Why fight?
Why put your body and mind through everything that being a boxer entails?
Why continue with all of the training, the drills, the roadwork, the sparring, the pain, the punishment, the politics, the ups and downs in the sport, the ups and downs on the scale, the sacrifices that are required in order to succeed at the highest levels?
Why go through all of this if you don’t love it?
Jordan White may not have a passion for boxing, but he’s proficient in it.
“I’m not as much of a boxing fan as everybody else that does it and loves to do it,” White tells BoxingScene. “I enjoy boxing, but I don’t like to make it my life. My dad always told me as a kid, ‘Don’t love anything that doesn’t love you back.’ Boxing doesn't love anybody. And that’s the hard truth. Boxing does not love anyone. At all. And the moment you think boxing loves you is the moment you will have a rude, rude awakening.”
White was perhaps 14 or 15 years old when he received that advice. By that point, he’d been boxing since he was 8. This didn’t deter the teenager, didn’t cause him to second guess what he had already dedicated so much of his life to. But White said it gave him a “realistic standpoint” on his pugilistic pursuits.
And he’s continued on in the sport for long after. At the age of 28, White has now boxed for two decades. He’s 20-2 with 12 KOs and has been a professional prizefighter for 10 years – in this case, “prizefighter” is not just another synonym we writers turn to in order to prevent repetition.
For a boxer whose passion isn’t boxing, he’s still going despite those two defeats, one early in his pro career, one more recently, still striving as a lightweight prospect who sees himself as an elite fighter, who is confident that he can challenge for a world title.
Why fight?
“Sometimes we got to do things that we don't necessarily want to do to get where we want to go, you know?” White said. “I don’t love boxing. I love what boxing can do for me.”
What it can do for him – and the people he loves.
“It can make me not worry about money no more. It can make sure my dad, my mom, my grandma, make sure everybody has a spot at the table. And it’s something I’m good at,” White said. “God gave me a talent. I just want to make the best of it.”
White turned pro at the end of 2015 as an 18-year-old competing at junior featherweight. His first loss came in May 2017 on the undercard of a David Benavidez fight. White was 4-0 while opponent Adam Benito Lopez was 6-0. Both weighed in at 124lbs. Lopez took a six-round unanimous decision.
White then won 15 consecutive matches, including a sixth-round technical knockout of the 11-0 Misael Lopez in 2021 and a two-minute dispatching of the 17-0 Eridson Garcia in 2023. White’s streak came to an end this past September, when he lost a unanimous decision to the 21-5 Rene Tellez Giron.
White came in within the lightweight limit for the bout while Giron was overweight, something that has happened frequently in Giron’s fights. White doesn’t blame any of that for the loss.
“I think I beat myself, pretty much. I don’t have no excuses,” White said. “He was the better man that night, but in my heart I know, and in reality I know that I’m the better fighter. I beat myself [by] not being a student of the game, not doing the things I need to do to become a world champion. Nobody will ever see that person again.
“You know, I was going through a lot in life at the time. I ain’t making no excuses, but it is what it is. And I kind of let what I was going through in life get in-between my fighting. ... I learned my lesson. It’s not really a loss if you learned a lesson from it. This is only the beginning. I got a lot to prove to myself, not anybody else. That’s what that fight with Willie Shaw was. I'm proving to myself that each time I get in there, I’m going to do better than I did last time.”
White got back in the win column on January 30, taking a 10-round unanimous decision over the 15-6 Shaw on an undercard featuring many of the top prospects from the Washington, D.C., region.
“I stuck to the game plan that we set for ourselves. I was defensively responsible for a good amount of time. I stayed disciplined. I was in shape. I could have did another three or four rounds,” White said, before detailing what he felt he could have improved on.
“I could have maybe got the stoppage. I could have did a lot better with keeping my hands up; I got hit with a couple of punches that I was being a little bit defensively irresponsible. I could have made it a cleaner fight. You know, I could have been a little bit more busy. It’s always what you could have, should have done, you know, but I’m just glad I came out with a ‘W.’”
It helped that endurance issues, which plagued White in the past, were no longer a factor.
“Any fight that has been close or anything like that, I’ve gotten tired. That was the main thing: just getting tired and not being able to think clearly in the ring,” White said. “And that’s a pivotal thing when it comes to boxing. You have to be in shape. You can’t get tired. So that’s one of the things that I’ve been working on overdrive with, being in shape, and it’s showing. Me being in shape and working on that, it’s going to show that I belong in there with the elite fighters. You know, I am an elite fighter.”
It also helps that the life distractions, which he didn’t go into detail about, are now gone.
“It’s a lot of personal things that were stopping me from being able to train how I want to train and do the things that I need to do,” he said. “It’s completely behind me, and I’m glad.”
Here’s what’s in front of him, then: continuing to get better, continuing to advance through the rankings and toward a title shot.
Don’t misconstrue White’s earlier statements. He may not love boxing, but he’s taking more pride these days in what he does and how he does it.
“As a younger guy, like I said, I didn’t care for boxing. I took the sport a little lightly at times in my career, and it showed in certain fights,” he said. “But at this point, I'm giving boxing my complete all, whether I like it or not.”
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.
