O’Shaquie Foster was once looking at spending the best years of his life behind bars.
Now, he has set his sights on becoming a unified world champion.
The distance between those two possibilities is measured in more than miles, years and boxing victories. There have been shootings, prison sentences, abandoned friendships, second chances and a man named Keith Mills who refused to give up on him.
Foster has never stopped believing he could make it to the top. He just didn’t always believe he would live the kind of life that would allow him to get there.
“I always had a strong belief that I could make it to the top and be one of the top fighters,” Foster tells me.
But the road to the top has been arduous. Foster has been in prison multiple times. He’s lost fights and he’s fought in the away corner.
But now he finds himself the WBC’s 130lb champion, preparing to unify against quality Mexican Emanuel Navarrete, who holds the WBO and IBF belts.
They fight on Saturday night at the Frost Center in San Antonio, a couple of hundred miles away from where Foster lives in Houston.
“I just didn’t know the route [to the top],” Foster admits. “Especially after they robbed me the first time against [Robson] Conceicao. I knew something special was still in store for me. I just didn’t know which way it would come. And God made a way.”
*
Foster is 33. He’s won 25 times as a pro and suffered three defeats. Two came early in his career and then there was the Conceicao loss, which he immediately avenged.
He turned pro in 2012, disillusioned by his treatment on the scorecards in the Olympic Trials. He lost twice to Jojo Diaz, and he lost his ninth and 12th fights, making him 10-2 at the time.
It was around then that his life took some catastrophic detours.
Foster lost the passion for boxing and it became only a business to him, using it to make money and take him to new places. But that was it.
You see, Foster had already fallen into street life. It was part of who he was, and after the second loss, he admits: “I didn’t see a path for me.”
He was all but done with the sport.
Then he was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and was looking at “a crazy amount of time” in jail.
“There was a shooting. I had a situation in my city where there was a lot of back and forths with me and other guys and some stuff ended up happening and a guy ended up getting shot,” Foster recalls. “He [the victim] lived and everything, but I ended up going down for it. It happened in broad daylight on some dumb stuff. That’s what happened. I had a lot going on at that time.
“Stuff got kind of crazy, just because I was kinda on the run, they were after me and that was high stress and everything else, but before that I was didn’t really have no path, no guidance. I was in the streets hard, just doing whatever, so I didn’t really care to think about the consequences of my actions until after the event.”
Foster was in “a bad head space.”
“I had been to jail a few times,” he adds. “So I kind of knew what to expect, but sitting in there that long, you get in altercations and stuff. I had a fight or two. A few fights and stuff, but that was kind of it. I only had to make an example of one person.
“Luckily, I met my boy Keith, and stuff just happened. Even when I met him, I wasn’t training like that, after I took that second loss I went back to the streets. There wasn’t anything for me after that.”
**
(Team Foster, with Mills pictured behind Shock’s left shoulder)
“The boy Keith” who Foster refers to is his advisor Keith Mills. Mills has been on the team for more than a decade.
“’Shock’ and I were training at the same gym and his then-promoter brought him out to the DC area to train in a gym in Virginia,” recalls Mills of their first meeting, back in around 2015 or 016. “I happened to join that gym, I was training in that gym and we got to talking.”
They were civil with one another, but their friendship did not extend beyond the gym, and Mills smiles when asked if he knew what Foster was doing away from boxing.
“No, oh God,” laughs Mills. “He was definitely not making great choices at all. He would show up to the gym but you’re only training so much time and I don’t know what he was doing at night. But it was not good at all.
“This is when we just started to build a relationship. We were training together and if he needed any advice on anything, he’d come to me and I’d provide any advice I could.”
Was Foster a gangster back then?
“I mean for sure,” he nods matter-of-factly. “That’s how I was living. Ever since I can remember being a kid or youngster I either used to look up to the gangsters or the boxers. There wasn’t no in between. So I had two things to look up to. If it wasn’t the streets, it was boxing. If it wasn’t boxing it was the streets, and boxing prevailed. Thank God.”
