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Julius Indongo, fighting to make history, learned how to box without ever wearing gloves

IBF-WBA super lightweight champion Julius Indongo faces Terence Crawford in a unification bout on ESPN on Saturday. (Getty Images)
IBF-WBA super lightweight champion Julius Indongo faces Terence Crawford in a unification bout on ESPN on Saturday. (Getty Images)

The bell sounded and Julius Indongo made his way out of his corner for his first boxing match. He was just 17 and had gotten hooked on the sport five years earlier when he lay in his bed holding a transistor radio to his ear, listening to the blow-by-blow of a boxing broadcast.

The flow of the action excited and intrigued him, and he wanted to give it a try.

But Indongo was born and raised in Namibia, a middle-income country in southwest Africa on the Atlantic coast. The gap between rich and poor in Namibia is extreme, and there wasn’t a lot of equipment.

Indongo was a tall and lanky boy and he was a natural for boxing. His long arms enabled him to stay on the outside and still reach his target. He trained for almost five years for his first amateur bout, but it was still an odd experience.

The day in 2001 when he first slipped between the ropes to compete in an amateur match also happened to be the first time he wore gloves and the first time he was punched or punched someone else.

Everything he had done prior to that point was without gloves hitting a bag.

“I never knew what it was like,” he said.

Now, 16 years later, Indongo holds the IBF and WBA super lightweight titles and will meet WBC-WBO champion Terence Crawford Saturday in Lincoln, Nebraska, in a bout televised on ESPN, for all the belts. The winner will become only the third man in boxing history to hold the four major sanctioning body belts simultaneously.

Crawford is a heavy favorite, just as Eduard Troyanovsky was when they met in December in Moscow for the IBF belt. Just 40 seconds into the bout and Troyanovsky was out cold and Indongo was celebrating a championship.

And while Crawford is one of the elite fighters in the world and a contender for the mythical pound-for-pound title, Indongo is nothing if not confident.

He’s not predicting a 40-second stoppage of Crawford, but neither is he expressing any doubt.

“I have no doubt,” he said. “I know [I can beat him]. All I can say is just only if maybe the knockout comes it may be late. … The crowd or the fans, fighting in [front of] Terence’s home crowd won’t intimidate me. That is nothing.”


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