LOS ANGELES -- Three thousand two hundred and ninety-one. That’s what the population of Ashland City, Tennessee was in 1992, the year undefeated super middleweight contender Caleb Plant was born. Though his profiles and bios list Nashville as his hometown, Plant (17-0, 10 knockouts) grew up in the rural town. Though Ashland City is only 20 miles outside of downtown Nashville, it couldn’t be any more of a contrast to the large metropolitan city known for making country music stars. Join DAZN and watch more than 100 fight nights a year In the 26 years since Plant was born, the population has grown only to 4,635 as of 2017. That’s considerably less than the 7,100 capacity of the Microsoft Theater where Plant vies for the IBF title at 168 pounds against reigning champion Jose Uzcategui (28-2, 23 KOs), televised live on FS1. For Plant, boxing was the only way out of the backwoods community in which he grew up. Ashland City has a poverty rate of 20.4 percent, six percent above the national average. There’s also rampant substance abuse, with the city responding to 64 opioid-related overdoses in 2017, pretty dramatic considering how few people live there. “The crime I wouldn’t say is too bad,” Plant told Sporting News when describing Ashland City. “But the substance abuse -- the meth, the heroin, the pills, the alcohol -- that's gotten ahold of a lot of the friends I grew up with and a lot of the city. … Even within my household, that I grew up in, there was a lot of that. My friends, a lot of them have gone to jail, gone to the penitentiary, things of that matter. Selling drugs, stuff like that. I knew I wasn't going to be bound and shackled to it. I knew I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be and my whole life the only thing I wanted to be is a fighter.” Plant has famously said that there was no “Plan B” to get out of town other than boxing. Since the age of nine, there’s nothing else he wanted to be. His father Richie scrounged up enough money to open up what Plant refers to as “a rinky-dink gym.” It didn’t have a ring -- instead, there was tape on the floor, and when there was sparring, people would stand around and hold hands so fighters wouldn’t bash into the wall. One heavy bag hung in the gym, some mirrors adorned the walls, and that was it. Eventually, Richie Plant couldn’t keep the gym up anymore and his son Caleb had to travel to Nashville to get work. “It’s basically the story of my life,” Plant told Sporting News. “Trying to paint the prettiest picture I can with the colors I have.” Many are picking against Plant (who is a slight underdog at +135 on 5Dimes as of Friday evening) because of his lack of experience on this level. But Plant makes the point often that what he faces in the ring is nothing compared to the cards he was dealt so far in his life. He’s experienced things in his personal life that strengthen your resolve inside the ring, keep you punching when your body might tell you not to. He lost his daughter Alia at 19 months old four years ago this month to a medical condition that gave her regular seizures up until her passing. “I plan on bringing that world title back to Alia like I promised her and seeing some friends and family,” Plant said of what he’d plan to do should he be victorious Sunday. Plant has also experienced adversity inside the ring, though you wouldn’t know it based on how easy he makes it look when winning shutout decision after shutout decision. One criticism of him has been that he doesn’t go for the finish when he has a guy hurt but chalked it up not to a lack of killer instinct but instead varying injuries to his hands that would occur mid-fight. “You don't see me talking about [the injuries] really on interviews afterward because I feel like a lot of people play that card,” Plant told Sporting News. “I don't really want to be the one to say that in a bunch of interviews but since you're asking specifically, I've had some had injuries in fights where I've had people hurt. It's been hard to put my foot on the gas and really sit down on my punches.” Plant will end an 11-month layoff -- the longest of his career -- when he squares off with Uzcategui on Sunday. He’s been the mandatory challenger since last February’s one-sided win over Rogelio “Porky” Medina. He was supposed to meet Uzcategui in September but then suffered a left hand fracture a month out from the fight. Plant required surgery, postponing the bout and allowing Uzcategui to take a stay-busy non-title win over unheralded Ezequiel Maderna in September. Plant talked assuredly when saying the injuries were behind him, that he’s punching harder than he ever has in his entire life. “I’m not just touching and