But before that, Foster served his time and while he was inside, it was left to Mills to try and get him out. Mills would put money on Foster’s books, was working with the attorneys and trying to see what would come next.
“When someone’s facing 10 to 20 years in prison, it’s really a difficult thing, to say the least,” Mills explains.
Foster was inside when Hurricane Harvey struck, killing more than 80 people in the Houston area and forcing the transfer of thousands of inmates between several prisons.
“It made things very difficult,” says Mills.
***
Foster didn’t end up with anything like 20 years in the end, although he was out of the ring between July 2016 and December 2017, by which time he had found a new focus and appreciation for the sport.
“It took me going to jail and coming out and that helped me fall back in love with boxing,” Foster admits.
“Sometimes I can’t believe how far we came and how different my circumstances are with everything. It’s just crazy.”
And having seen a life of criminality romanticised on TV and in the movies, he can now say the glamour of violence isn’t what it is made out to be.
“When you’re doing stuff and you’re young, it can be exciting and it can get your adrenaline rush but once the consequences of jail time and all that stuff starts coming, that’s when it really hits you. It ain’t what it was supposed to be,” he explains.
Friends stopped calling him. He was dealing with lawyers. He had no money. People were snitching.
“When you’re young, it seems so cool and you’re having fun doing stuff. But it definitely ain’t what it seems. Not even close. I was facing crazy numbers, and that was the worst, not knowing if you’re going to come out and not having nobody. Keith was there for me, but everybody you thought or people you love the most, when you get sent down, they ain’t going to show up.”
****
When Foster was finally released, he thought the slate had been wiped clean, but he was arrested again just days before a September 2018 clash with Jon Fernandez.
“He would tell me things,” Mills continues. “However, saying something and actually doing something is two completely different things. It was over time Shock started to change. It was definitely after he ended up getting out of prison but over time you really got to see that he’s really locking into boxing, finally. He’s locking in to doing all the right things. It was definitely after that prison stint where I felt he was really coming along.”
Then, however, the old charges came back to haunt Foster and he was back inside.
“It was fight week,” recalls Mills. “We were preparing for a fight, Shock had been on the straight and narrow. Hadn’t got in any type of trouble, and the police just pulled him over. I don’t even think the police wanted to take him to jail, but they have to follow protocol, and he had a lingering warrant and they enforced it. But I wasn’t worried because he hadn’t been in any trouble. This was something that happened years prior. Shock got out of jail on the Wednesday, he fought on Friday.”
But from that point on, there has been no looking back. Foster is 12-1 since, he avenged the Conceicao loss, and he knows there are plenty who condemned his prospects after his defeats.
“Oh, for sure,” he says now. “I feel like that’s been part of my career for the longest now, they wrote me off for my first two losses and thinking any fighter they threw in front of me could beat me because of those two losses, but I think I’m changing that wave in boxing of, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be undefeated’ or this and that. I’m showing that you can have a couple of setbacks early in your career, but if you dedicate yourself and put your mind to it you can turn it all around.”
And Mills has been with him every step of the way.
“I had no aspirations on being on the business side of boxing. I had no interest,” Mills grins. “I’m a businessman and this is not my business, so when Shock asked me to be his manager, I was caught off guard because I was just looking to help him. I didn’t even realise how great he would be, this wasn’t me trying to be a boxing manager. It was easy for me to stick with him because I never wanted to be this big manager in boxing. I would have helped him and never been his manager.”
*****
O’Shaquie Foster leans up against the ring in Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn and smiles.
The grin reveals two diamond-covered K9s and he won’t let on how much he paid for them (“ain’t no little boy stuff!”).
In part because of his dreadlocks, Foster is instantly recognisable. Later in the day, I saw him posing for pictures with fans elsewhere in New York.
