Bowe Knows That He Must Be In Shape Ex-Heavyweight Champ Works Off The Weight As Golota Awaits

Riddick Bowe can have his chicken and eat it, too - as long as it’s baked.

“Why can’t I have fried chicken?” Bowe sometimes asks nutritionist Kibwe Bey.

But the former heavyweight champion does it Bey’s way as he prepares for a Dec. 14 rematch with Andrew Golota.

“It’s certainly no secret that Riddick has, and has had through his career, battles of the bulge,” manager Rock Newman says.

On July 11, Bowe weighed 252 pounds when he won in the seventh round after Golota was disqualified for low blows at Madison Square Garden. A melee broke out after the fight was stopped, and several people were arrested.

Bey said Bowe weighed 280 pounds on Labor Day but was down to the mid-240s a little more than two weeks before the rematch at the Convention Center.

Bowe’s diet consists of vitamins, spring water, juice, herbal tea, lots of grains, fruit, fresh vegetables, baked chicken and fish. No other meat.

“Riddick is the type of guy who, when he puts his mind to it, he’s going to do what he has to do,” Bey said.

Putting his mind to it has been a problem for Bowe. Although he won the undisputed championship and has a 39-1 record, his approach to fights sometimes has lacked focus. It’s a reason veteran trainer Eddie Futch no longer works with Bowe.

Bowe expects things to be much different when he and Golota meet again.

“I didn’t know much about him” before the first fight, Bowe said before a training session this week. “I know him very well now. I underestimated him. He was an unknown. I’m fighting no unknowns. I want to be motivated.”

That explanation seems to be offered by Bowe to Bowe.

“This fight is very important to me,” he said.

“I’m going in there and boxing and set him up,” Bowe said. “The first thing is to win by a decision.”

So bad did Bowe look in the first fight that his mother told him he should think of retiring “because, between you and me, he was beating your butt.”

“She’d never seen me in that situation,” said Bowe, whose ego got as bruised as his body.

“I was embarrassed. I was humiliated. The only way I can change that is to go in there and do what he did to me.”