Calvin Brock

Calvin Brock
Data
Birth Name	Calvin Vance Brock
Fight name	The Boxing Banker
Weight class	Heavyweight
nationality	US-american
birthday	22nd January 1975
place of birth	Charlotte
style	Left delivery
size	1.88 m
Combat Statistics
Struggles	33
Victories	31
Knockout victories	23
Defeats	2

Calvin Brock (born January 22, 1975 in Charlotte , North Carolina ) is a retired American heavyweight boxer .

amateur

Brock started boxing at the age of twelve, but lost his first six fights. In 1996 he failed in the qualifying tournament for the Olympic Games in Atlanta in the heavyweight class at the later bronze medalist Nate Jones , so that he was temporarily denied participation in the Olympics. In 1997 and 1998 he lost as a heavyweight (up to 91kg) at the US amateur championships in the finals to his feared opponent DaVarryl Williamson (four defeats in four fights), but in 1998 he won the Golden Gloves up to 91kg, after his promotion to the super heavyweight he was able to finally in 1999 also won the championship title.

He qualified for the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 , but was clearly defeated by Paolo Vidoz in the first round of the tournament . Vidoz managed to get a knockdown in the course of the fight, as a result of which the referee broke off the fight due to the clear superiority of the Italian , a defeat that still lingers on him today. He attributed his performance to the too hard training of the Olympic team. His amateur record was 147-38.

Professional career

He signed to Main Events after the Olympics , his manager is Jim Thomas, who also looked after Evander Holyfield . The Ring Magazine greeted him with the prognosis that no Olympic athlete will perform worse than him.

As a professional, he first boxed a number of unknown opponents , he made the only positive headlines with a brutal knockout against Jim Strohl . The unbeaten Terry Smith (then 20-0-1) was a well-known amateur in the USA, but Brock's televised point win in May 2004 hardly impressed.

Even against a clearly no longer boxing Clifford Etienne , he was the underdog for many in early 2005. But he clearly won through a technical knockout in the third round, after he had previously knocked his opponent to the ground three times.

The most important victory of his professional career to date was against Jameel McCline . He had to go down in the seventh round, but put away the precipitation and was still able to win on points. However, questions arose again about his ability to take. Even after this fight there were talks about a title fight with Vitali Klitschko .

He was able to knock out Zuri Lawrence (winner over McCline and Paolo Vidoz), who was quite respected despite the mixed record (20-10) , with a single left hook. On the one hand, this was remarkable in that he had never been noticed before by being particularly hard and on the other hand he usually got his KOs with the hand.

In June 2006, a rather lackluster victory over the undefeated Uzbek Timur Ibragimow followed . The victory meanwhile advanced to third position in the IBF rankings, he offered himself as an opponent for a voluntary title defense of the title holder Wladimir Klitschko . The fight took place on November 11, 2006 in New York's Madison Square Garden . Brock lost by knockout in the seventh round, the first defeat of his professional career. He received $ 1.2 million combat exchange for this fight.

He won his two subsequent fights, but did not make a convincing impression. Nevertheless, he was selected by the IBF for an elimination tournament for the right to challenge the IBF World Champion. Brock met his compatriot Eddie Chambers on November 2, 2007 as part of this tournament and just lost by a 1: 2 judge's decision.

An unsuccessful eye operation carried out after the Chambers fight, which left him blind in the right eye, forced him to retire early.

He now works as a real estate agent for the Nichols Company .

Others

He is considered very religious, one of his hobbies is tap dancing . In 1999 Brock, whose parents are both academics, graduated from Charlotte University with a bachelor's degree in business administration . He then worked for Bank of America as an "Operation Call Analyst" for nine months . This gave him his unusual nickname "The Boxing Banker".

Web links

• Calvin Brock in the BoxRec database
• Biography of his promoter ( memento of December 26, 2008 in the Internet Archive )