Kirkland's tough journey

With Kirkland you may not get a lot of technique. You will not get a lot of subtlety. But you get a lot of the stuff that, when it's in a football player, causes him to be an automatic for the All-Madden team.

Kirkland, an unbeaten super welterweight contender who meets highly regarded Joel Julio in the main event of an HBO 'Boxing After Dark' card on Saturday at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, may get drilled in the first round. He is sure to take more than a few haymakers to the chops.

No one, though, ever leaves a James Kirkland fight unsatisfied. If you like fights, you will love James Kirkland.

"If ever there was a born fighter, it's James Kirkland," his trainer, Ann Wolfe, said.

He's a train wreck in short pants, a middle linebacker thrust into the fight game.

Kirkland, 24, grew up in abject poverty in East Austin, Texas, in a part of town that does not look too dissimilar to the ravaged towns you see on the news in Iraq.

There wasn't a lot of money for luxuries, though he laughs and says there wasn't much for necessities, either.

"We weren't poor," he says. "We were po'r. Take out the 'o'. We were po'r. We had nothing. When I tell you nothing, I mean literally nothing. Basically, I had to fight to get everything I've gotten."

And he never stopped fighting, except for a three-year stint in prison for armed robbery. He was heading down a path that, he concedes, was leading to nothing but a bad future and, perhaps, a short life.

He did not seem to care about himself, but when he became a father, he had something of a revelation.

"I have friends who died in shootouts and friends who spent more time on the inside than on the outside," Kirkland said.

"That's where I was going, to be honest with you. I thought about my son (James Jr) and I thought, 'You know, this isn't the lifestyle I want my kid to lead'. I didn't want my son to see me in prison and think of me as a bad guy.

"A kid needs his Pop, and I knew I needed to turn my life around for him so I'd be there when he needed me."

Kirkland (24-0, 21 KOs) funnelled his energy into the ring, where he has thrived under Wolfe's less-than-conventional training methods.

One of her favourites is putting Kirkland into a ring with two men and having him fight both at the same time. Just as he is ducking a punch from one, he's running into a blow from the other.

It looks like chaos, but to Kirkland, it has made him a far more effective fighter.

"You need to have a chin and you have to be able to take a punch to do that for any period of time," Kirkland said. "You learn to slip shots, and you learn to use your peripheral vision.

"Ann's really upgraded me. She tells me not to go crazy, that I have to go in there and think. I just want to get in there and knock the other man's head right off his shoulders, but Ann has taught me to be patient and to create my punching room."

Kirkland has power in both hands, but he believes he has been miscast as a brawler.

Wolfe likes to call him "a shark in water filled with blood", but Kirkland doesn't like the notion of himself as a one-dimensional fighter. While he concedes that he enters the ring every time with the intention of doing damage, he is more than just a street yard scrapper.

"I can fight, I can bang, the whole nine yards," Kirkland says. "Anyone who has seen me, who has fought me, knows that. But I've progressed a lot. I'm not just running into shots all the time any more. I know how to break someone down in there."

Julio, a Colombian with a reported 85-0 amateur record, is 34-2 with 31 knockouts and once was the prodigy that Kirkland is now. Kirkland, though, is supremely confident and says he believes Julio does not realize what he signed himself up for.

To hear Kirkland talk, it is reminiscent of a young Mike Tyson, who would speak of maiming opponents and driving their septums into their brains.

Kirkland isn't quite as brash as the 20-something Tyson once was, but he's not far behind.

"My take on Julio is that he's a good fighter and he comes out and likes to press, but he is a guy who hasn't been put to the test, not really," Kirkland said.

"People talk about (how) he's fought better competition, but that don't matter because he ain't fighting none of them other guys. He'll be fighting me, and believe me when I tell you, that's bad for him.

"He's a guy who gets confused in fights. I really don't see him hanging with me. Honestly, I don't."

The fight he wants and one that would be a closet classic were it to be made this year is one with another unbeaten super welterweight prospect, Alfredo Angulo.

Last year both were in the Gary Shaw stable, but Kirkland and Shaw split, with Kirkland landing with Golden Boy. Angulo remains with Shaw and eager to fight Kirkland, who relishes the shot at his one-time stable mate.

"There is no fight I want more than that one," Kirkland said. "I would fight him anywhere. I just want that fight so bad, man."

Shaw wants to see each man fight three or four more times on national television in an attempt to maximize their exposure before he makes the fight. He said fans don't really know the fighters yet and the match isn't big enough now to make it.

Shaw, who said he believes Angulo is the better technical fighter and that Kirkland has better one-punch knockout power, is nearly as eager as Kirkland to see the fight.

"As a fight fan, that would be one of the fights I think we'd remember for the rest of our lives," Shaw said. "It would be that good."

The bigger the fight, the more Kirkland wants it. He thinks back to his impoverished days as a child and doesn't want daughter Amari, 5, and sons James Jr, 4, and Michael, 18 months, ever to see what he saw and experienced what he did.

"I've been blessed because I can fight and these hands of mine can do some damage," Kirkland said.

"The reason I'm doing my thing is my kids. I don't want them to know struggles. I want them to have the best schools, the best clothes, the best everything.

"And so I got to go and do my thing to make sure they get what they have coming to them."