Houston’s Joshua Edwards Is Ready To Show Olympic Super Heavyweights ‘Something The Division Has Never Seen’

Joshua Edwards has boxed ever since he was 6 years old. It was a path that his father, himself a boxer, had wanted the youngest of his four kids to take.

But during his sophomore year of high school, Edwards had other thoughts. He put down his boxing gloves and wanted to try to make a run at becoming a star basketball player, perhaps even playing for the hometown NBA team, the Houston Rockets.

Instead, an injury on the court led him to get back into the ring.

“I realized, if I don’t be careful, I’m not going to be able to do anything athletically,” Edwards said. “And then I realized I was so much better (at boxing).”

Part of that a-ha moment stemmed from his dad, Henry. They were at the gym one day after a basketball game when Henry told his son to picture the room full of all the kids in Texas who want to go to the NBA.

Where did Joshua fit in?

Now picture the gym full of boxers in his weight class who wanted to make the Olympic Games.

“My chances were a lot higher for being an Olympic boxer than playing basketball,” Joshua said.

Henry’s words of wisdom not only struck the right chord, they proved prophetic. The 24-year-old will be representing Team USA as a super heavyweight at the Olympic Games Paris 2024, where the boxing competitions begin June 27, the day after the Opening Ceremony.

“He’s always been a big motivator,” Edwards said of his dad. “He believed that I was gonna be doing this before I believed in myself. He’s the one who put me in sport. It was fun, but it was like, ‘Man, you think I’m gonna be the heavyweight champion of the world and go to Olympics and get a gold medal?’ That was his thinking, but around like 15, 16 I started to see my potential in myself. From there, I just started to work a lot harder so I can go get this.”

Even at 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, Edwards is often the smaller of the two fighters in the ring. But he gets a lot of his grit and determination from the neighborhood he grew up in. Sunnyside is a community in the southern part of Houston, the fourth-largest city in the U.S., but it’s far from glamorous. In fact, on Sunnyside’s Wikipedia page, the fourth sentence of the entry describes the area as having a landfill, a garbage incinerator (now closed) and a handful of salvage yards. Not exactly Paris, with the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

“It is a pretty rough neighborhood, especially where I live,” Edwards said. “Houston has everything that you’re looking for. People move to Houston for the food — any kind of food you’re looking for — the nightlife is really nice. The people, I feel like Houston is a really supportive place. Other people from Houston, they support my fellow Houstonians.”

While undersized for a super heavyweight, Edwards does feel he has a distinct advantage: his speed.

“I feel like it’s natural,” Edwards said, “but in the way my body developed as I got older, I wear my weight in my legs mostly, rather than my upper body. I can walk around and people look at me and don’t believe I’m through 220. It’s just crazy.”

Edwards prides himself on his defense, and that is easily seen in his fighting style. He can often be seen with his hands up in the air, almost pretending to be his opponent’s trainer and providing targets to hit. But that is part of Edwards’ strategy.

“I noticed when I was in a ring and I have my hands higher, people tend to jab at my hands instead of at my face,” Edwards said. “So a lot of times, I just put my hands up high and I know you’re going to jab at my hands just because it’s in your face and it’s in the way — and I do a lot of counters from there.”

It is a markedly different brand of boxing than the last super heavyweight from Houston to qualify for the Olympics. That would be George Foreman, who often used his brute strength to overpower his opponents en route to the gold medal at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.[CM1] 

Edwards was much younger when he fought and lost in front of Foreman and took in some words of wisdom, especially when it came to his trainer, Melvin Malone, aka “Coach Mel.” Edwards has studied Foreman’s style and taken note of what made him successful.

“A lot of times, it was so unorthodox how he would land his punches,” Edwards said. “Also, he didn’t have a traditional defense, like the hands up by the ears, so I think that a lot of those kinds of things (I’ve taken from him). And just when you think a lot of times when George threw his punches, his head would be out of the line of fire, I like that.”

Edwards qualified for Paris by winning gold at the 2023 Pan American Games last fall. This attempt came after he failed to make it to the Tokyo Games, delayed by the pandemic and held in 2021. Edwards finished fifth at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials. But he certainly turned that disappointment into success.

“I’m a lot more versatile,” Edwards said. “I was a lot more one-dimensional then. I just bounced around and just stayed on the outside, one, two punches at a time. Now I can fight all styles. I can be the counter-puncher, I can get inside and work inside, so I feel like I’m a more complete overall fighter.”

That confidence includes a victory over Tokyo gold medalist Bakhodir Jalolov of Uzbekistan in 2022 in one of the bouts the two have had in recent years.

“I feel like I gave him the most trouble,” Edwards said. “I believe everyone else was pretty much either knocked out or just blown out the water. I had him thinking a lot in the ring, I wasn’t easy to hit, so he had to figure out a strategy.”

His goal for Paris is obvious. Edwards wants to win a gold medal, not just for himself, but his dad and his neighborhood and his city. And he believes he can get it done.

“I feel like I’m something the super heavyweight division has never seen, and I trust in the hard work that I’ve put in,” Edwards said.