realize all fights for Juan have been big since he was 11 or 12 years old. This fight wasn't much more of a big event than it was when he was fighting in the finals of the national Silver Gloves because anything he did back then set the stage for what he did on July 17th. If he hadn't been successful in those things that wouldn't have happened.

HBScene - But why are you more amazed now than the night of the fight?

WS - Looking at the fight and just realizing, watching the Olympics, some of the guys that are on the Olympic team are some of the guys that Juan boxed when he was 14 or 15 years old, and these guys are maybe 22 years old. Those guys have waited all this time to try to make a name for themselves so they can fight pro and then it's going to take them four or five years if they get a chance to fight for a title so Juan is four or five years ahead of all those guys because this is the year that he should have been going to the Olympics, not fighting for a world championship so that's one of the amazing parts of it.

HBScene - How'd you get him the title fight?

WS - The thing with Showtime sort of collapsed. Showtime pulled out November 22nd or after November 22nd so we had to go with HBO and HBO dictates who you fight. So you either fight who they tell you to fight or you don't fight anybody. They give you several names. So the name of Lavka Sim also came up, as a matter of fact I was sort of suspecting that, so I said we might as well fight Lavka Sim. If we're going to fight a guy ranked number 2 or 3 we might as well fight for the world title.

HBScene - So the Sim people agreed to fight you, in retrospect probably not the greatest decision on their part.

WS - I can understand why they would (take the fight). This guy lives in Mongolia. The only way he can get American T.V. is to fight a kid like Diaz. Because when he won the title it was on one of the Don King undercards and it wasn't televised. So now he gets a chance to fight on HBO and I'm sure he thought he could beat Juan.

HBScene - So dissect the fight a little bit. It was a great fight.

WS - For one thing Juan stuck to the game plan. Exactly how we trained in the gym, that's exactly what he did. We knew this guy was very strong. We knew he had that little sneaky quick straight right hand and an uppercut. There was no way in the world you were going to knock the guy out. So he stuck to the game plan about 99% of the time. Otherwise it would have been a long night for us. Juan made a hard fight easy.

HBScene - Did you ever have any doubts? I gave him the fight, thought he might have lost a couple of rounds.

WS - No, I felt we had won six rounds out of the first seven so I figured all we needed to do was win one or two more rounds to clinch the fight. On some scorecards Juan won all but two and on some he won all but three. Even those two or three rounds were very, very close. You could have called those draws or whatever. But I thought he won comfortably.

HBScene - Was that the first fighter of yours that's won a title?

WS - Mm-Hmm.

HBScene - So what's next for him?

WS - He'll fight in November or December.

HBScene - Here in Houston?

WS - I dont' think so. I think it's be in San Antonio or maybe in Corpus or Hidalgo.

HBScene - Any idea who the opponent might be?

WS - We've got a mandatory coming up against this guy Julian Lorcy out of France.

HBScene - So there are a few champions in the lightweight division. What are your thoughts on unification?

WS - Unification is the furthest thing from my mind. It doesn't bother me whether we unify a title right now or not. The thing that I want to do is to keep Juan maturing. Juan is 20 years old. Juan came out of the juniors, of the 15-or-16-year-old age bracket to fight professional, whereas the other guys, they came out of fighting grown men turning pro. Like Jermaine Taylor, Rocky (Juarez), these guys had a lot of open fights but Juan never had open fights. He came out of the juniors. So he's young and I can see him growing into man strength. I can see his physique changing so I'm in no hurry to unify a title. I'm sure at some point we'll do it. But you look at baseball, basketball or football. The Tennessee Titans could be 8-8 in the regular season and wind up in the Super Bowl. Now a boxer with an 8-8 record is going to wind up sleeping under a bridge. Baseball, they can be half and half and still get a chance to play in the World Series. So they have all these different ways you can get there. But then they have three or four divisions in boxing and everybody's going "Oh, man it's alphabet soup". What about the alphabet soup in all these other sports? And you've got so many guys that are fighting worldwide. Say you've got four or five thousand guys in one weight division worldwide, then youy've got one champion that defends the title three times a year. All those other guys are in the top ten are going down the line before they can get a chance to fight for the title. So I think for the sake of boxing it's good to have more divisions because you'll have more title fights. People wll see the guys instead of one guy who unifies the title and fights every five months and that's the only time anybody ever hears about him is fighting every four or five or six months. So by you having three or more different ones, WBA, WBC like IBF or WBO, more title fights are going to be on TV. The more title fights on TV, the more the public will see different fights. But you get these guys fighting once or twice a year that ain't worth a crap.

