Newark, New Jersey, boxing fans had a chance to see a local product fight as a professional for the first time last Friday, when 21-year-old Zaquin Moses (8-0, 4 KOs) defeated Angel Antonio Contreras by technical knockout. Contreras’ corner stopped the fight after the fifth round of a scheduled eight-round bout.
Moses’ immediate reaction was to step up on the ring ropes, raise his arms in triumph, and emphatically pump his chest. He has won every round of his budding professional career, and he discussed his preparation leading up to the bout exclusively with the AmNews.
“I’ve been sparring four-minute rounds, I’ve been training four-minute rounds, and I’ve just been sparring four minutes, 10 rounds,” said Moses, who is the first cousin of WBO junior welterweight champion and fellow Newark native Shakur Stevenson.
“I’ve just been getting a lot of rounds in this whole camp, so I just been keeping up on my conditioning, running, getting as many rounds as I can with different fighters, and I’m well prepared and ready.”
Moses expectedly was emotional about fighting in Newark as a professional for the first time.
“I’m super excited … this is like a dream come true, I always wanted to do it,” he said. “I ain’t know it was going to be this soon, but I’m here now, and this is the first step to get out of the way to what I want to accomplish more.”
Like Stevenson, Moses was introduced to boxing by his grandfather, the Newark boxing trainer Willie “Wali” Moses.
“One day, my grandfather is a trainer. He had been training different fighters for a long time, and one day he just took me to the gym, and I wasn’t really in like training and everything,” Moses said.
“I was just playing around the gym all the time, playing, and then one day, I don’t remember the exact day, but one day, I remember him just giving me pad work in the living room. And then after that I just been going back to the gym, training and stuff. That’s all I remember about really starting as a young kid.”
Moses also does not hesitate to ask Stevenson (25-0) for advice.
“I for sure go to him, tell him about everything for real, whether it’s the business, whether it’s the preparation, whether it’s the mental of just preparing, going into a fight, so I just ask him a lot of different things, things he went through, things he experienced,” he said.
“Then I ask him if he went through the same thing I’m going through, if he went through anything different, so I know what I’m going through. But over the years, to be honest, over the last couple [of] years, I’ve been with him to experience everything myself, so I’ve been seeing a lot of things.”
On Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Ryan Garcia (25-2, 20 KOs) will put his WBC welterweight world championship on the line against England’s Conor Benn (25-1, 14 KOs). Garcia defeated Mario Barrios in February for the title and will defend it for the first time.
