Oh yeah, I would have been a coal miner, I would think, if I hadn't had tuberculosis when I was 12.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was a sickly child, contracting tuberculosis at the age of five.
I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.
I wanted to be a forest ranger or a coal man. At a very early age, I knew I didn't want to do what my dad did, which was work in an office.
I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.
My father and brothers were coal miners.
I'd started working when I was 21 and had been very determined about my career, very focused, even as a little kid, so it was something I had been working at for a long time.
Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.
I'd made enough money by the time I was 12 to never have to work again.
I would have been a geologist.
To say what I would have been if I wasn't boxing, I don't know why, but I always wanted to be an x-ray technician or a substitute teacher. Those two occupations always stuck with me, maybe because my substitute teacher didn't give us homework, or because I've always had x-rays of my hands.