HBScene - So who's the next big thing that's going to come out of your gym?

WS - I think Jose's (Diaz, Juan's younger brother) going to be the big thing. He's 3-0 with two knockouts. He's fighting next month. I'm hearing rumors they want to put him on TV next year. His first fight was on Telemundo. If Rocky's fight would have been over early on April 24th he was going to be on NBC that day. In his first four-round fight, that's awesome. So Jose's coming along real good. He trains real hard.

HBScene - How do you contrast the styles, is there any difference between him and his brother?

WS - Jose throws more punches than Juan but as time goes by he'll settle down a little bit and throw a little less punches. I remember when Juan fought his first ten round fight he threw a thousand punches. As they become more seasoned pros they start picking their shots more so Jose will slow down as time goes by. He has very fast hands. His hands are superfast. He's very strong. He wants to knock everybody out with one punch.

HBScene - So just like you're fighters you've put in some time and some work and here you are in essence at the top of the game. That's got to be pretty satisfying to you personally.

WS - Yeah, you're right. Because Juan first came in here when he was eight years old. So you take a person and you mold them in a way that you think is positive and you see them come out not just in boxing but in school. And you see that you've had something to do with that, it makes me and my wife feel very proud.

(Editor's Note:--What follows are some questions and answers from an interview with Willie in October of 2005)

HBS - So now Juan's defended his title a couple of times. Give us your assessment of how those fights went.

WS - You mean how did he box? Just like we wanted him to. He boxed real well. He didn't just slug. Got on his toes, boxed, used the jab, everything. Defense was real good.

HBS - He really throws a lot of punches.

WS - Yeah, he'll fight Lavka Sim next so he'll probably throw the same amount of punches as he did last time.

HBS - Do you expect him to make any changes or adjustments?

WS - No the only adjustments he'll make is improvements over what we saw in his last fight. Even though he fought almost a perfect fight there's still some areas that he needs to do and that's what we'll be working on for this fight. So we're not going to just try to fight the same fight identical as we did last time, we'll fight it somewhat, but he'll make some improvements.

HBS - What might those be?

WS - Well, his balance will be a little bit better, his jab will be a little bit better and we'll use it more.

HBS - There's been some criticism that the two challengers that Juan has fought since taking the title have been well past their prime so they weren't really legitimate contenders. What's your reaction to that?

WS - First of all, I'm not the rating committee. Lorcy was a mandatory so we had no choice but to fight him so I don't have a response to that. Juan's the world champion. He's 28-0. That speaks for itself.

HBS - You mentioned that there was some frustration in that since he had to back out of the Ebo Elder fight because of the fight, Main Events hasn't scheduled another bout for him and you don't know when and where this mandatory defense might take place.

WS - Well you know I'm totally disgusted because Main Events have not reached out and got him another fight of course. I think everything went downhill when he got cut for that April fight. Since then I think they more or less put him on the back burner to make him suffer because he didn't fight with a cut eye. I hate to see that happen but that's a fact. I don't have much dialog with Main Events any more since then. I've written then letters, asking them what is their game plan and they don't answer. It's unreal that if you couldn't promote a kid like Juan. Maybe if he was a wife beater or a drug addict or something like that they'd be hopping all over him but he's squeaky clean and he's a good kid, he's a college student and if they can't work with something like that I don't know what the hell's wrong with them.