Regis Prograis On The Josh Taylor Fight And Why He Kept A $1 Paycheck

Regis Prograis has collected two dozen victories as a pro, one junior welterweight world title and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fight purses.

But one of his most important personal possessions is a check that totals $1. He keeps it because it reminds him of when he was a nobody on the international boxing scene, when hardly anybody knew who he was and when nearly as many people cared. If he wins his fight vs. Josh Taylor on Saturday for two of the 140-pound titles in the finals of the junior welterweight World Boxing Super Series titles, he'll earn about $2 million.

He's not interested in tossing out that $1 paycheck, though. For Prograis, that 100 cents is important to him-reminding him where he came from and providing motivation to get him where he wants to go.

"It just shows the hard work," Prograis told me. "I always knew I was going to be here. It was a certainty. It was always motivation. You have to see it to achieve it."

It's not like the $1 check was even earned during Prograis pro debut. Far from it. Prograis said he made $600 for his pro debut in 2012. He earned $50 for his second bout four months later. It was actually his 10 ^th fight, against a boxer who had 84 professional fights, where he took home that single buck.

Prograis isn't bitter about what he made previously. But as he showed in the leadup to the WBSS finals, he's not going to stand for it when he feels he's possibly getting fleeced.

That's why he threatened to pull out of the tournament this summer and went to court to free himself from the WBSS contract. In his lawsuit, via The Athletic, Prograis said Comosa AG, which backs the tournament, hadn't paid him the money that had been set forth in their negotiated deal.

According to the website, the WBSS was supposed to deposit money for Prograis into an escrow account-$250,000 65 days after he beat Kiryl Relikh in the tournament's semifinals, another $250,000 54 days before his scheduled encounter with Taylor, and the final prefight payment of $600,000 a month out from the final. But some of the funds weren't there in time, and Prograis had a decision to make.

He decided to bail on the largest payday of his career. Or at least threaten to do so.

"If you go back and you look at the history of the World Boxing Super Series, all the fights always went through," said Prograis, who earned a total of $1.1 million for beating Relikh. "I felt like it was going to happen. For me, it was just about when it was going to happen. ... I can't speak on Josh Taylor and his contract, but in my contract, I had some things that needed to be taken care of. So, of course, we threatened to pull out. I never wanted to pull out. That's the only person I wanted to fight. The contract just needed to be tightened up.

"If they didn't have the money, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm not going to fight for free. But they got everything straight."

It cost him on the PR side, though. Even though this wasn't the first time a boxer said the WBSS wasn't fulfilling its financial obligations to fighters who had advanced in the tournament-Ivan Baranchyk also nearly pulled out of his fight vs. Taylor before their semifinal showdown-Taylor's supporters didn't see a pugilist eager to make sure he would receive his money. They saw a fighter who was scared of Taylor.

"He didn't want to come [to the U.K.], I believe," Taylor said on Sky Sports' The Gloves Are Off show. "Trying to pull out because he didn't want to come here. If it was in America, I'd be there straightway, no questions asked."

That wasn't the case, Prograis said.

"I saw a lot of stuff on Twitter that I was ducking him or that I was scared of him," Prograis said. "I couldn't comment until everything got straight. The fight is still taking place and it's in the U.K. I'm going to show who's ducking who. To me, it only added fuel to the fire."

It's a fire that is still continuously fueled by the amount of money he was once paid to step into a ring. That $1 check means more to him now than the cash ever did back then. And so does another check he recently wrote to himself to cash sometime in the future-a check for $100 million.

"I've got it right now," Prograis said. "I just can't cash it yet."