Fame is an interesting concept to someone who was looking at two decades behind bars.
He hasn’t cut his hair in about 11 years and he’s embracing the idea of being a celebrity.
“I was one of those children that didn’t get as much attention as a baby, so I feel like this is life full circle,” he says thoughtfully. “I know it comes with the game. I don’t fight because it [fame] comes with boxing, but I know it comes with boxing and I know how it can bother people.”
Foster has seen those blessed with sporting talent, dedication and wealth stumble and fall. He knows he is a work in progress, but can also heed the warning of NBA and NFL stars who have burned brightly but been left destitute. The idea is to own businesses and real estate.
“The money that makes money while you sleep,” he adds.
“It’s all a learning game to me. That’s what I pray on, leaving the boxing game with my brains intact and a pile of money.”
******
There is another dream that is shared by both fighter and manager, and that is for Foster to land a fight not just with one of the top pound-for-pound fighters in the sport, but specifically to fight Shakur Stevenson.
Foster contends that he, too, belongs among the pound-for-pound ranks having defeated Conceicao, Rey Vargas, Ray Ford and Rocky Hernandez.
Shakur had said that if Foster defeated Ford, he would fight him, but that remains a way off.
“We’re gonna see if he holds up to his word,” says Foster. “We’ve gotta fight. There’s no other way around it. The world wants to see it now. Me and him got animosity just like me and his little man [Ford] had for the last fight, so we might as well just let it carry over.”
They have, of course, sparred a few times previously.
“Every session I enjoyed, a few sessions went bad for him but it was great work,” Foster continues. “It was high-level work but I believe in myself. He disrespected me and now it’s time to show the world. We gotta fight.”
Foster would take the fight at 135 or 140lb. He wouldn’t need a rehydration clause, either.
“We can take it old school.”
“I hope we get that fight one day,” states Mills. “I really do. Because here’s what I realise about people in boxing. They won’t believe you until you show them. People have a connection with whoever their favourite fighter is, they think they’re unbeatable, so you’ve got to go in there and beat them. And Shock and Shakur have such a long history. All three of us were in the same gym in Virginia, so it’s a long deep history and I’d love the fight to happen but Shakur knows Shock way too well to fight him. Hopefully one day it happens.”
But one thing that is certain is the old life that nearly derailed Foster is long gone. Sure, he can still hear the streets calling, and he knows why those doing well are sometimes drawn back to them.
“Easy, easy. And it’s them temptations, especially in fields like boxing when if you’re not at the top and not making real money then the streets can try to call you back or you go and try to make some quick money, so it can definitely pull you right back in,” he explains.
But he knows his identity. He appreciates his journey. And he won’t forget where he has come from or what has made him the champion he is today.
“I wouldn’t say it took me to turn my back on the streets, I just had to change the people around me,” he says. “I still go back and give to my community, so I don’t feel like I turned my back on them because I always want to give back. But as far as hanging with the wrong crowd and certain things like that, I just changed it up. Nobody felt any kind of way, because no one helped me to get where I’m at. Nobody felt like I owed them nothing and I didn’t feel like I owed them anything.”
His debts of gratitude extend to Mills, though, and the sport that gave him a second chance.
“I’m super grateful for boxing. If it weren’t for boxing, I don’t know where I’d be in life,” he says knowingly. “I thank the sport and I’ll always show love to the sport and put my all into it because I know what position I’m in, how far it can take me and where I could be. I feel like I’m blessed.”
Support independent boxing journalism
Stories like this take time, access and trust. If you value original interviews, long-form features and boxing journalism that goes beyond the headlines, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Total Boxing. Your support helps make this kind of work possible.
(Pictures courtesy of Top Rank and Matchroom Boxing)
I love this. I am a huge fan of Shock and stories like these are what boxing is all about. You can tell he has been through some things in life because he comes to the ring with the mentality like he knows what a real loss feels like.