Shawn Porter's Last Day in the Gym

Former titleholder Shawn Porter worked so hard that he lost Saturday night, in the welterweight championship contest held in front of 12,718 frothy patrons at Brooklyn's Barclays Center.

His opponent was current undefeated champ Keith Thurman, who won on all three judges' scorecards by just a single round. That was hardly the showing Thurman had promised days earlier in the rooftop lounge of New York's Downtown Dream hotel, when he crowed to reporters he'd attain his 23rd knockout, if only because he really liked the number 23.

Thurman won, just narrowly, on cleaner shots, but only because he had the advantage of waiting for Porter to make a move (#BoxingIrony). That's why fans booed the decision. Porter threw more punches in 11 of 12 rounds. He made the fight. Unfortunately, the fight he made was one in which he could be picked off time and again entering the pocket.

Partly that's because Porter is physically limited: at five-foot-seven, he's short for a contemporary welterweight; he can only throw when he's in tight with an opponent. It's also because his team has treated getting in, to some degree, as a matter of will—or at least has overlooked Porter's mechanical flaws in doing so.

That's what I saw last Tuesday, during Porter's last day in the gym.

The driver who takes Porter and his crew from their Brooklyn hotel to nearby Gleason's in Dumbo drives them first into Manhattan, so they show up 40 minutes late (not that it's their fault, but man, it is a sweaty wait).

Porter's team has a certain look. Trainer-father Kenny Porter wears aviator glasses (not sunglasses—spectacles); Coach Wade has white baseball batting gloves embroidered with his name (they're quite helpful for a number of exercises, he says—but they also look pretty cool). But the most fascinating part of the team is its elder statesman, retired Hall of Fame referee Joe Cortez, who officiated a bout with Muhammad Ali.

As Shawn stretches, I sidle up to Cortez, and he tells me the story: Porter trains in Vegas, where Cortez has long lived. But Cortez's home is no ordinary one—here he begins flipping through pictures on his iPhone, as if giving a Ted talk with slides. Inside is a regulation ring, which he installed years ago so he could hone his own footwork, and that of the many refs he mentored during a 35-year career (there are slides of them, too).

It's also the house Earnie Shavers, the hardest puncher of the 1970s heavyweights, visited for consolation after Ali's death.

All that time reffing bouts, it pained Cortez when he noticed pugs making mistakes—say, circling the wrong way—because it wasn't his place to correct them. When Shawn's father sought Cortez's advice after his retirement, he was eager to speak, finally sharing his sharp boxing mind. He was signed up as a technical consultant.

As Shawn heads into the ring, a gym employee hands out black Gleason's T-shirts to the crew, which they all don. "We look good," Shawn says. And in a superficial sense, they do—Shawn especially, with the perfectly puffy mini-fro (think Kobe Bryant's early-career cut, but without the Mamba's receded hairline); the wide, disarming smile; and the thick eyebrows that he uses to great comic effect.

But Shawn is naturally a musclebound guy—like fellow welterweight Andre Berto, but shorter—and it shows in his boxing. Portentously. Because that puffed-chest, bicep-heavy, ripped-lats physique precludes a man from fully extending his arms while punching and, to modify an automotive term, widens his punch-turning radius.

(A quick primer: The hook, for example, should start with a vertically aligned arm and an elbow positioned not far from the body, and from that slot the arm should be turned over till the fist is perpendicular to the opponent and the arm horizontal to the floor. But if you've got a bursting pec and measuring-tape biceps, those muscles are going to collide as you turn the hook—there won't be space for it to slide across. So the muscled man must throw it wide, opening his own face for a return shot.)

Shawn heads to a corner of the ring where he, his father and Cortez quietly recite their regular gym prayer, in which they ask for strength and request no one be hurt ("even on days when we don't spar," Cortez tells me afterward). Then Shawn begins shadowboxing, his fists covered in highlighter yellow wraps that recall, for this New York Mets fan, Yoenis Céspedes' famed parakeet-sleeve.

Outside the ring, Coach Wade examines the new body armor Everlast has supplied. Shawn had shredded the old one with hooks and straight rights. "If I put that on," I ask, "just how much of his power would I feel?"

"Oh, you would hurt," Coach Wade says, before poking the vulnerable fatty areas below my navel and at my sides, to confirm his assessment of my muffin-top. Coach Wade tells me that before Shawn fought Erick Bone (KO in five), his body blows in training caused Wade to spit up blood.

That doesn't give Shawn's disciplinarian father any pause. As soon as Wade enters the ring, Kenny Porter barks instructions: "Jab, feint, right hand, body shot! I don't care if that right hand's not there, tear that fucking body up!"

Shawn obliges. When his father lambastes him for perceived errors later in the session, Shawn obliges then, too—not with a smile but with an aggressive glare. Still, he obliges. The anti-Bartleby the Scrivener.

