Above: Cassius Clay, soon to be Muhammad Ali and the undisputed champion of messing with his opponents, prepares to face Sonny Liston. (Photo: Getty Images)

RYAN GARCIA’S FIGHTING SKILLS MIGHT NOT GET HIM ON THE POUND-FOR-POUND LIST, BUT HE MIGHT BE AMONG THE BEST TRICKSTERS OF ALL TIME  

Most fighters are predictable. That’s why Ryan Garcia’s behavior was so alarming in the weeks before his April 20 victory over Devin Haney. After a few decades of fighters saying nothing more than “I’m in great shape and I’ll kick my opponent’s ass,” here was Garcia talking about secret societies and devil worshippers.

Not since Mike Tyson was at his wackiest had a fighter drawn so much attention with his pre-fight antics. And much like the days of Tyson’s meltdowns, there was considerable worry over Garcia’s mental health. The difference, of course, was that Tyson had to unveil his strange behavior in public settings, usually in an unhinged interview or on a press conference dais. Garcia, a child of social media, had only to post something online to get the same effect. And he was relentless. Most fighters talk about their boxing strategies. Garcia talked about the Illuminati. Most fighters talk about their promoters, or the recent deals they’ve struck. Garcia talked about alien abductions. The boxing world, which is rather old-fashioned and unaccustomed to such topics, assumed Garcia was in need of an intervention. Some expressed concern that the young man was ill and shouldn’t be fighting. Few considered that he might’ve been having fun. 

Another difference between Tyson and Garcia was that Tyson appeared trapped in the image he’d created for himself. As Tyson got older, perhaps to compensate for his diminishing skills, he increased the bogeyman act. Unfortunately for him, opponents who weren’t intimidated by Tyson’s façade usually knocked him out. Still, he’d created the image and he was stuck with it. On the other hand, Garcia has already admitted his oddball behavior was merely a ruse. “I don’t know what made me come up with the idea, honestly,” Garcia said on the PBD Podcast. “One day I just decided to just go all in and just commit to the plan that I had, and I was not gonna budge for nobody.” The other news from Garcia’s camp – namely a pair of failed drug tests – is for another story. His weirdo act, on the other hand, was masterful. We don’t know if he’ll resort to it for future fights, but it was fascinating while it lasted. It also puts him in some interesting company.

Ryan Garcia (right) kept up the mind games even while in the ring with Devin Haney. (Photo by Chris Esqueda/Golden Boy Promotions)

A landmark moment for fighters acting strangely before a contest dates back to February of 1964 when a 22-year-old Cassius Clay challenged heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in Miami. Not yet known as Muhammad Ali, the boisterous Clay spent weeks harassing Liston. The culmination came at the weigh-in, when Clay entered Miami’s Convention Hall hollering like a lunatic. Startled by Clay’s shouts that “someone” was going to “die at ringside” that night, the police asked him to calm down. He responded by lunging at Liston, while his handlers held him back. Wild-eyed and seemingly hysterical, the challenger’s pulse rate was so high that the physician in attendance, Dr. Alexander Robbins, suggested the fight be canceled. “This is a man who is scared to death,” Dr. Robbins said. Meanwhile, the Miami Boxing Commission chairman, Morris Klein, fined Clay $2,500 for his “wild antics” and promised another fine if he continued his batty behavior during the fight.

Livingstone Bramble and friend on the cover of The Ring’s September 1984 issue.

The pre-fight histrionics were nearly forgotten once the bout took place. Liston quit after the sixth round, claiming an injury to his shoulder. The new champion would always say his “crazy act” at the weigh-in shook Liston’s confidence. “For 35 minutes, I put that on,” he told the New York Times a month later, “and Liston was searching my face for fear. He saw none. This is what destroyed him.” Ali purportedly told his inner circle that Liston was nothing but a bully, and that bullies were afraid of crazy men. 

Whether Liston was truly afraid is unknown – and frankly, it’s doubtful – but it was important for Ali to think he was inside Liston’s head. Liston was a scary character, and Ali needed to believe he’d struck the first blow, even if it was merely a psychological one. As Ali’s career progressed, he used other types of mind games, some more effective than others, but he never again matched the pre-fight madness of his first bout with Liston. In time, his antics became stale. The fans and the press were onto him. Moreover, his opponents were onto him. It became harder for Ali to psyche opponents out, but he kept trying. Sometimes it seemed he was doing it only to amuse himself. 

Livingstone Bramble’s antics prior to his 1984 bout with WBA lightweight titlist Ray Mancini certainly caused a commotion. He started with some vulgar insults. He even dedicated the upcoming fight to the Ethiopians killed by Italian soldiers during World War II, alluding to Mancini’s Sicilian roots. The capper was when Bramble arrived for a press conference accompanied by a witch doctor named Dr. Do, supposedly sent from the Virgin Islands to put a hex on Mancini. Bramble’s trainer, Lou Duva, had conceived the stunt and played along brilliantly. “I shook hands with him,” Duva said of the voodoo man, “and my right arm became shorter than my left.” His features concealed by a bowler hat and shades, the mysterious Dr. Do was a sinister presence during the buildup to the fight. Bramble, meanwhile, talked of drinking herbal potions that would give him special powers. Bramble later told author Mark Kriegel that his plan was simple. “I wanted him to think I was crazy,” Bramble said. Bramble went on to beat Mancini by TKO in round 14. As for Dr. Do, he was Bramble’s high school basketball coach from St. Croix. 

