The power has always been there – you don’t get a nickname like “The Sniper” otherwise. It is alluring. It is tempting. It has upsides and downsides: It is better to have power than not, but power alone will typically only get you so far.
That is where Travon Marshall finds himself nearly five years into his professional career, after 13 wins and one significant setback. “The Sniper” is trying to give himself a better shot. He’s aware that he needs to have a full arsenal of weapons and tactics.
“I’ve never been a pitty-pat type of fighter,” Marshall, a 25-year-old welterweight and junior middleweight from Washington, D.C., said in an interview with BoxingScene. “I always threw with bad intentions or try to hurt the person in front of me.
“It’s like a blessing and a curse, because my coach [is] trying to get me out of that, because you got to know when to turn it on and turn it off. As my opponents get bigger, the rounds get long, you just can’t go in there blazing. You got to move through the fight accordingly. That’s the part we’re getting together right now.”
When Marshall was a child, a family member had a heavy bag in their basement, so you can picture that his earliest punches likely tended to be hooks and crosses rather than jabs. Once Marshall stepped into a boxing gym, he fell in love with hearing people hit the bags and watching them spar. He trained as well, with his first official boxing match eventually coming at the age of 12.
“My first amateur fight, honestly even my first sparring session outside from my gym, they actually thought we was lying about my age and my experience. I was not too advanced, but I wasn’t your regular beginner,” Marshall said. “That just shows the potential I had right there. But what really made me think, like, ‘Oh, I might actually have potential in this,’ I believe my first four [amateur] fights was by stoppage, by TKOs. Mind you, I’m only 12, 13 years old in this time frame. A lot of kids don’t get stoppages at that age.”
In April 2021, when he was 20, Marshall turned pro on the undercard of an event in Los Angeles featuring lightweight Frank Martin in the headliner. Marshall scored a first-round knockout.
Indeed, seven of Marshall’s first eight wins came by KO or TKO as he developed on the undercards of Premier Boxing Champions shows. That landed the 22-year-old prospect in a clash with another unbeaten welterweight, Gabriel Maestre, in August 2023.
Maestre, at the time 5-0-1 with 3 KOs, was 36 years old and had a good amateur pedigree with two Olympic appearances. As a pro, he was a few fights removed from a highly controversial decision over another D.C. area fighter, Mykal Fox.
This could have been Marshall’s grand arrival. The fight opened a Showtime tripleheader and took place at the MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, in front of Marshall’s home crowd.
The day before the bout, Marshall spoke of how his team had been trying to get him to be more relaxed in the ring and not to retaliate in a way that would leave him vulnerable.
“Even though I get caught with a shot, sometimes I be eager to get it right back,” he told YSM Sports Media. “That’s one of the things we’ve been working on: just staying calm and composed.”
The bout was scheduled for 10 rounds. It didn’t go past the second.
About a minute into the round, Marshall backed away from two Maestre jabs, then shuffled to his left, coming to a stop close to the ropes. Maestre moved forward, crouched and threw a big overhand right. Marshall attempted a counter left hook but got caught with Maestre’s shot and soon toppled over, leaning face-first over the bottom two ropes.
Marshall was up by the count of seven. Maestre, rushing forward and eager to resume the action, was pushed back by the referee, giving Marshall a few more seconds to recover. It wasn’t enough. Maestre’s onslaught brought Marshall back to the ropes, where he tried to exchange. Marshall landed some heavy blows but Maestre got the better of the sequence.
They clinched and moved back to the center of the ring. Not for long. Maestre maneuvered Marshall to the ropes once more and let loose with a barrage until Marshall was diagonal and defenseless, the ref jumping in to stop the fight.
Two and a half years later, as people have probably requested of him countless times since, Marshall was once again asked to relive his sole defeat and explain what happened.
“I just feel like my inexperience in the moment, right there when I got caught with the shot, once again, to go back to my mentality, instead of getting myself together, grabbing, holding, using my feet, I went right back into a dogfight, which was a stupid mistake on my behalf, but it was my ego that got me,” he told BoxingScene.
Marshall knew that losses are a part of the sport of boxing. But the business of boxing has unfortunately long been unforgiving, overemphasizing undefeated records and punishing fighters when they don’t come up victorious.
“I was more so hurt on how close I was,” Marshall said. “I was just blessed to be in a good position right there, but I was more so hurt and devastated on what I knew that winning that fight could have did for me and my family. I was fine, but it’s just, I just knew the life after that.”
Instead, his career since has been a combination of rebuilding and returning to his ongoing development. Marshall has won five in a row: once at the end of 2023, once in 2024, twice in 2025 and once so far this year. Two injuries sidelined him during this time: his left rotator cuff and his right hamstring. Marshall says his body has fully recovered from both. That’s not all he’s recovered from
“I actually think he’s grown real well from that loss,” said Marshall’s trainer, Andrew Council, a two-time world title challenger who fought professionally from 1990 to 2003. Council’s career included a victory over Buddy McGirt and defeats against Bernard Hopkins, Winky Wright and Keith Holmes.
“I see him being more patient,” Council said. “I would like him to be a little more patient as a coach, but also I don’t want to take away his aggressiveness, because that’s who he is. I can’t take that from him. I think he needs to use his jab a little bit more. When he uses his jab, he can set up combinations and set up more traps and walk a person into his right hand.”
In his most recent fight, Marshall took on the 9-4 Eduardo Diaz on a show in Hanover, Maryland, as part of an undercard featuring several up-and-coming prospects from the region. Marshall triumphed via technical knockout in the sixth and final round.
“He had a hard head,” Marshall said. “Once I started touching his body, I started getting results. It’s, like my coach said: ‘You got to learn, and you’re still learning how to navigate through these long rounds. So you're going to have to invest in that body as you’re starting to fight [eight- and 10-round fights], because a lot of people can take a good head shot. So as your opponents get better, ain’t nobody’s just going to go down off a head shot, man. You’re going to have to break these guys down to get the results you want.’”
Once again, it is better to have power than not, but power alone will typically only get you so far. Marshall says he is trying to get back to a more technical version of himself – he utilized his jab and speed more before becoming so enamored with scoring KOs.
“People pay to see a knockout. People pay to see good fights. But my coach, he just says, ‘Man, I wish I had what you had. Use it, Travon. People that fight like that, or people with that mentality, don’t last long in the sport.’ I gotta stop going in there just looking for the knockouts and be smart about it. I gotta set it up. Back then, I was setting my knockouts up. Now I'm kind of just shying away from my fundamentals just to get the knockout.
“I can still produce the knockout but look better doing it. It’s more so [no longer] just standing there, banging to get it, instead of using my boxing abilities to capitalize off the man’s mistakes and get the knockout like that. It’s just leveling up my IQ and my way of thinking.”
David Greisman, who has covered boxing since 2004, is on Twitter @FightingWords2. David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” is available on Amazon.
