Rodney Hinton

Rodney Hinton is a bare knuckle fighter out of Pasco County, Florida, who took his first professional fight four years after he took up boxing.

Cason Banyas books debut fighters onto Salty's Fight Talk on purpose. Nobody knows their names yet, he says, and a first professional fight can carry a man the rest of the way, so he asked Hinton for the story before the Clearwater crowd ever saw him throw a punch. Hinton was at the back end of a camp he called tremendously tough, matched on May 2 against another man making his own debut.

He grew up fighting his brothers, fighting at the Boys and Girls Club, fighting in the street, and says he was otherwise a good kid who could not find a legal way to do it. The boxing started a few years back in Melbourne, Florida, at Mayweather Boxing and Fitness, with a stretch at the Mayweather gym in Las Vegas, and it produced four amateur fights. One of his promoters, Justin Presley, put him in touch with Brandon Gold, who got him down to Smith Brothers Fighting Academy for a tryout in February last year. He did enough in it that the gym found him a fight that April, on the Clearwater card, with David Feldman and Mike Perry watching. He knocked James Ruger out in the first round. A boxing match in Tampa in June ended inside two rounds, and in October in Myrtle Beach he stopped Jonathan Davis in the first. Camp drills angles one day, footwork the next, combinations on the bag after that.

Getting anyone to fight him was the hard part. He and his promoter had ten to fifteen bouts turned down, and the only amateur fight he did not win went to a decision in the other man's hometown, with a rematch he chased and never got. The discipline came out of rugby at Iowa Central Community College, where his team lost a national final they had no business losing because they never executed their own game plan, and he says it ate them alive. He is blunter about where the sport found him. The people who run the promotion took him off the streets, he says, when he was sleeping behind trash cans, which is why nobody will hear him run that organization down.

Acting is parked until the fight is done. He went to Iowa Central on a rugby and theater scholarship in 2017, and the part he likes is method work, taking whatever he has carried out of his own life and putting it into somebody else's. For now he is calling out names instead: Brandon Gold, Kevin Smith, Chris Kern, Justin Street, Jay Jackson, a list he said he could keep going with. He signed off by calling his shot at the 165 pound title.