boxing people anymore -- I’m hurting people,” the 28-year-old told Sporting News. The general consensus over how Plant wins against Uzcategui on Sunday is by outboxing the Venezuelan-born fighter. If he could somehow summon a stoppage to win the title, the shock alone would propel his name. He’s also got a couple of things working favorably -- he’s not a bad looking dude, he can talk a good game and one other thing. One of the colors Plant has to “paint the prettiest picture” he can as mentioned earlier is clear. There are currently no white American champions in the sport of boxing, and Plant has an opportunity to become the lone one able to make that distinction if he can get past Uzcategui. When this fact was mentioned to Plant, he joked: “You don’t say.” Somehow, Plant has escaped the kind of marketing that white fighters have always seen tacked onto them -- “great white hope” and whatnot. Early on, his skin color was more something Plant had to overcome. “My whole life, I’ve been hearing, ‘He’s good for a white boy,’” Plant told Sporting News. “... My plan in boxing is just to eliminate stereotypes. I don't feel like just because the color of my skin that I can and can't do something. I can be whoever I want to be and do whatever I want to do and I can be the best at it regardless of my ethnicity and where I come from, whether I came from the trailer, whether I came from the projects.” We briefly discussed the Woody Harrelson vehicle White Men Can’t Jump and Plant dropped a good line. “He dunked at the end though, right? I’m slamming that thing. I’m coming in like MJ,” Plant told Sporting News when asked what he’ll do Sunday against Uzcategui. Tennessee isn’t really known for its boxing champions. Thomas Hearns was born in Memphis, but most people associate the all-time great with Detroit and Kronk Gym and Emanuel Steward than they do with his home state. Even though he’s lived in Las Vegas for the past few years, Plant still considers himself a Tennessee kid. If he gets past Uzcategui on Sunday, he thinks bringing the title back to his home state is a real possibility. “That's been a goal of mine for a long time to play right down on Broadway at the Bridgestone Arena where the Predators play,” Plant said. “First things first, we're focused on this mission, focused on the task at hand, but after this really pulling and pushing to bring something to Nashville.” We’ve seen fighters from the south develop huge followings once they reach this level. Terence Crawford moves tickets in Omaha, another city not recognized as a boxing hub. But the people of Omaha rallied behind Crawford much the same reason Plant hopes to rally support amongst his home state -- because it’s proof you don’t have to be limited by your surroundings.<doc-sep>Caleb Plant’s daughter, Alia, was born with a brain abnormality and she was plagued by seizures, sometimes several hundred a day, during her life. (Photos courtesy of Caleb Plant and graphic by Amber Matsumoto/Yahoo Sports) Caleb Plant scoffs at the notion that he’ll be overcome by the pressure of fighting for his first world title on Sunday in Los Angeles, when he faces José Uzcátegui for the IBF super middleweight belt at the Microsoft Theater on Fox Sports 1. He’s lived through so much tragedy and dealt with so many horrors that trading punches with another person, even one of the best fighters in the world, is a fun thing. The golfer Lee Trevino once laughed at the suggestion there was pressure trying to win the U.S. Open. Pressure, Trevino quipped, was playing for 10 dollars with 10 cents in his pocket. Plant could relate better than most. The ring is a sanctuary for him because of the hand life has dealt. Five times during the all-too-brief 20 months and 23 days that his daughter, Alia Plant, spent on this Earth, doctors told her father she was about to die. Four times, Caleb looked those doctors in the eye and said no. “The doctors would pull me into this little white room and they had that look and they said to me, ‘OK, Mr. Plant, we want you to know that we’ve done everything that we can do, but your daughter, she’s going to wind up passing away tonight,’” Plant said. “Obviously, that’s something no parent ever wants to hear. I couldn’t accept it. I didn’t believe it. I told them, ‘No. We’ve got to figure something out. That’s my daughter. I don’t accept that.’ I was probably naive, or blind to what was going on, but I couldn’t accept it. I refused to accept it. I just didn’t think it would happen.” The fifth time, though, was different. Alia was born with a brain abnormality and she was plagued by seizures, sometimes several hundred a day, during her life. As he had so often done, Plant rushed to meet with his daughter’s doctors, who had once again put her on life support. Plant walked into the intensive care unit of the hospital she was in and saw his daughter, who had wires protruding from her tiny body. It felt different when he saw her this time, however. Once again, doctors told him she was going to die. This time, somehow, some way, Plant knew they were correct. It was Jan. 29, 2015, not even two years since he celebrated her birth on May 7, 2013. Story continues “I was so excited and so happy [when she was born],” Plant said. “I couldn’t wait to be her father.” But she spent most of her life in and out of the hospital and in the care of doctors. She couldn’t do the things with her father that Plant had dreamed of doing. On that fateful morning, he was alone with her in the ICU and had a talk with her. “She was in an induced coma and I went up to her and I said, ‘Alia, are you tired of this? Do you not want to do this anymore?’” Plant said. “She’d been through so much. I said, ‘Are you tired? Because if you are, I’m not going to be disappointed in you. I’m not going to be mad at you or upset with you. I just want you to know if you don’t want to go through this anymore, I support you. I love you and your Dad’s not going to be mad at you.’” The pressure on Plant was intense. He literally had to make a life-or-death decision on the spot: Leave her on life support and pray for a long-shot miracle or remove her and end her suffering. He loved his daughter so much, and he looked forward to singing “Happy Birthday” and to introducing her to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, taking her trick-or-treating and meeting her boyfriends and walking her down the aisle when she was married. And now, she was slipping away, and he was helpless. After agonizing thought, he’d decided to keep her on life support until his family and friends had a chance to get to the hospital to see her and say their goodbyes. But when he spoke to her as she lay motionless in that coma, something changed dramatically. “They’d said she’d pass sometime in that coming night,” Plant said. “So I thought it was best to keep that life support on until five so everyone who wanted to could get there. But then after I talked to her, something happened and the doctors said, ‘She’s going to pass now.’ I asked them to take all the tubes out of her and clean her up. She’d had those tubes and wires on her all of her life and I didn’t want our last memory of her to be of that. So they cleaned her up and we saw her and at 10:55 [a.m.] on Jan. 29, 2015, she passed away.” It was the toughest thing he’d ever done in a life he says has been colored by issues. He was born into poverty in rural Tennessee, Ashland City, where the median household income is just $55,855 as of 2017 and the per capita income is just $26,618. José Uzcátegui (L) and Caleb Plant (R) face off Sunday for Uzcátegui’s IBF super middleweight belt. (Leon Bennett/Getty Images) He saw things no young child should ever see: Drugs were prevalent in Ashland City and he was taught how to deal. Things were hectic at home and there were plenty of physical altercations in the home. Things were broken, he said, and doors were ripped from the jamb. At a young age, he knew he wanted to escape that life. “I wasn’t happy with what was going on around me, even when I was only 9 years old,” he said. “I wasn’t happy with the economic situation we were in. I love where I’m from, but it’s a tough, poverty-stricken area. There is a lot of meth and heroin and people who abuse alcohol and do pills. “I didn’t want to be bound by those shackles. I believed early on that I could escape that and become something. I didn’t know exactly what at first, but I knew I was destined for something bigger.” He was, he said, close to his father and tagged along with him everywhere. When he was 9, his father built what he called “a rinky-dink little gym,” and introduced him to boxing. Learning to fight would change his life, but he began in the most humble manner imaginable. “We didn’t have a lot of money and my Dad, he scrambled up what little money he had to put together this gym,” Plant said. It was, truth be told, a gym in name only. Sure, a heavy bag hung from the wall, and there was a mirror, but it had no ring. His father would put tape on the floor to mark off the ring and when there was sparring, he’d have the kids stand on the tape and lock arms to serve as the ropes. Plant found he was good at fighting and it changed his life pretty dramatically, at least part of the time. “From the time I got off school until 10 o’clock at night, that’s where we’d be,” Plant said. “I loved it there because I was the kid who no one wanted to be, but when I got to the gym, I was someone everyone wanted to be. At a young age, grown men were looking up to me and wanted to be like me. I got to be a superstar. I got to be someone who stood out. I got to have an identity. I got to be somebody special. As soon as I’d leave the gym, though, I’d go back to being that kid no one wanted to be.” He’s now 17-0 with 10 knockouts and if he can win on Sunday, he’ll be the guy everyone wants to be again.