Sugar Ray Robinson once said, “Rhythm is everything in boxing. Every move you make starts with your heart, and that's in rhythm or you're in trouble.”
Keith Thurman can breathe easy on that count.
The 26-year-old might deliver chin music in the ring, but he turns to the kind that soothes the savage beast to decompress from training for his March 7 fight against Robert Guerrero at 8:30 p.m. ET live on NBC for the debut Premier Boxing Champions card. Thurman first picked up a guitar at 20, but never quite found his inner Jimi Hendrix. An impulse flute buy, though, stuck.
“I just got back into it as a hobby,” Thurman said. “I’m not as good as I wanted to be, but for me, it’s not my profession so I can keep messing with that for my whole lifetime. That’s what I really like about music, that it’s something you can just play with, like a kid in a sandbox.”
The instrument has a haunting, naturalistic tone that appealed to the outdoorsman in Thurman. It also proved him to be a natural when it comes to music.
“I don’t know how to read a note. I don’t know where to start, where to begin. I simply picked this up, went off what sounds right,” Thurman said. “I could figure it out, but like I said I just play by ear and go by what sounds good.”
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