That's the most terrible mistake you can make: to relax. It's difficult to become a champion, but it's more difficult to maintain it for many years because you're getting too comfortable.

It is incredibly difficult to adjust to such a little fighter. Mormeck is similar to Mike Tyson, he is just a little still faster.

It's not my place to compare myself to greats like Tyson, Frazier or men like that. But I would look at a fighter like Evander Holyfield. He's a great heavyweight who worked his way up through the weight classes to become champion and had to beat bigger men along the way.

I never fought in my life outside of a ring.

There are 49 guys that got bored to sleep on my record, so they got knocked out by it.

In the old days, when Muhammad Ali was fighting Ken Norton, Joe Frazier and George Foreman, there was a lot of excitement in the heavyweight division, I have to admit it.

In Soviet times the border was closed so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.