Aloys Junior credits his boxing education to a combination of Mike Tyson and Snoop Dog. The 23-year-old is making his own mark on the cruiserweight division after a series of early knockouts, but his first lesson in the fight game came not from boxing legends but from hip hop stars.
Junior spent his childhood plugged into Def Jam: Fight for New York, a computer game which dumped noughties rappers on to the streets of the Big Apple where they fought for musical supremacy.
First inclination to fight
He said: "Playing that game gave me my first inclination to fight. Someone threw an overhand right hook in the game, and I found that so fascinating. I thought, 'What would actually happen if I did it?' I was in primary school at the time and I threw an overhand right hook at a kid. What happened was I got into trouble!"
"The game was set on the streets and was very similar to where I grew up in South East London. I like music and I like fighting and this was a mixture of both. I would play as Snoop Dog or Ice Cube and they would have street fights. But it was a bit more creative than that; it wasn't just a general brawl."
"They had special moves you could use, it was almost like a kung-fu game but on the streets. They mixed the martial arts element with the streets and it had great music behind it, too, so it made sense to me as a kid."
From karate to boxing
Junior, who returns to action on the undercard of stablemate Moses Itauma's heavyweight world title fight tonight, eventually graduated to a more natural boxing idol.
"I was getting bullied as a kid," he added. "I wasn't as big as I am now of course, and all the older kids were picking on me. I started to do karate but it wasn't my thing. I wanted to do contact sparring but the coaches wouldn't let me. I tried the karate moves on the kids outside and I got absolutely pummelled."
"So I fell out of karate and went online and typed in 'knockouts', and Mike Tyson is the obvious knockout merchant. I saw the way he was able to knock people out and I was like, 'Oh my goodness; if I have this power and if I have this ability, nobody can bully me again. I asked my dad if I could go to boxing training - and I started knocking people out in school. Nobody bullied me again after that."
