TO BE A CHAMPION
HE still remembers the feeling. One hand being raised, the other clutching a huge trophy. Hundreds of faces all around him, all looking at him, all applauding him. He had won his first bout and felt like a champion.
“I fought a kid who was a year older and had two amateur fights. I tell you the trophy that I got from that first fight, I was 60lbs and the trophy was half my size. So I was so excited that the sport gave me something so big. I never experienced having a trophy that big and the feeling, they were calling me champ. I felt a lot of glory being in the centre of the ring I was just an eight-year-old kid,” Jose Ramirez, now the WBC and WBO 140lbs titlist, remembered. “I was so excited with that trophy I didn’t want to let go of it. I just wanted to collect more trophies and I wanted to learn more about the sport.”
Ramirez’s parents had migrated to the United States in 1980s to
