There are a thousand things Tony Ferguson could get excited about ahead of his professional boxing debut.
A fresh challenge? Learning new skills? Getting back under the bright lights? Another pay day even?
But of all the things, there’s one he is most jazzed about.
Wearing shoes.
The former UFC star has long had to do his work barefoot, just as nature intended , in the Octagon and on the mats.
Oh, how he has longed to be able to train and fight with shoes on.
“I f—– hate fighting without shoes,” Ferguson tells ESPN ahead of his Misfits boxing debut against YouTuber “Salt Papi” in Manchester, England on Friday.
“I grew up wrestling with wrestling shoes. I grew up playing football and baseball with cleats and I grew up just with shoes on my feet. It was just always like that.”
Fair enough.
Of course, it’s not just being able to lace up some boots that has Ferguson fizzing. The 41-year-old loves having something different to get him out of bed in the morning.
“I can’t wait to get in there and handle business, man, because I’ve been working my ass up,” Ferguson says.
“I’ve been showing up and waking up early, doing my run, doing my sprints on the hill no matter what time [it is], hitting my strength conditioning and doing everything that I need to do to get this job done.”
It has also been a long time coming.
Ferguson says the UFC didn’t let him entertain the idea of having a boxing match while he was with the promotion. A natural entertainer and a big star in the lightweight and welterweight divisions, it makes sense that the UFC wouldn’t want Ferguson to risk an injury in the boxing ring.
But tell Tony Ferguson he can’t do something, and he’ll try to prove you wrong.
“I don’t know why. They allowed other people to box. I’m not saying [it was] favouritism and all the other bull—-, but I’ve always wanted a box,” Ferguson says.
“They tried to ice the kicker, which means they try to put me on the shelf so that way they thought I was going to get old and not be able to do shit. But unfortunately for them they were wrong.”
Ferguson is another fighter nobody would blame if he walked away from the fight game. He’s been around long enough and earned enough respect that he surely doesn’t need Misfits. What he does want is for his two sons, Armand and Angel, to have a role model they can look up to.
“A lot of these kids don’t have fucking role models that are able to see that. Me growing up, I had Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Ferguson explains.
“It’s hard to find that. And if I’m able to still be that fucking dude where people can be like, damn, that’s a man right there. He’s doing his business.”