Yes, Yoel Romero knows that people find him scary. But thats their proble

There's a story about Yoel Romero that is, you might say, instructive. It's not one he really likes to tell, but if you pester him a little bit you can get it out of him. And if you do, it might help explain why someone like Darren Till felt the need to stand there and force himself to stare back into those burning, searing eyes ahead of their bare-knuckle boxing match at BKFC 94 in Manchester, England, on Saturday.

Last year there was a story going around the combat sports segment of the internet about a BKFC fighter named Alberto Blas who had been arrested in 2022 for an alleged attack on Romero. According to reports, Blas was charged with attempted murder after supposedly trying to hit Romero with his car following an argument, then removing a samurai sword from his trunk and striking Romero twice with it.

Romero's wounds were reportedly significant enough that he was briefly hospitalized with injuries to a tendon in his arm. But when Blas' trial on attempted murder charges came around, Romero refused to testify against him. It wasn't because he was simply too busy, either. Romero showed up in court and watched the trial — every day of it — but did not help the prosecutors in any way. In the end, Blas was acquitted by the jury.

If another man did this, we might be inclined to see it as an attempt to let bygones be bygones. But Romero is an intense guy. Even when he's being encouraging and positive — we all remember his "everything is possible when you believe" speech — the sheer force of his personality can make it seem vaguely menacing.

So I wanted to know, what was he doing in court if he wasn't going to testify? Should his alleged assailant have been concerned about that, or heartened by it?

"I never said [anything], never called the police," Romero told me. "I don't like to talk about this. But God said, 'You need to forgive people, because I forgive the people who killed me. So if you want to follow me, you need to forgive people.' … I forgive everyone, because I want God to forgive me. … But I never called the police. The father of my young student, he called the police. And when the police asked me, 'Who [did] it?' I said, 'I don't know the guy.'"

Even this explanation was delivered with such passionate intensity that it was slightly unnerving. But that's Romero's gift and curse. Even now, about six months shy of his 50th birthday, Romero is the kind of guy who remains imposing even in repose. It's part of why Till felt the need to maintain eye contact for a comically long time during their BKFC press conference staredown last month.

"Yoel's a scary guy," Till told Uncrowned's Chuck Mindenhall. "I think we're all in agreement he's scary. But I'm a fighter's fighter. I'm not scared of any man when it comes to fighting. I'm really not."

But, the menacing vibes of Romero being such as they are, Till felt the need to stare back for more than three uninterrupted minutes in order to make the point that he was willing to stand up to this man's constantly simmering ferocity, lest he be thought unequal to the task.

Romero is aware that he can have this effect on people. He insists it's not something he really tries to cultivate or leverage.

"I don't want people to be scared of me," Romero said. "That's not what I want. It's only me. When I go to the ring, I want to beat that guy. That's the only [thing] I want is to beat that guy. I train hard and I fight for my family, so I need to do what I need to do. But if you scared of me, that's your problem. I don't try to make no one scared."

In fact, to hear Romero tell it, a sanctioned fight in the BKFC ring is the last place anyone should be scared of him. There may be plenty of professional tough guys for whom bare-knuckle boxing is a leap too far (or they've just been forbidden from even considering it by concerned loved ones). But for Romero, there's nothing the least bit scary about it.

"For me, it's very simple, bare-knuckle," Romero said. "Why? Because when I'm very young in Cuba, I need to fight for my life. I need to survive. And many times I fight, it's very simple for me. When you fight in the street for your life, you don't think about the cuts or your hands. No, the only thing you need to think is you need to beat that guy because that guy maybe wants to murder you. That's the way you need to do it. And now for me, it's a sport. I'm not thinking about this."

Here he paused, as if concerned that I wasn't getting it. Me, this guy who wanted to know whether a 49-year-old man who still looks carved from granite ever got concerned about the physical damage inherent in this particularly brutal side of combat sports.

Sam Barnes via Getty Images

"See," Romero continued, "I fought in the street for nothing. I fought only for myself, only for the ego. Well, now I fight for my family. I fight to help my family. I fight for the legacy, for the sport. I want the people that's coming behind me to see how you can do something good in your life. When I go to the ring, that's the only thing I think. When I go to training, I think how can I not love the sport? How can I not love my talent? It's not scary at all."

Not if you've been doing it all your life, maybe. Not if you're like Romero, whose current plan is to fight at least until he's 52, since that would be one year past the age when Bernard Hopkins retired.

And why not? He's still fit, which he attributes less to genetics and more to discipline. He's still capable, which he attributes to his love of the game. He's also definitely still scary, which he insists is purely an accident of perception. And even if it is a perception shared by many, well, that's your problem. Isn't it?