A similar strategy played out on St. Patrick’s Day 1995 when Ireland’s Steve Collins challenged Britain’s Chris Eubank for the WBO super middleweight title. Collins claimed that hypnotist/cult guru Tony Quinn would put him in a trance on fight night to make him feel invincible. Eubank was disturbed by Collins’ revelation, declaring that “such things have no place in boxing.” Collins knew he had his man. As Collins would tell author Ken Gorman, “I decided to make him believe I was half-crazy, that he was fighting a madman.” At the Green Glens Arena in County Cork, Ireland, Eubank rolled into the ring in his usual extravagant manner, which included him riding down the aisle on a Harley Davidson motorcycle, while Collins was motionless in his corner, the hood of his robe pulled down over his eyes as if he were under a deep hypnotic spell. “We were looking at a way of taking Eubank out of his comfort zone, and that is how we came up with the hypnosis,” Collins told Irish news site Extra.ie in 2020. “And it worked.”

Chris Eubank (left) landed plenty of punches on Steve Collins but might’ve been unnerved by the belief that Collins was under a spell. (Photo by Getty Images)

Collins believed his act disturbed Eubank, for he noticed a “little moment of hesitancy about everything he did.” When Eubank scored a late-round knockdown, Collins merely smiled at him. Surviving the knockdown, Collins went on to win a 12-round split decision and the title. Eubank said later that he didn’t capitalize on hurting Collins because it would be wrong to continue hitting a man who was under a spell. The Collins camp must’ve had a good laugh over Eubank’s gullibility. There was a rematch, which Collins also won. 

Lou Nova wasn’t trying to look like a madman prior to his 1941 bout with heavyweight champion Joe Louis, but fans wondered about his mental state. He had already attracted attention by studying the mysteries of yoga with an instructor named Oom the Omnipotent. For his bout with Louis, talk centered around Nova’s so-called “Cosmic Punch,” a right-hand blow allegedly delivered “in obedience to cosmic or universal law.” According to the punch’s inventor, a Yale crackpot named Walston Crocker Brown, Nova had mastered this new punch in accordance with various planetary influences. By practicing what Brown called “dynamic balance,” Nova would supposedly throw his punch in sync with the Earth’s rotation. This way he could generate the power of the universe in his right fist. If this sounds weird now, imagine how it sounded in 1941.

Lou Nova’s “Cosmic Punch” didn’t save him from getting creamed by Joe Louis. (Photo: Bettmann collection via Getty Images)

Nova was seen in his camp doing yoga poses and occasionally breaking into a kind of herky-jerky folk dance, his arms and legs a-flailing, all designed to get him in line with the cosmos. He explained to bewildered reporters that he and Brown had actually developed three different cosmic punches – “the bullet,” the “shock punch” and the “pull-punch,” which he described as looking “like a hook, but it isn’t.” At one point, the fight’s publicist, Harry Markson, told Nova to stop the nonsense and begged photographers to not take pictures of Nova dancing. Markson feared people would think the fight was a joke. Yet more than 56,000 attended the bout at the New York Polo Grounds. They saw Louis KO Nova at 2:59 of round six. Later, when asked why the Cosmic Punch had failed, Nova shrugged. “Well,” he said, “Louis moved.”

Louis was unimpressed by Nova’s weirdness. The opponent who got under Louis’ skin was “Two Ton” Tony Galento two years earlier. A crude trash talker, Galento was encouraged by his manager, Joe Jacobs, to rip into Louis. The plan was to make Louis so mad that he’d lose his composure during the fight and leave himself open for one of Galento’s heavy left hooks. Galento’s needling included the usual insults (“I’ll moider da bum”) and late-night phone calls to Louis’ training camp where he insulted both Louis and his wife. Louis admitted that Galento bothered him, but when he saw more than 40,000 at Yankee Stadium, he knew that Galento’s prefight jabber had served a purpose. The fight itself was a good one. Galento had his moments and even knocked Louis down briefly, but Louis cut Galento to ribbons and stopped him in the fourth. What made Galento’s antics so unusual for the time was the personal nature of his insults. Boxers had taunted each other before this, but usually with a playful tone. Galento’s taunting seemed mean-spirited. He crossed some personal lines and was distinctly unsportsmanlike. A new era in pre-fight antics had begun.

No fighter loved pre-fight shenanigans more than Kid McCoy. And they didn’t always involve wrapping his hands in enough tape to make them as hard as cinderblocks. One of his favorite ploys was to feign illness. Because he was pale and thin to begin with, he would often trick opponents into thinking he was at death’s door. McCoy took this scam to an extreme in 1895 when he faced Jack Wilkes in Boston. According to legend, McCoy covered his face with white makeup, giving himself a sickly pallor. Wilkes took one look at McCoy and panicked. He thought the Kid had tuberculosis and might drop dead during the contest. Though cleared by a doctor, McCoy kept up his act, coughing his way into the ring, pale as a vampire. Meanwhile, ringside reports of the time claim Wilkes entered the ring looking drunk, with the smell of alcohol on his breath. The fool, thinking McCoy was sick and that the fight was his, had done some drinking before the bout. This made McCoy’s job easier. The Kid, not sick at all, stopped Wilkes in two. 

One assumes others have used pre-fight games as McCoy did, as a way to distract opponents from the impending contest. Whether Garcia’s stunts had much effect on Haney is up for speculation. But Garcia’s spooky talk may have also been for his own benefit, to make himself feel like he was putting one over on all of us. And he did. He also made himself into one of the hottest names in boxing. There’s no telling what direction his career will take, but we hope he tells us a bit more about the aliens. When these superior beings eventually take over this sad old planet, we should know as much about them as possible…

Or maybe Garcia’s antics really were a sign of something more serious … REPORT: Ryan Garcia arrested on suspicion of felony vandalism