IT’S often assumed that every fighter starts out with the intention of becoming a world champion. But after beginning his professional career with a 6-6 slate, those intentions had to be fading fast for heavyweight Mike Weaver.
Enter Ken Norton, a future champion himself who Weaver trained with… well, whenever the Texas-born Californian decided to make his way to the gym.
“I worked with Ken Norton one day, and he told me, ‘Michael, you don’t come to the gym regularly for training and you don’t take it serious. If you come to the gym regularly and focus, you can make a lot of noise at heavyweight,’” recalls Weaver, who estimates that he only showed up one or two days a week. Despite this, whenever the phone rang with a fight offer, the then-23-year-old would answer.
“I had some ups and downs, because I would fight anybody,” Weaver tells . “One day I was getting ready to go to a party and I get a call. ‘Mike, can you fight tomorrow? The guy fell out. Will you take it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take it.’ I drove up there the same night and went to the fight. It was crazy.”
