"I wouldn't say that the jab surprised me. I expected him to jab. The thing is I'm pretty durable and a sturdy guy. I'm a guy that no one can say doesn't take a good punch and I'm a guy that does take a good punch. What surprised me was that he was incredibly strong. Every shot that he hit me with hurt me. I was in a situation where even if I didn't go down, before the fight was over, every shot that hit me, I was like, 'Wow; what power.' It was more of what surprised me was how strong he was.
"This is a guy who hadn't had a knockout in two years. This is a guy that wasn't somebody that really had that killer reputation. If you would have told me in the Miguel Cotto fight that this would happen to me, with a reputation such as that, then it would be like, 'Okay, this is a guy who is known as a strong guy.' But I didn't expect that from Porter. I didn't expect the power that would hurt me like that.
"I've been in with some of the best fighters in the world, so I know when a fighter is strong and I know how to deal with it. But I couldn't deal with the power. It was really out of this world, the power that I got hit with and the way that I was feeling when he hit me, you know? So it was pretty shocking. I was surprised but it was also shocking. I was hurt right away and then I got hit with more shots after I was hurt.
"I was starting to wonder at some point in the fight if it was me and if it was just mental because I'm older and I don't want to be in this kind of fight. Nobody had hit me this hard. It was starting to irk me during the fight because I was mad at myself. I was like, 'You can't really be this hurt. This guy is not a puncher. This guy is not that strong,' and, 'You've been in with harder punchers than this.'
"It was starting to irk me where I was trying to tell myself, like, 'Come on; you can't be this hurt. There's no way you're this hurt.' I was like, 'You're not supposed to be hurt this bad, bro. You've been in with bigger punchers. You're not hurt.' I thought it was more mental and that I had to motivate myself and that, 'I'm not really hurt but I'm just not getting myself pumped up for the fight.'
"So I thought that I could just charge myself and pull it together because I didn't believe that he was that strong. But he was hurting me and I still didn't want to believe that he was that strong. The fact that I was hurt like that constantly was probably the most shocking thing of all."
