Life and Boxing Career
Kim was born in Gangwon province, South Korea, 100 miles east of Seoul, the youngest of five children. His father died when he was two and his mother married three more times. Kim grew up poor. He worked odd jobs such as shoeshine boy and tour guide before getting into boxing in 1976. After compiling a 29–4 amateur record, he turned professional in 1978. In February 1982, he won the Orient and Pacific Boxing Federation lightweight title and became the World Boxing Association's #1 contender. Kim carried a 17–1–1 professional record into the Mancini fight and had won 8 bouts by KO before flying to Las Vegas in the WBA as the world's number 1 challenger to world lightweight champion Mancini. However, he had fought outside of South Korea only once before, in Indonesia. It was his first time ever fighting in North America.
Read more about this topic: Duk Koo Kim
Famous quotes containing the words life, boxing and/or career:
“I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)