<doc-sep>The unbeaten super middleweight contender is guaranteeing victory in Sunday night's IBF title fight vs Jose Uzcategui on FS1—believing he is the next king of the 168-pound division. Caleb Plant knew something was wrong almost instantly. After landing a punch on his sparring partner’s elbow, his left hand felt like it was swelling into a balloon. Plant pulled his hand free from the glove. As soon as he looked at it, he sensed trouble. It was a puffy, contorted mess. An August 2018 bout versus IBF world super middleweight champion Jose Uzcategui was just a month away. But in that moment, Plant knew it wasn’t happening. Hopes dashed with one punch—though not completely gone. Six months later, what seemingly was a disaster has blossomed into a second chance for the 6-foot-1, 26-year-old from Nashville, Tennessee. Plant says he feels stronger, smarter and far more prepared for Uzcategui now. The anticipated match takes place this Sunday, January 13, at Microsoft Theatre at L.A. Live, in Los Angeles on FS1 and FOX Deportes (8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT). Plant’s broken left hand is fully healed after undergoing surgery for the first time in his life. Following a quick but arduous rehab, he was back in the gym by October. “The rehab center where I worked said they never saw anybody ever go through rehab that fast,” he said. “I couldn’t hit anything until October. When I first heard that I broke my hand, it was disheartening. But I’ve been through bigger and harder obstacles than that.” By late October, Plant fully trusted his left hand, knowing each time he threw it, it wouldn’t come apart. It was, in many ways, just like the fighter himself, forcefully moving forward despite the cracks that came with it. The worst blow occurred on Thursday, January 29, 2015. That was the day Alia, Plant’s 19-month-old daughter, died after losing her battle with Aicar Transformylase/Imp Cyclohydrolase Deficiency, a rare condition with only two known cases worldwide. Alia was one of them. “I had Alia at a young age, and not only did I have a child at a young age, I had a disabled child at a young age,” Plant said. “That’s what turned me into a man and the responsibilities that come with it. I have a tattoo of the date Alia died. “It’s something I think about every day. What happened to me and my daughter will always be a part of me. Something like that happens to you, it changes you. That’s why I say it turned me into a man.” “ What happened to me and my daughter will always be a part of me. Something like that happens to you, it changes you. That’s why I say it turned me into a man. ” Unbeaten 168-pound contender Caleb Plant Having gone through that, a little broken hand wasn’t going to derail Plant. “I want to be a world champion, and to be so close to making my dreams happen, it was depressing, but each day, I kept going back to the gym, working on my right, working on my conditioning,” he said. “I don’t think I learned anything new about myself. It was just another ordeal that I had to go through. I’ve been doing it all my life.” Plant, 17-0 (10 KOs), will carry his life experiences into the ring against Uzcategui. He’ll need everything in his arsenal to topple the lanky Venezuelan who, at 6-foot-2, is an inch taller than Plant, and possesses a 76.5-inch reach to his 74. Uzcategui’s last loss came via controversial disqualification against Andre Dirrell in May 2017, when referee Bill Clancy ruled Uzcategui hit Dirrell after the bell ended the eighth. At the time, Uzcategui was up on two of the three scorecards. In March 2018, Uzcategui got his revenge, stopping Dirrell in the eighth round of their rematch to win the interim IBF world super middleweight title. His status has since been upgraded to IBF world super middleweight champion. Plant envisions himself wearing that belt around his waist at some point on Sunday night. Further, the man known as “Sweethands” believes he knows Uzcategui, 28-2 (23 KOs), better than the champion knows him. “I don’t have to concern myself with nowhere near as much as what he has to concern himself with me,” Plant promised. “When I was recovering from the broken hand, I studied film of him. He’s a rough, rugged guy. He’s tough, but sometimes tough is not enough. I know he’s a pressure fighter who will come forward and try and cut the ring off. “I’m going to make things happen. I trust my left hand. A new king is going to be crowned. It doesn’t matter how the job is going to get done. I can guarantee you everything that needs to be done will be done. And I can guarantee you’re going to hear, ‘And the new!’” For a complete look at Uzcategui vs Plant, check out our fight page.<doc-sep>
