Quotes on Ring

The twenty minutes or more we spend inside the ring, that's the fun part. It's the rest of our lives that's the real battle - the ruthless backstage politics, the constant traveling, the endless mental and physical aches and pains.

Sometimes you can be one of the best, but you don't accept that if you don't get the ring or win the Super Bowl. There's a lot of good teams between the Super Bowl winner and other teams. Once the Super Bowl is over, we lump everyone into the other 31, and that's not fair.

You know, you want to win and you want a ring. But when you win and you get the ring, you never really wear it.

I learned to run backwards from Muhammad Ali. He told me about running backwards because you try to imitate everything you do in the ring, so sometimes you back up. So you have to train your legs to go backwards.

The worst thing is for a fighter to be in the ring with no hope - where he's missing and getting caught. You need to have hope.

If we have anything in common as humans it's the instinct to survive. When you go in the ring you are going against that instinct. You're running into conflict instead of away from That's when the complexity really begins.

I want to be able to look back and say that I stood where I was supposed to stand. I fought where I was supposed to fight, in the ring and out of the ring.

Ali even told me in the ring, 'You can't beat me - I'm your Lord.' I just told him, 'Lord, you're in the wrong place tonight.'

I know that when a fighter is out of the ring for more than two years, when he comes back he isn't the same anymore. Each fighter is different. But each must think, even if something goes wrong, 'I have to make this decision and live with it for the rest of my life.'

They call it the rope-a-dope. Well, I'm the dope. Ali just laid on the rope and I, like a dope, kept punching until I got tired. But he was probably the most smart fighter I've ever gotten into the ring with.

You get these moments in the ring that live forever. That's what Muhammad Ali accomplished, and I hope that I have, too.

Boxing is the ultimate challenge. There's nothing that can compare to testing yourself the way you do every time you step in the ring. On the downside, you meet a lot of really bad people in boxing, at all stages of your career.