“I laughed at him and he didn’t like that. That started the feud and it’s been ongoing for a few years now.”
Shannon Briggs has at least one more match in him.
The 52-year-old “Cannon” plans to extend his current winning streak to 10 with his next time out. Briggs (60-6-1, 1 no contest) will welcome former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Light Heavyweight champion, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson (38-14 in MMA), to the boxing ring when they collide in Qatar at Rumble of Titans: Duel In the Desert on June 8, 2024.
Despite his long streak of victories, Briggs has been absent from competition since he knocked out Emilio Zarate in round one of their May 2016 bout. Briggs has been calling for and trying to make several match ups happen throughout the period that’s followed, but says everyone’s turned him down. Things got close with the possibility of boxing Mike Tyson in the epic return exhibition encounter that wound up going to Roy Jones Jr. in November 2020. Instead, a rivalry with Jackson developed in early 2020 after Jackson’s last bout, a first round technical knockout loss to Fedor Emelianenko.
“He was always kind of a loudmouth anyway,” Briggs told MMA Mania. “I might have come across him doing something silly and was laughing at it. Someone said, ‘You guys would be great in a fight.’ I was like, let’s give it a shot. I went to give him a call, it was the night he was fighting Fedor, and as I was calling him he got knocked out so I said, ‘Ah, man. That’s not gonna happen.’
“I laughed at him and he didn’t like that,” he concluded. “That started the feud and it’s been ongoing for a few years now.”
A notably strong wrestler early in his career, Jackson, 45, in boxing makes all the sense in the world. Jackson developed into more of a striker as his career’s gone on and is largely considered a legendary knockout artist.
Both fighters will have ring rust to worry about in Briggs vs. Rampage. While he’s been inactive for longer, Briggs sees it impacting his opponent more than him.
“There’s such thing as ring rust but there’s also such thing as you burn out, and you need a break,” Briggs said. “The fact that I’ve been dabbling with training over the years, it never really did anything. The fact that I’m gonna train really hard now for the next three months, that’s gonna make the fight a war. We might not be as sharp as we would have been but that’s gonna make it a better fight for the fans. That’s what we really want to do.
“At the end of the day, we’re both entertainers, and I don’t like him,” he continued. “I’m gonna beat him up anyways so it’s gonna be fun entertaining the world and beating up old ‘Rampy Pa.’ I think it’s gonna be great. We’re gonna have fun and because we’re not as young as used to be, it’s gonna be a slugfest. We’re gonna go to the middle of the ring and when the bell rings, we’re gonna go toe-to-toe. Punch for punch, as hard as we can. He’s gonna be throwing round houses, and I’m going straight down the pipe.”