Quadtrine Hill – The Next Great Heavyweight?

One look at the cover of the December 28, 2009 issue of ESPN The Magazine, and you can tell that Quadtrine Hill has the look to be a heavyweight boxing star.

Talk to the affable former University of Miami fullback for any length of time, and it’s clear that he also has the personality to be a breath of fresh air in a stale division.

But the first two elements won’t get you anywhere in this game without the third member of the triumvirate. That number three is being able to fight, and if the 2009 Florida Golden Gloves were any indication, the 27-year old Hill could turn out to be the real deal, as he defeated Carl Frederich, Christopher Roberson, and Jarrett Brock in successive bouts, with the knockout of Frederich in less than a minute…

“Six seconds,” Hill clarifies with a smile.

Yes, six seconds. Just enough time for Hill to walk to the center of the ring and drill his opponent with a right hook that sent him sprawling to the mat and almost out of the ring, even surprising Hill.

“I didn’t even think I hit him that hard,” he said. “Then I watched the replay, and his head snapped back in slo-mo, and he almost flies out of the ring and the scorekeepers are ready to catch him from going through the ropes. And it isn’t like I laid into it, I was backing up when I hit him. It was a right hook and I was backing up when I threw it.”

And all this came after less than two months of training.

As far as learning experiences go, it wasn’t one for the memory bank, but when it comes to making an impression, Hill certainly did.
“I wasn’t worried about trying to show what I had because I know I’ll have the opportunity to do that eventually,” he said. “I couldn’t knock everybody out in six seconds. Don’t get me wrong, if I could, I would (Laughs), but the next guy I fought I dropped him in 40 seconds with another right hook. The first fight I didn’t get to show much except that I had power, second fight I showed that I had everything else, and third fight and every fight after that is destroying people.”

If Hill sounds confident, he is, and he has good reason to be. As an elite level athlete in football throughout high school and college, he’s proven himself on the field of battle. As an amateur boxer he’s had nothing but success. But on Tuesday, at the Hard Rock Live arena in Hollywood, Florida, it all becomes real when he makes his pro debut against the always dreaded TBA. Yet if he’s nervous about jumping into the professional shark tank, he’s not showing it.

“I’ve never really been one to get nervous,” he said. “Ever since I was little I never got nervous for stuff. It’s more like anxiousness.”

Fight fans should be anxious as well, because if this experiment works out, heavyweight boxing may be changed for the better. Experiment, you might ask? Well, it’s the best description for what entrepreneur Kris Lawrence is doing with his Heavyweight Factory promotional company, as he takes athletes who were successful in other sports, predominantly football, puts them in the Lucky Street Gym in South Florida, and now attempts to make them into heavyweight contenders and hopefully, champions. Hill is without question the star of the first wave, the most successful pre-boxing athlete, and the one who looks to have the most potential in and out of the ring.

“I was an established football player – a four year starter at the University of Miami when we were the best team ever – so people already knew who I was,” said Hill. “They’re like ‘yeah, this guy is a phenomenal athlete and now he’s picking up boxing. Can a top-conditioned football player switch over and do something as well?’ And I think it’s picked up a lot of steam. I was shocked, but I know that everybody’s itching to see the next great fighter. If there was a great fight to come around for the heavyweights, everything would blow up. Boxing would blow back up so quick if you could put five or six heavyweights out there that people wanted to see. Hopefully, other people will follow the lead and bring some more good athletes into boxing.”

As a marketing tool, it’s brilliant. As a realistic venture after only a handful of amateur bouts, only time will tell. But one thing’s for sure, and that this isn’t a lark for Hill. He’s not a jock looking recapture past glories, and he’s taking this seriously – so seriously that he put his goal of returning to play in the NFL on hold when the opportunity to box came along.

“To me, football never even ended until I actually got serious into boxing,” said Hill, who spent time on the practice squads of the Texans, Bears, and Patriots in 2006-07. “I know I can still play football, without a doubt. With my athletic ability and what I did in football, it was one of those things where every time somebody saw me play, they’re like ‘how the hell are you not playing?’ I’d be on a team and they’d be like ‘damn, you’re so good, how’d you end up in this situation?’ I really didn’t have an answer for them. So I still knew that eventually, if I kept driving and kept pushing, I’d get my shot. It just so happened that my shot came in boxing first. Then things kept picking up and I got serious into that, and I just kinda let the football go. I had to ease my way out of football training to pick up some more boxing training. It was one of those things where football never really died until boxing picked up, so I never really lost that athletic bug.”

