Danny Trejo Explains How Boxing Matches In Prison Work And How He Became San Quentin Prison Champ

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• Actor Danny Trejo was a guest on Steve-O’s podcast where they discussed Danny’s previous life of being San Quentin Prison boxing champion
• Danny Trejo explains how training for boxing matches used to work, who they’d fight, how outsiders would come in for fights, and more
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Actor Danny Trejo seems like a guy who has lived a thousand lives. Danny has been a guest on BroBible‘s ‘Endless Hustle’ podcast recently where he discussed being ‘scared straight’ by the gas chamber and how that spurred him to get his act together and stay out of prison.

He did cold hard time in prison before embarking on a career as an actor. Trejo said his first drug deal was at just 7-years-old. He was arrested for the first time at age 10. He spent most of the 1960s in California prisons and even met Charles Manson at the LA County Jail during his time behind bars.

Danny Trejo arrived at California’s notorious San Quentin Prison on San Francisco Bay in 1966 and got out in 1969. During the several years that he was in that prison, Danny became the boxing champion of San Quentin’s Lightweight and Welterweight divisions.

On Steve-O’s podcast (clip below), Trejo takes us through what boxing in prison was like back then. This was a time when the inmates were allowed to work out with weights. Danny says they’d bring in outsiders from the military for boxing matches. It sounds like a completely different world form the modern picture painted of prison. Check it out:

The question about gangs was pretty interesting. Of course, there was a long time in the American prison system before gangs took over how the societies functioned. But Danny Trejo is able to pinpoint it down to basically when he was getting out of prison.

He got out of San Quentin in 1969 after serving 5 years on a 10-year sentence. Danny claims 1969 is when the Mexican Mafia showed up in the California prisons, but 1972 is when “the mafia really came into power.” And now describes the Mexican Mafia as “a force to be reckoned with if you go to prison” which is reason #1,000,000 I never want to find myself inside of a prison cell.

Here’s the Endless Hustle podcast story about how Danny Trejo thought he was being sent to the ‘gas chamber’ after being accused of injuring a lieutenant after inciting a riot:

To listen to that Endless Hustle episode in full, you can follow that link.