As he waited to step through the ropes, the unbeaten, 27-year-old middleweight was surrounded by the nightly symphony that fills the fight club: the whirring sounds of jump ropes; the steady thwacks of guys pounding the heavy bags; and the rhythmic cadence coming from a lone boxer working a speedbag.
“The only thing I want now is enough time and enough money to follow my daily routine,” said King, who now works at a Far Hills chicken restaurant and then trains close to seven hours every day.
He said his boxing work is done at DMC and his cardio and strength work come at Planet Fitness. He said he finally gets home near midnight and eats the exact same thing each night — chicken, rice and broccoli — before going to sleep and then doing the same thing again the next day.
“I love my daily routine. That’s all I want,” he said. “Right now, I don’t do any other entertainment or go to other places.”
Considering his mom’s query, you might think he sounds like the Grinch, but if you talked to 95-year-old Pete Marciano, he’d tell you the Centerville boxer sounds a lot like his brother, the late, great Rocky Marciano, who remains the only unbeaten heavyweight champ in boxing history.
“Rocky lived like a monk,” Pete once told La Gazzetta Italiana, the Italian-American newspaper based in Cleveland. “He was always in incredible condition. He was devoted to training, and he could always throw more punches than he faced. He’s never been given full credit for his conditioning.”
Now that’s a gift — a comparison to Marciano — that King will graciously accept.
“He loves Rocky Maricano,” said Daniel Meza-Cuadra, who owns the DMC gym and is its head trainer. He’s mentored King since he first walked into this fight club seven years ago and he works his corner in fights.
“I study the old greats from back in the day, guys like Archie Moore, Ezzard Charles and Joe Louis,” King said. “But my favorite fighter of all time is Rocky Marciano.
“I see myself in him. We’re both about 5-foot-10, so we would always fight bigger people. Taller people. We both had short arms, short legs. We were both kind of underdogs.
“I probably have 2,000 videos of him in my camera. While I’m eating, doing anything, I’m obsessively scrolling through them,
“I watch some full speed, so I hear what the announcer said and other times I’ll mute them and play them slowly and really study what he does: how he moves his head; rolls punches off his shoulders, creates his own distance, his own power.
“I’ve had people tell me Marciano was just a brute, but that’s not true. He was skilled. He never got hit clean…never. What man do you know who goes 49-0 in the ring and never gets hit clean? In his whole career, he was down just two times. That’s an amazing fighter.
“Essentially, I want to be the new version of him.”
King — who started his career as Andrew Zammit before changing his name — had a short but impressive amateur career, which culminated at the Last Chance Qualifier in Pueblo, Colorado, in the fall of 2023. The winners there got the last invitations to the U.S. Olympic Trials which then would decide the U.S. team for the 2024 Paris Games.
King won four Last Chance bouts in four days.
His first opponent — likely seeing a video compilation of King’s knockouts on the DMC website — pulled out of their fight. King then went on to batter the next three opponents he faced and make the Trials.
Although he eventually would lose a decision and not make it to Paris, he turned heads with his relentless and aggressive style, which many thought, was more suited for the pros.
He’s now 2-0 going into Saturday’s middleweight fight in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
In September he won his pro debut against Dorian Jared Najera Flores in Colima, Mexico and a month later won another decision, this one against Houston middleweight Robert Montgomery, on the undercard of a fight show in Nashville.
While Saturday’s fight — like his first one in Mexico — will be against a local boxer who has the crowd behind him, King said he likes it like that.
“It’s the way it’s always been for me,” he said. “My whole life I’ve been the underdog.”
Unmatched dedication
He was born in the Detroit area and lived in Wisconsin before moving to Ohio.
In all he went to four high schools, three of them in the Miami Valley: Dixie, Hamilton and Miamisburg.
He once told me he does not know his father and for parts of his life he was estranged from his mother. For a while he said he was homeless.
He discovered boxing and eventually made his way to the DMC Academy.
He now admits that when he first walked into the fight club, he thought he knew everything. Meza Cuadra soon gave him a reality check and let him spar with a boxer considerably smaller than him.
The opponent turned out to be Peruvian Carlos Zambrano, who had just lost the WBA featherweight title but still was 26-1 as a pro and had been 288-6 as an amateur.
Zambrano schooled King and made him realize Meza-Cuadra knew what he was talking about and could make him better.
Outside the gym, King was befriended by a family from Lewisburg and then later met Richard Copper. The former U.S. Marine, who once had won a Purple Heart, took him into his home in Miamisburg.
On August 22, 2023, the 76-year-old Copper died while sitting in his easy chair at home. King found him when he came home from the gym.
In recent years, King has found a home at the DMC gym, which is the most active and diverse fight club in the area.
In the process he and Meza Cuadra — who grew up in Lima, Peru; went to college there and in Illinois; earned an MBA and worked in the business world before embracing boxing — developed a close bond in and out of he ring.
“We do feel like family and I trust him,” King said.
“I’m the type of person who just keeps going — who keeps pushing and training and thinking about nothing else — until the wheels fall off.
“He has life experience. He knows boxing and the world outside of it too. He tells me to slow down and enjoy journey.”
Meza Cuadra said that is no easy task.
“I’ve been in boxing 47 years and I’ve been around a lot of fighters, but Jrue’s commitment, his dedication is unmatched. I’ve never met anybody with that kind of drive, that kind of focus.”
An expression of self
As he’s become a student of the game — and a devotee of Marciano — King has tried to frame much of his fistic approach the way the unbeaten heavyweight champ once did.
Marciano knocked out 43 of the 49 people he faced in the ring and King takes the same approach with his opposition.
“I truly believe no matter who it is, if I hit them, I can knock them out,” he said.
Since turning pro, he hasn’t stopped either opponent and instead won on decisions. In each case he feels he rushed punches without first setting his feet.
In the second fight he suffered a nasty cut on his right eyelid from a head butt.
In that fight — as in certain moments in his life — he said he’s drawn on something his training partner, Thomas Diamond told him:
“He told me, ‘No matter what happens, there’s one thing you always can fall back on. It never fails you. It’s your heart.’”
And boxing is the one place where he has been able to show that heart.
No matter the other struggles he’s had in life, King has found focus, a sense of family, an expression of self and real success in the fight game.
“I’ve been really lucky,” he once told me. “Most people I knew from before didn’t end up very good.
“They’re either dead or locked up or strung out on something. And even those that aren’t, at best, many are just getting by and probably not enjoying the kind of life they once dreamed they’d have.
“I am and it’s because of boxing.”
And that’s why his mom need not worry about his Christmas list.
Boxing has given him the best gift of all, he said:
“I can truly say boxing saved my life.”
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