News from Ray
Watching Curmel Moton Since He Was Sixteen
By Ray Diaz · August 2026
There is a kid I have been watching since he was sixteen. He is 9-0 now with seven knockouts, he fights for Mayweather Promotions, he is a Venum athlete, and six hundred thousand people follow him on Instagram.
When I met him, people were already calling him Tank Davis 2.0.
They were not wrong.
How you get in
You do not walk into TMT. Somebody brings you.
TMT in Chinatown is Floyd Mayweather's actual working gym. Not a franchise with his name on the sign, the room where he trains and where his fighters get built. There is a difference and you feel it in about four minutes.
John Easter brought me in. The Candyman, 7-0 with seven knockouts, not a single fight that has gone the distance. John introduced me to Curmel, and that introduction turned into years.
You cannot buy your way into a room like that and you cannot talk your way in. Somebody who is already respected has to say your name, and then you have to not waste it.
The room
I trained around Curmel. I trained with Jursly Vargas, The Gorilla. Joseph Brown, The Prodigy, was in there. Lehkei Mayweather, Roger's son, was on the mitts. Floyd has said publicly that Lehkei is going to be one of the great trainers in this sport, and having felt those mitts, I would take that bet.
Otis was there. Otis Lee Pimpleton Jr, one of those people who makes a hard room feel like somewhere you belong.
I started stealing from all of them. That is the honest word for it. I took Curmel's style and I took Easter's and I put them into whatever I was becoming. That is what you do in a gym like that if you are paying attention. You do not get taught. You absorb.
And nobody in there was coasting. Not one person. When the standard in a room is that high you do not need discipline, the room supplies it. You show up and the level is already set and you either rise or you feel small. It is the cleanest form of accountability there is.
Curmel did that to me at seventeen years old. A kid held me accountable to staying fit, staying sharp, staying young. He never said a word about it. He just trained the way he trains, and you either matched it or you did not.
I filmed him
I used to shoot his training videos.
Not for money and not for credit. I was in the gym anyway, I know how to run a camera, and he needed footage. So I shot it. If you go back through Curmel's early training clips you will catch me in the background of a few of them, because I was the one holding the phone most of the time.
You do not earn a place in a room like that by asking for one. You earn it by being useful in it.
That is how I try to operate everywhere. Find the thing you can actually give and give it. Sometimes it is fitness. Sometimes it is longevity, or a connection, or a camera. Sometimes it is just being in the building on a Tuesday when nobody else showed up.
So I have videos on my phone of him from before most people knew the name. Him training. Him working. Sixteen, seventeen years old, the best kid in a gym full of professionals.
I know his mother. I know his father. This is not a story about a guy I stood next to for a photo.
I have watched a child become a professional fighter in real time, and there is nothing else in sport quite like being close enough to see it happen.
My son met all of them
When my son was born, I brought him to the gym.
Everybody met him. The fighters, the trainers, the guys who had been in that building for years. My newborn son, in Floyd Mayweather's gym, being passed around a room full of people who hit other people for a living, all of them going soft the way grown men do around a baby.
I have the picture. August 11th, 2023. He is days old, wrapped in white, in one arm. The TMT ropes behind us and Mayweather Promotions on the floor.
Of everything I could tell you about those years, that is the one that means something. Not the names. The fact that when the most important thing in my life arrived, that room was one of the first places I brought him.
Bringing Kosar to Curmel
Here is what all of it built toward.
Kosar Wellness is Bernie Kosar's company. The Browns quarterback, one of the most recognizable athletes Cleveland has ever produced. Real brand, real operation.
Kosar Wellness had never spoken to Curmel Moton. Not once. There was no relationship there to build on.
I made that entire deal happen.
I knew both sides. I knew what Curmel was about to become and I knew what the brand needed, and I put them together and I ran it through. That is a sponsorship between an NFL legend's company and Floyd Mayweather's top prospect, and the reason it exists is that I was in both rooms.
On March 1st, Curmel walked out at Turning Stone with KOSAR WELLNESS across his trunks and BIG DEAL on the waistband, on a card promoted by Mayweather Promotions and Manny Pacquiao Promotions, streaming on Prime Video.
Bernie posted it himself. Big congrats to Curmel Moton on last night's W, loving the Kosar Wellness rep.
I commented underneath it. Welcome to Kosar Wellness.
Because I put him there.
The day it closed
Floyd shut the gym down.
I was there.
You spend years in a building and you learn the sound of it. The bags, the timer, the particular noise of a room where nobody is pretending. And then one day it stops and you are standing in it.
I moved back from Vegas in 2024. I lost my boxing for a while after that, and I have written elsewhere about the man who got me back into it. But I did not lose what that gym gave me, because what it gave me was not conditioning.
It was a standard. And a kid who is 9-0 who I have known since he was sixteen. And a sponsorship deal that exists because I was standing in the right two rooms. And a picture of my son, days old, in Floyd Mayweather's gym.
Find the room where the level is already high. Get somebody to bring you in. Then do not waste it.