TORONTO — Given the option of staying in a luxury condo while in Montreal to train for Saturday's title defence fight at Casino Rama, Steve Molitor instead decided to go old school.
During his early days as a pro boxer, when money and prize fights were tougher to come by, the Sarnia, Ont., native lived in a room at the Atlas Gym in Toronto he once described as "a rat hole."
He had a TV, a few friends to hang with, and little else.
Now as the IBF junior featherweight champion, Molitor can obviously afford much nicer digs. Yet for the past month and a half, he voluntarily holed up at a dump he unadoringly labelled "the crackhouse," worrying about his Cadillac Escalade out front.
The place didn't even have cable, let alone a TV. It was hardly the life of a boxing champion.
"I was driving there [for the first time] in my nice Escalade, nice house, nice house, nice house — crackhouse," Molitor recalled Wednesday at news conference for Rumble at Rama V. "I was like, '... that's where I've got to stay.'
"No TV, no cable. I ended up buying a TV so we could watch movies. Thin bed, thin mattress, stuff like that. Just a real shady, horrible place, raccoons outside, dark alleyway, cats everywhere.
"But it had a fridge, it had a washer and dryer, it was close to the gym, it had a bed and that's all I needed."
And with that decision, any worries that Molitor might be taking his fifth title defence, versus unheralded Argentine challenger Ceferino Dario Labarda (TSN, 10:30 p.m. ET), lightly were put to rest.
Since his last win over Fernando Beltran Jr., in April, Molitor briefly parted ways with promoter Allan Tremblay of Orion Sports Management before reuniting, dumped trainer Chris Johnson and hooked up with the renowned Stephane Larouche in Montreal.
The meeting with Labarda, who is 18-0 with seven knockouts but has few opponents of substance on his resume, is widely seen as a tuneup for Molitor (27-0, 10 knockouts) ahead of November's planned unification bout with WBA champion Celestino Caballero.
With that on the table, and talk of bigger-name bouts in Toronto beyond that, among other things, all the ingredients that could cause Molitor to lose focus were there.
"I had an option to stay somewhere nicer, park my truck in a safer place, but it was a farther drive with maybe some more distractions around and that's not what I wanted," said Molitor.
"I wasn't down there to play games or hang out with people, I was down there to train and that's exactly what I did. I wanted to go back to where I came from, get that hunger back and get that drive back and that's exactly what it did for me."
It better have.
Bouts against what are considered lesser opponents can sometimes lull champions into complacency, with James (Buster) Douglas's shocking knockout of Mike Tyson in 1991 serving as a prime example.
Labarda's trainer, perhaps through a poor translation, said "We have the illusion of beating Steve," and Molitor, in his opening comments at a news conference, said his opponent's hopes were just that, an illusion.
But for Labarda, a bronze medallist at the 1999 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg and the WBC Latino featherweight title-holder, this is a chance of a lifetime.
"I'm coming to win," he said through a translator.
Since one simple mistake is enough to make that happen, Molitor has good cause not to take anything for granted.
"This is a fight where Steve will feel the pressure," said Larouche. "He comes against a fighter that has nothing to lose ... and Steve changed trainers, he's thinking about the unification bout, so he wants to look good.
"The pressure is all on Steve and this is the beauty of boxing, how he will respond to that. Great athletes assume that, and I think he's in that group."
Molitor trained with Larouche at Interbox's Centre Claude Robillard, alongside IBF super middleweight champion Lucien Bute and Adrian Diaconu, the WBC light heavyweight champion.
His gruelling days began with either sprints or jogs, followed by weight training at 7 a.m. After breakfast and a nap, he'd be back at the gym from 3-6 p.m. and then in bed by 9:30.
Many observers will be watching to see how Molitor looks in the ring under Larouche's tutelage after the break with Johnson.
Larouche gave his predecessor credit for making Molitor craftier in the ring and said he was fine-tuning, not overhauling his athlete's technique.
"I'm not trying to change him dramatically, because it's going to be too hard, he could lose his rhythm, momentum and style," said Larouche. "We're going to change things but at that level, small details make a big difference.
"I'm trying to get him more loose, more elusive also."
Molitor is embracing the changes — "That's like an ex-girlfriend for me," he said of Johnson. "As far as I know, he's banned from the casino," — and believes the difference shows in his more relaxed attitude outside the ring and the reduction of tension throughout his body inside it.
Getting to Montreal helped remove Molitor from the day-to-day responsibilities of life at home, which in turn allowed him to completely focus on training.
"I'm becoming a lot more relaxed," said Molitor. "I'm not spending energy being tight and tense, I feel a lot faster and hit a lot harder when I'm not forcing it."
That could be bad news for Labarda, who if all goes to plan, will be little more than a footnote en route to the looming unification bout in November between Molitor and Caballero.
Of course, that's a matter for another time. There's business at hand first.
"We're not even talking about that today boys," Molitor said grimly. "That question gets you out the door."