There's a lot of psychology at play here that I'm not qualified to explore: Kenny lost a sibling when he was young, so some say son Shawn partly fulfills the role of little brother; others will tell you that Kenny wants to be Shawn (I heard that from a member of Showtime's sports operation, too). No one denies that theirs is a very deep, if complicated, love.

For all his criticism, though, Kenny overlooks certain fundamental problems in his son's game. For instance, Shawn has a leg kick on his jabs, like a batter who lifts his front foot as the pitch nears. When Shawn's foot comes down, the jab comes out, such that you can time and counterpunch him just by observing his feet or even listening to his shoe hit the wood beneath the canvas. And sure, Shawn occasionally stamps the floor without throwing—but if you have to Riverdance just to feint, it's probably best to drop the jig altogether.

Similarly, Shawn sometimes lifts both feet when he surges forward on his power jab, and that kind of instability gets you knocked down. Now, whether Shawn, at 28 years old, can go back and rework some of his most basic moves I'm not sure. Boxing has a way of making young men old dogs. Muscle memory precludes new tricks.

To be fair to Kenny and Joe Cortez—and also, unfortunately, to be tougher on Shawn—the footwork is just one issue, and the two men notice others. Shawn still wades into the pocket headfirst and bent-over sometimes, leaving him open to an uppercut that Keith Thurman's trainer, Dan Birmingham, will later assure me they had already been practicing, given that hey saw the opening on tape.

Cortez points this out to Kenny, who says he tried to correct it already. And then Shawn reaches in with a right hand to the body, exposing his head again and leaving his body even further imbalanced. This time, Kenny jumps on the mistake.

"You're reaching!" he yells. "Be in range!"

In other words, don't create a pocket in which a fighter can hit with you a check hook or counter right. A harbinger.

When it's over, Joe Cortez sidles up to Kenny and gives his full take in sotto voce. My overall assessment is shared by a fellow I'm chatting to on the sidelines of the gym: it's pretty late in the game to be making changes. Usually, you've worked out what you must by fight week. The last days are about visualization, running through scenarios, cutting those last couple ounces to make weight.

We pile into a black SUV to head back to Shawn's hotel—this time taking the direct, five-minute route.

Shawn's suite is sleek: leather sofa, mounted flat screen, warm lighting. Feels like a W Hotel, though it's not. Kenny plops himself down into a chair, Coach Wade and Showtime Shawn hit the couch, I spread out on the ottoman and Andrew, the indefatigable publicist who arranged this jamboree, stands. In retrospect, I regret not offering him ottoman space.

Shawn types something on his phone. "It's someone's birthday," he says, only half-aloud.

"Whose?" Kenny asks.

"My mom," Shawn says. I write it all down and only realize the implications of the exchange later—does that represent his parents' distance, or his father's super-narrow fight focus, or both?

Instead, I turn on a recorder and begin shooting the shit. I say what an odd transition it'd be if Manny Pacquiao goes from pug to elected president of the Philippines. "We've had movie stars become presidents," Shawn says, and I love the guy for mentioning Reagan's acting career—because which other boxer would?—and it allows us to segue into a mutually loved topic, film.

As Shawn and I try to talk, Kenny shouts, "Who's the Gipper, Shawn? Who's the Gipper?" As though knowing the 1940 film Knute Rockne All-American, in which Reagan starred, is required knowledge of a champ boxer.

Shawn's favorite film is Any Given Sunday, the Oliver Stone football flick that, for all its bombast, has proven rather accurate about the dangers of the game and also features one of those sports monologues (the game of inches speech) you can replay endlessly on YouTube. Pacino as coach: "'Cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the fucking difference between winning and losing! Between living and dying!"

That could be this camp's motto.

In the end, we wind up naming boxing movies we like. Shawn takes Jimmy Smit's Price of Glory, Andrew calls out Raging Bull—which is the No. 1 film on Shawn's to-watch list, so Andrew promises to snag him a copy in the next two days—and I mention The Prizefighter and the Lady, which starred actual heavyweight champ Max Baer. (You may know him as the loser in Cinderella Man).

"Max Baer," Kenny interjects, "his son played Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies." There's a pause, before Kenny turns to me.

"You didn't know that, did you?"

Nope. Hillbilly trivia, however, does not a boxer make. Nor the dying speech of the Gipper.

Since the fans in Barclays clamored for a rematch Saturday night, Shawn will have another chance—if not against Thurman, then in a similarly significant fight.

Of course, it may be too late to refine his technique. Same for his physique. Perhaps he's destined to be another Tim Bradley, the boxer to whom HBO anchor Jim Lampley compared Porter in an email to me. Hardworking and kind. Good, but not great.

But Porter might as well try. Because he is so damn likeable and smart and loyal—and boxing has constant need of a champ like that. Worst case scenario, if he doesn't improve he'll still be the guy whose one-point loss was essentially in the margin for error. And so, maybe next time, it's a win.

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