Caleb Plant will step into a ring in Los Angeles this weekend to face a boxing boogeyman, but he isn’t afraid. How can he be scared of another man when he has done the unthinkable? What can Jose Uzcategui possibly do to cause him more pain than pulling the plug on his 19-month-old daughter’s life support? Plant, a 26-year-old Nashville native, had to make that call four years ago to end the suffering of Alia, who was born with a condition that caused her to have up to 200 seizures a day. He will challenge for Uzcategui’s International Boxing Federation super middleweight championship Sunday at Microsoft Theater at L.A. Live in a bout that will be televised on Fox Sports 1. “I’ve been through much bigger obstacles,” Plant said. Plant, the No. 2-ranked contender, takes more than a 17-0 record into the title fight: He takes the promise he made to his daughter. “I’m not just going to bring the championship back to Tennessee,” he said. “I’m going to bring it back to Alia.” Rising from poverty Plant was brought home from the hospital after being born and placed in a dresser drawer. His parents couldn’t afford a crib. “Pulled it out and lined it with blankets,” said his father, Richie. The family lived in a two-bedroom trailer on a rural patch of land in Ashland City, a town with a few thousand residents located about 25 miles northeast of Nashville. “I’d say the obstacles started then,” Caleb said. “They just continued.” As he grew, Caleb saw himself surrounded by poverty. He saw friends get hooked on methamphetamine and strung out on heroin. Others drank themselves into oblivion. Some ended up in jail or prison. His father worked a variety of jobs. He had a background in kickboxing and scraped together enough money to open what he calls “a hole-in-the-wall school to teach martial arts.” Caleb was a natural, but kickboxing was more than a sport to him. “It gave me an outlet,” he said, “so when I got older I wouldn’t be running around with my buddies getting in trouble.” He took up kickboxing and soon also started boxing to help with his striking technique. Justin Gamber, a boxing coach from South Dakota who had settled in Nashville, remembers first seeing Caleb when the fighter was about 10 years old. “He came from martial arts and kickboxing, so he didn’t have typical boxing fundamentals,” Gamber said. “His stance was a little bit different, but he was so fast and athletic that he could get away with it and still have success.” Life-altering events Caleb went on to win six amateur world kickboxing titles, then decided to focus solely on boxing. He won the national Golden Gloves and earned a spot as an alternate on the 2012 U.S. Olympic team. At age 19, his life changed with the birth of his daughter and the news she had been born with brain damage. “I think that would be tough for any young man to take on a big responsibility like that,” Caleb said. “What came to fruition from that situation became much bigger than I anticipated.” He was at an amateur boxing event when he got the call informing him Alia was having seizures. When he got home, he realized how serious the situation was. “She had no motor skills,” Caleb said. “She couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t grab anything. She couldn’t even eat on her own.” A tube was inserted into her stomach so she could be fed a special formula every three hours. She took eight medications twice a day. When she was able to go home, she slept with a heart monitor and oxygen. Physicians tried to find something that could stop the seizures but never came up with a diagnosis despite countless tests. Five times she went on life support; five times she pulled through. “As all these things began to sink in and you see what she’s going through,” Richie said, “I really felt at some point like Alia was going to be coming into our life and she was going to be leaving our life.” It never occurred to Caleb his infant daughter wouldn’t get better at some point. “As a father, I just didn’t accept that or think about that,” he said. “Maybe it was naive of me.” Fighting for control Caleb took Alia to doctor appointments almost daily. He turned professional in May 2014 and found solace in the gym.