Joppy Stumbles over a Glove

AND BECOMES CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

By Von Black
Tuesday, September 2, 2014

William Joppy grew up in a neighborhood in Rockville that was once a Black community known as Lincoln Park. He also lived in Takoma Park, MD not far from where Sharmba Mitchell, another World Champion boxer, was being groomed. Born on 9/11 in the year 1970, Joppy, unlike Keith Holmes, Mark Too Sharp Johnson, and Sharmba Mitchell, never thought he would become a boxer while he was a youth.

Joppy tells the story of his first encounter with boxing, and it wasn't pleasant. It wasn't until I was 15-years-old when I went into Takoma Langley Boxing Gym, and the coach had me hold up my guards, then said 'you wanna be a fighter and don't even know how to hold your guards.' That crushed me, and I stopped going around the gym."

Joppy would, however, return to a different gym five years later and meet Bill Green who offered him a chance to spar with the guys in the gym. Joppy felt like he was going to be pretty sharp with some training, so he stuck with it. "Besides, everybody back then wanted to be known as having good hands," Joppy added, "That's what you lived for, that respect."

Chris Byrd, who was on the Olympic Team with Oscar De La Hoya, became Joppy's first official trainer, but Charles Mooney, a Silver medalist on the 1976 Olympic Boxing team with Sugar Ray Leonard and Spinks, quicky took over as trainer for Joppy because of his rapid development into a world-class boxer.

Mooney would stay with Joppy throughout the amateurs and led him to his first Golden Glove victory over one of Adrian Davis' hopefuls, Patrick McDonald. "They thought I was a push over, you know, a 'pretty boy' from Rockville ain't supposed to beat a boxer from the hood especially if he's coming out of Round One," Joppy continues with an air of satisfaction in his voice. "I knocked him out in the third round, and whenever I went down Takoma Langley, I made sure I punished all of them because of that trainer that tried to crush my spirit when I was younger."

Joppy couldn't stick with Mooney after a while. He felt that Mooney was too hard on everybody, and he refused to put up with Mooney's drill sergeant approach to training. After winning his second pro fight (2-0), he determined that the boxers in Rockville didn't challenge him and that new management and training was in the cards, so off to the Round One Boxing gym he went and starting working with Peppy Correa.

[Joppy in red, Sharmba Mitchell (right) and Keith Holmes behind him partially hidden]

Joppy now became surrounded by DC finest boxers. He worked-out with Vaughn Davis and Glenn Johnson. Both of these men got him ready for his fights, especially Vaughn Davis. "Me and this guy tried to kill each other in the ring, but you would never know it by the way we got along outside the ring. That was my man," Joppy said.

He soon met Keith Holmes, and they would spar with each other and, as Joppy put it, prepare each other to become world champions. "Keith got his in March, and I got mine in June," Joppy asserts. "Mark won his first World title that year too, in April."

He was correct. We checked the accuracy of his memory and found that they all won their first world titles in 1996 in the months that he had mentioned. Joppy reeled off months and years with extreme precision throughout the entire interview to our amazement. The guy has a photogenic memory, and wowed us with his account of his first shot at a world title as he had to travel all the way to Japan and fight their only world champion boxer in history. It didn't look good for Joppy and according to him, "the whole country was at the match." As we continue the series on William Joppy, we will share his detailed and very animated account of that match and much more. Return tomorrow.

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