And I remember leaving my place in L.A. and - my father is a big fight fan - and I said, 'Dad, I got a couple of days off and I'm getting ready to go to Houston to sign to fight Muhammad Ali.
If you look at my career, towards the end you will see I was fighting like once a year. I was not part of the Don King top heavyweights, so I was kind of kept out. His guys were getting three to four fights a year and I could only get one.
Looking back, I couldn't get enough fights because Don King owned most of the top 10 fighters, and he never gave me a fight.
Promoters need you. You don't need them... The boxer has the leverage, and a lot of boxers don't know that.
Boxing is not that complicated. If two guys want to fight, it's not hard to make a fight. If the fight's not made, it's because one party doesn't want that fight, or maybe both parties don't want it.
The whole idea behind going ahead with this Chisora fight was that a victory may then lead to a fight with Vitali Klitschko.
He's got a rematch clause in his contract but I'm not sure if he's going to want to exercise that rematch but if he does, I'd happily oblige. I'll go over to Canada and give him another whooping.
The bad press came because they thought I should fight more. I couldn't get the fights because if I would sign to fight one of King's guys I would be signed to him. I chose not to do that. In hindsight, that might have been a mistake.
Boxing's a business, and I've got a great team around me who have been looking after me in that sense.
The thing with professional boxing is you have to have the right promoter and the right fights. It is a cut-throat business.
I had two managers who couldn't stand each other. I had a promoter, Don King, who couldn't get any fights, and I was fighting once a year. I knocked out Norton and then didn't fight for 13 months. Then I fight the heavyweight champion of the world.
I can't tell you how many fights I had where I had to pay to go fight. It was a lot of them.
When they said, 'Why is Floyd Mayweather not fighting Manny Pacquiao?' it was because Manny Pacquiao had a boss. I don't have a boss.
Kostya Tszyu was the best payday of my career to that point, even though I thought it should have been better.
Winning a pro tournament is another step toward getting fights against higher-ranked opponents.
From a business standpoint, of course I'm not gonna fight someone that's unranked or something like that.
