Kenny Porter, father and head trainer of Shawn Porter, speaks his mind and he is totally unafraid of doing so. Case in point, Porter’s recent interview with Fight Hub, in which the trainer spoke about the recent and frequent injuries Keith Thurman has been plagued with – injuries that have kept “One Time” out of action and out of fights with Porter and anyone else for over a year now.
Porter Senior insists that until he sees proof to the contrary, the injuries are merely “strategic” moves on the part of Thurman, designed to keep him from fighting his son in a rematch of their epic 2016 rumble. Not only that but Porter Snr says he is certain the car crash Thurman was involved in 2016, the one that prevented the rematch between Thurman and Porter from going ahead, never actually happened.
“It’s, you know, par for the course. Unless he’s ready to prove that he has a hand injury I don’t believe anything is going on there,” Porter said. “It’s not bad luck [on Thurman’s end; all the injries he has suffered]. It’s strategic. It’s not bad luck. You know, that first fight he pulled out of, there was never any medical reports given about that. Nothing. [We] Never received anything. There was never any proof of a car in any type of accident so, you know, I made a quick call to Florida, because I know people in the insurance business, and he had a 2016 car — he said ‘nah, there’s no reports of a 2016 Mustang being in a car accident.’ Of course you gonna report your new car in a car accident. So it never happened. He knows it never happened.”
Porter said that it is his belief that both Thurman and Danny Garcia are reluctant to fight his son (Garcia has of course been ordered by the WBC to fight Porter for the title vacated by Thurman, who shows no signs of being fit to fight any time soon).
“I don’t know what it is. I think him and Danny [Garcia] both have a mindset that they don’t wanna fight Shawn, and they’re hoping that Shawn is continuing with trying to stay busy and fight other people and I’m sure they rooting against Shawn when he fights,” Porter said. “They want him to lose. They have no interest in fighting him.”
That said, Porter does think the big, big fights will not elude his son forever, that the defining fights will come in time.
“Eventually Shawn will fight Danny for the first time, he’ll fight Keith again — the hope is to fight Errol Spence, [Terence] Bud Crawford, all of these guys,” Porter stated. “And then he [will] move on with the rest of his life; because boxing’s not a sport for guys to stick around forever. These are the top echelon fighters, we wanna fight those guys and we just gonna do whatever we can to make those fights happen.”
But first, will Porter get Garcia into the ring, and who wins if they do fight? There is no doubt, Porter is a rough and tough customer who can, on his night, beat any 147 pounder out there. It can certainly be argued how Thurman has never been the same since his war with Porter.