That’s not to say Hill seamlessly transitioned from football training to boxing training. Not only is it a different type of training, but in competition, the mindset changes in a subtle, but key, way.

“In football, you’re doing a lot with your legs, a lot with your core, a lot with different muscles, and everything was a hundred percent,” he explains. “When the ball snaps, there’s no relaxing or resting; you’re going full speed, full contact, you hit somebody, you’re driving them forward, and you try to burn all that energy. Then you break for 30 seconds and do it again for another four or five seconds. Boxing’s almost the complete opposite – you want to pace yourself and move yourself through the round, and that was the biggest thing for me to learn – not to go a hundred percent all the time and gas myself out. I have a lot of speed, I punch hard, but you can’t always pound somebody through the floor. Sometimes you’ve got to slow down your pace, take a little something off some punches, load up on others. You can’t always be full throttle all the way through the round. That was the hardest thing for me to learn.”

Especially when you’re dropping guys in six seconds, but what may set Hill apart from his peers in the gym and maybe throughout boxing here in the States, is that he is a diehard student of the game. Training for him doesn’t mean fighting every day and calling it sparring; he knows when to take the foot off the pedal and he spends as much time watching film and observing the action in the ring as he does in it. Along with his physical conditioning, that’s another gift from his days on the gridiron, when, for example in New England, the days would start at 7am and end at around 6pm. That’s not the case in boxing, so Hill (whose father Eddie was an NFL running back for five years from 1979 to 1984) is making sure to fill in those extra hours with studying time.

“I’ll sit down and watch film because I’m used to being prepared,” he said. “It’s like a learning preparation for what you want to do. We have a week to prepare for a game. We have a month to prepare for a fight. If I can learn an entire team’s tendencies – 11 guys and their backups - and what a team’s gonna do in a week, what can I do with a month to learn what a fighter’s gonna do? I can have someone read inside and out if you give me a little film. I sit in my gym, since I’m not gonna be training for any specific fighter right now – I’m still building myself as a fighter – and I just watch film on a lot of great fighters from back in the day who I would like to emulate and take some different things from.”
He’s been even picking up pointers and techniques from former heavyweight champions Oliver McCall and Michael Moorer, both of whom have been training the Heavyweight Factory roster. Ironically, both are two of the last vestiges of an era of American heavyweights that may not have produced Louis, Marciano, Ali, or Foreman, but that did have solid US-born big men like Riddick Bowe, Evander Holyfield, Ray Mercer, and Chris Byrd. Now, the landscape is barren, leaving the door wide open for Lawrence to bring in fresh faces like Hill, who is well aware of the situation he is walking into.

“I couldn’t name you two American heavyweights that were young and contenders,” he said. “And it’s one of those things where boxing goes as the heavyweights go. Boxing dropped because the heavyweights dropped. That’s the excitement and what everybody wants to see. As far as athletics go, it’s just a natural thing. People want to see people that are bigger than them and stronger than them doing things that they can’t do. As exciting as the smaller guys are, and there are a lot of great, young fighters, it’s not going to be as exciting as the heavyweights when they’re at their prime.”

“It’s sad, because America has the best athletes in the world,” Hill continues. “You can’t question that with the different sports we do, but all the big athletes are going to football and basketball, and they don’t really leave much for boxing. Boxing’s not the glamour sport it used to be. The heavyweight champion was the most famous athlete in the world back in the day. Everybody knew who Muhammad Ali was, even people without TV’s knew who he was. Mike Tyson, he hasn’t been in a fight in forever, and he’s probably still the most popular heavyweight in the world. When the heavyweight division’s strong, boxing’s strong. And we need to get some guys in there that are athletes and who can fight and do the sweet science the way it was created, instead of just sitting around and leaning on each other until whoever lands the big punch first.”

Quadtrine Hill is volunteering for the job, and on Tuesday, we get the first indication of whether he can pull it off or not. If he sticks with it, it’s going to be a long journey, but it’s obvious that the physical ability is there, and more importantly, he’s got his head on straight. That’s a fact made evident not by his graduating college in three years or being one class short of his master’s degree, it has to do with his understanding that more important than seeing great fighters, people want to see great fights.

“I’d love to get to that level where no matter who you put me in the ring with I’d make them look bad and completely destroy them, but at the same time, I know people want to see me actually have to sit down and fight with somebody and get in there with someone they think can actually beat me,” he said. “But right now it’s just good to bring some spark back into the heavyweight division in the United States.”


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(boxingscene.com)
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