Kenny Porter took some heat from within and around the boxing world on Saturday not. It wasn’t so much that he stopped his son Shawn’s fight with Terence Crawford — which was Shawn’s first, and with his retirement, last stoppage loss — but many felt he did Shawn dirty with his post-fight interview in the ring.
Kenny elaborated on his thought process at the post-fight press conference,
On stopping the fight
“I planned on stopping it going into the fight. Already knew this…if I saw what I saw, that was my plan. No knock against Shawn in terms of who he is but as he mentioned earlier when he thought Errol Spence would be the last fight. I’m his father, I knew that. So I knew everything that was gonna happen with him before it happened. So this was something that was coming, not to be negative towards him, but because I’m his father I could see these things.
“I can see it in the training, I can see it in the movements, I can see it in the looking at the clock ‘how long I gotta be here today?’ I can see it…and I smile because someone said I was criticized. Please, criticize me. Go right ahead, I love it. Because at the end of the day — this is where we at right now, we are at the end — tomorrow morning I will be able to look out of my window at his house right across the street from me. I will be able to play with my (grandsons), I will be able to walk my dog over to his house, I will be able to hug my daughter-in-law, and I will be able to love on my son.
“So we won before we got here. We were already winning. It’s just what’s expected in the ring, but in the biggest part of this picture, when this thing is over with, I’m still his father, he’s still my son, and we get to do that part. That’s a long life of that, there’s a whole bunch of that to go on. So I just saw things that told me that it was time.”
On if he’s relieved that he can now just be Shawn’s father instead of trainer
“Absolutely, but when you say I’m hard on him, you gotta understand the reason for that is exactly what we dealt with tonight. I’m hard to the point of, ‘Man, I need you to protect yourself, I need you to go home to your wife, I need you to go home to your kids, I need you to be able to play ball with them. I need you to still play ball with me.’
“This is just a small part of his life and people would ask me some time ago he had over 270-something amateur fights, they’d say, ‘Why you fight him so much?’ He was winning. If he got hurt after fight number three as an amateur we wouldn’t continue with this. He was winning. He may have been right in this fight, right there with the guy, it was a surprise for me that he went down — and I’ve never seen him go like that — and then what happened after that, he got hurt again and I saw him at a deficit. He didn’t have everything it took to protect himself. And coming in here I wasn’t seeing that same thing going on, protecting himself. So the most important thing is I’m able to walk away from here and he’s safe.”