MAN OF THE WORLD
REGGIE JOHNSON is a people person.
He loves boxing. Yes, he loved winning (doing so 44 times in a 52-fight pro career) and he loves his belts. But most of all, he loved the people he met, especially when fighting overseas.
“A lot of fighters just go in, fight, get paid, and get out,” says Johnson of the typical approach to boxing on the road. “We don’t roll like that. Every place I’ve been to, we hung out with the people.”
The Houston native, now 55, is best known for the belts he won at middleweight and light-heavyweight, for sharing a ring with legends such as Roy Jones Jnr, James Toney and Antonio Tarver, and for wins over the likes of Steve Collins, Lamar Parks, William Guthrie, Chris Johnson and Julio César González. But the man known as “Sweet” is most effusive when talking about the people he met.
“Man, I love Argentina,” he says of a country in which he went 0-3. But it’s not the sporting setbacks he remembers it for, it’s the personal gains.
“We went up into the mountains and hung with the poor people,” he says. “These people were like ‘he’s fighting our guy [Jorge Castro], why is he coming up here to us?’ But I loved them
