Unbeaten Dylan Price Awaits Next Chapter Of Pro Career
Up-and-coming super flyweight prospect Dylan "Real Dyl" Price (10-0, 7 KO) and his father, David have an obsession for boxing that runs in the family’s DNA. As a result, Dylan has won numerous amateur championships and is off to a decent start as a professional prizefighter. While he has been inactive since November of last year (in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic), Dylan has been diligently working on his craft and will be working with some of boxing’s best this summer.
“We’re just staying busy,” says David. “We’re gonna be doing a lot of traveling and sparring and just staying busy that way. We’re going down to Baltimore [working] with Gervonta Davis, and then we’ll work with Lamont Roach, and then we’re gonna go to [Washington] D.C. with Barry Hunter. We’re just moving around and traveling all over, East Coast and West Coast, just getting good boxing.”
Self-described as a boxer-puncher, Dylan Price possesses lightning-fast hands and an elusive style. Like many young fighters, Price looks up to boxing legends Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker, admiring their slickness and defensive prowess.
But Price asserts that he prefers to emulate the younger version of Mayweather. “There’s a difference between ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd and ‘Money’ Mayweather,” Dylan said. The difference is that “Pretty Boy” Floyd was a more offensive-oriented fighter with more knockouts, compared to “Money” Mayweather who was more content to cruise to an easy decision win. Though it is still early in Price’s career, his record reflects a more offensive approach like Pretty Boy Floyd, with seven of his 10 wins coming by knockout or stoppage.
So, it was only fitting that Dylan and his dad teamed up with Mayweather Promotions to begin his professional career in 2017. While Dylan was thankful to work with the company, his time with them did not go exactly as he and his father would have hoped.
“We’re no longer with Mayweather Promotions, but it was a cool experience,” Dylan said. “It was pretty cool, but we’re gonna do our own thing now. My dad has his own promotional company so we’re gonna do it that way.”
David Price points to broken promises and less than stellar matchmaking as reasons for separating from Floyd Mayweather, Leonard Ellerbe, and their promotional firm.
“Being with Mayweather had its pluses and minuses,” David said. “We kept busy, so that was good. But there were a lot of fallout fights and matchmaking wasn’t up to par as we thought it should be. We were on a three-year contract which was up in February. We were actually supposed to fight a homecoming fight in January on the Julian Williams’ card and we were pulled off at the last minute, so that was disappointing. We just decided that we weren’t gonna re-sign.”
With that, David decided to have his son fight for his promotional company, D&D Management, which has signed talents like Jesse Hart and Emmanuel Taylor in the past decade. Dylan is still awaiting his first fight under the D & D management banner.
“Me and my partner Doc [Nowicki] have been in charge of D&D Management for 10 years,” David said. “We do local shows and things of that nature. It’s not that Dylan’s gonna be ‘signed’ with D&D Promotions, I just know promoting and promoting of a fighter, and I thought that was somewhat lacking at Mayweather [Promotions]. So, we’ll handle the promotion end, we’ll get some fights and get his name out there… In a year or year and a half, we’ll have an additional five or six more fights and maybe [another promotional team] will come knocking at the door and get a phone call to fight somebody for a meaningful position.”
Although Dylan is just starting out, he has already had to face some adversity in the professional squared circle. In January of 2019, Price had initially lost a six-round split-decision to Pedro Antonio Rodriguez. However, it was discovered after the bout that Rodriguez had tested positive for a banned substance, and the result was overturned to a “no contest.”
Dylan believes that Rodriguez’s testing positive is an indication of a bigger problem in the sport.
“He’s a cheater,” Dylan said. “What I learned from that is: don’t fight cheaters. And we need to clean the sport of boxing up because a lot of people who didn’t even get caught are just getting away with it… [Rodriguez] beat several undefeated fighters, so I know that it wasn’t the first time he had done it, it was the first time he got caught. My dad looked it up on Boxrec and he’s still fighting in Mexico, so we gotta clean that up in the sport of boxing.”
Price says that he noticed something different about Rodriguez from the beginning of the fight.
“He was super strong, and when I hit him it was like my punches were bouncing off of him, he didn’t move,” Dylan said. “He was already bigger, and he was on steroids on top of that. But that’s the matchmaking of Mayweather Promotions, that comes back on them, I should have never been in that fight. But things happen. My heavenly father Yahuah made it this way so that I can learn a lot inside the ring and outside the ring and still not have that loss on my record, so I'm still thankful it happened.”
So while he was upset that Rodriguez had used performance-enhancing drugs, he realizes that he has gained considerable amounts of knowledge and experience by going through that. He is also proud of himself for doing as well as he did given the circumstances.
“I still showed everybody, even though I was knocked down, I didn’t quit. I still was fighting to win, I wasn’t in survival mode. And this is with a guy who was on steroids. As I said, I learned a lot from it and I was definitely tested in that fight too, my heart was tested,” Price said.
Since that fight, Dylan won his next three bouts, two of them by knockout. As Dylan’s 12th pro fight is on the horizon, he and David are confident that the new circumstances of boxing in the coronavirus era won’t bother him at all.
“It doesn’t matter,” David said. “We can fight in my backyard or an arena with 20,000 people. Being on major cards with Mayweather [Promotions], we were generally early on in the fights, so we were used to not a lot of people being there besides family and friends anyway.”
“Life is all about making adjustments and adapting, so it is what it is,” Dylan said. “As my dad said, we can fight in a backyard, the result is gonna be the same. We can fight whenever, wherever, crowd, no crowd. We’ll be ready when the time comes.”