
"Then López entered, dancing. Wearing a Popeye shirt, he raised one hand above his head and bounced like a pogo stick. Rocking through some b-boy footwork, he added Latin flavor, shimmying his shoulders. The official weighing (139.6 pounds) seemed merely an interruption to his dance as he continued prowling the stage. Stevenson was forced to walk over to him, so that the two could perform the next part of the ritual and stare at each other, eye to eye."
"López, Sr., holding his son's champion belt aloft, busted a few moves at the weigh-in, too. Born in Honduras, he moved to New York as a child, and was later part of a b-boy crew called the Floor Master Dancers (not to be confused with the Floor Masters who became the New York City Breakers). "They were really more like a gang," he said. "Just kids doing bad things.""
At Madison Square Garden the day before the junior-welterweight title bout, Shakur Stevenson completed the ritual weigh-in on a historically used scale. Teófimo López entered dancing in a Popeye shirt, performing b-boy footwork, Latin shoulder shimmies, a backflip and an acrobatic loop-through jump. The official weighing registered 139.6 pounds but the performance dominated the stage and forced a face-off stare. López's father and trainer described the display as a tactic to get in opponents' heads and to showcase entertainment. López, Sr. has a b-boy background and began boxing around age thirty; López Jr. combined dancing with early competition.
Read at The New Yorker
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