In the Ring with Yuri Foreman

This is a rush transcript from "On the Record," June 4, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: World champion professional boxer Yuri Foreman doesn't just train for battle in the ring, he is also training to be a rabbi. He faces the biggest challenge of his career tomorrow night when he fights Miguel Cotto at Yankee stadium. Griff Jenkins got in the ring with Foreman.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's 100 percent.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's very hard to beat. He hasn't lost a fight.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I love him as a person, I love him as a fighter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The thing I like about Yuri that most fighters don't have is that he's truly spiritual.

GRIFF JENKINS, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT (On camera): If you don't think standing in the ring with the super welterweight champion Yuri Foreman isn't terrifying, you would be crazy. Yuri, tell me, you have a fascinating story. You are also studying to become a rabbi. How does boxing and rabbinical studies go together?

YURI FOREMAN, PROFESSIONAL BOXER: Well, it helps me in many ways. It helps me in the ring and outside the ring. We all have bad days, bad training, not so successful a sparring session. It helps me to look at it to turn perhaps a somewhat negative into a more positive thing. The negative thing that it seems like is actually a positive thing. It helps me to be better.

JENKINS: You were you born in Belarus then you moved to Israel. Your mother put you new boxing at a young age. Take our viewers through the story. You have a very interesting history.

FOREMAN: Well, being in the Soviet Union, part of a program, Soviet Union program that every kid after a certain age have to do some kind of sport activity. My parents send me to swimming pool and over there swimming, I was bullied a couple of times by bigger kids.

The next day my mom decide to take things in her hands and take me to boxing gym, and she was thinking that I will learn how to defend myself and perhaps get more confidence in myself, and she was right. I started boxing and I got completely in love with the spore.

JENKINS: I imagine those kids wouldn't bully you today.

FOREMAN: They would not.

JENKINS: Then you go at a young age to Israel where you continue to box. Tell us about that.

FOREMAN: We immigrated to Israel. Shortly after -- we didn't have friends to learn the language and my parents had make a living. I considered myself as a boxer and always looking for a boxing gym in the area and was really hungry for the sport. In 1995, there was the first boxing gym open in my city, and I was the first student.

JENKINS: When you boxed in Israel you would sometimes train at the gym and there you were neither Jewish nor Arab you were just Boxers, right?

FOREMAN: Exactly, no race, no differences much involved in boxing. Boxing like our village has a gym, they had ring, all kind of boxing equipment. We didn't. I decided to go there and train there.

A few of my friends, we went there, and you know it was spooky in the beginning. But after hard work and sparring sessions, they tried to take your head off. But boxing is such a sport that the differences are ended and you become friends.

JENKINS: What is tougher, becoming world champion, which you have already done, or becoming a rabbi?

FOREMAN: It is a good question. It is pretty much as tough. The only thing in being a rabbinical program, you know, nobody throws you punches at you.

JENKINS: OK, great. I'm getting a lesson from the champ right there.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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