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VINTAGE
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Copyright © John Dennen 2017
Cover photograph © Andy Hooper/ANL/Rex/Shutterstock
John Dennen has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Yellow Jersey Press in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781787290075
THE LIGHTS ARE hot. Twenty thousand people in the arena shift in their seats. They are hushed, quiet. Nothing is more deafening than a crowd that size waiting in silence. A bell rings out. It chimes once, twice and on, a last salute. Memories of Muhammad Ali stretch to every corner of the world, including England. Here, in London, under the dome of the O2 on the banks of the Thames is the first heavyweight world title fight since the death of the sport’s greatest champion. The bell tolls a tenth and last time and the crowd erupts, the final honour.
All heavyweights toil in the shadow of their great predecessors. There can’t be another Ali, there never could be another. But there are always more champions.
The crowd stamp their feet on the floor, they clap their hands, they shout their voices hoarse. This audience has certain demands of its heroes. They have to fight. They have to suffer. They have to bleed and they must hit to hurt.
Anthony Joshua will walk out before them. With his challenger, a polite American, Dominic Breazeale, already in the ring, Joshua will step out on to a raised platform, a stage. A vast screen behind him will flash with his name. He will stroll easily forward and back, raising a glove to knots of people spotted in the crowd. Too late to pause, too late to think of anything much: the show has begun. Lights flash, rolling round the arena, the snarl of a lion roaring plays out clearly, specifically requested by Joshua. This is the ‘Lion’s Den’ after all. Just to underscore the extravagance, pyrotechnics, for little apparent purpose, ignite either side of him.
And so he makes his entrance, still recognisably himself, smiling here and there. He doesn’t see the crowd now, it’s too dark beyond him. He can’t see the old faces that throng the ringside. Old team-mates, old friends, old enemies, too, are all sitting close, watching among thousands and thousands of new fans, new supporters, all shouting his name over and over. He doesn’t see all that, doesn’t hear the deep roar of the crowd.
Security guards, stony-faced, fall in alongside him, marching him through a passageway hemmed in by fans. Above him, lit brightly, is the ring. In it, waiting for him, is the fight. His first challenger. Joshua’s face only hardens now. He steps up, his boots on the canvas. He slips through the ropes.
His robe, broad across his shoulders, catches the light, shining bright white. This is the picture of a fighter. Joshua stations himself in the home corner, his team fanning out behind him. He peaceably crosses his hands in front of his body, waiting, almost formally, for the inevitable. Breazeale, meanwhile, busies himself shadowboxing. The challenger, a converted American football player, is more comfortable than he has a right to be. But he doesn’t look a natural fighter. He shifts his gloves through the air, snapping punches at nothing in particular.
The announcer takes up his familiar refrain. ‘Let’s get ready to rumble’ reverberates across the arena.
Joshua’s face is framed by the ropes. He looks out directly through the strands. Can he see the people out there? Or is it only darkness? Is it just him in there? Him and the fight.
A fight is a curious thing. It is a lonely business, no doubting that. There is nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide, no one else to ease the pressure. No one, aside from the man in the opposing corner, really understands what the boxer goes through in his fight. It’s up to the fighter to force himself through the pain. Away from the ring, back in the gym, there is a team; sparring partners, coaches, support. But their help, by definition, is limited. It’s Joshua who has to throw the punches, who has to take the hits, do the extra circuits on the track. When he does eventually enter the contest, it won’t be so much his opponent he’s fighting. It’s a reflection, a mirror image of himself, of the work, of the suffering he’s bled into this particular engagement. If he can shed his doubts and fears, if he can impose his style on his opponent and their contest, he wins.
This camp, though, is taking a toll on him. Joshua is a big man. When he enters a room he towers over its occupants. That’s the thing about being big – everybody sees you. And Joshua is unmistakable. A hefty six foot six, it would take a lot to knock lumps out of him. But on this occasion, just a week before the first defence of his world title on 25 June 2016, he is weary. He is feeling the pace. No boxer wants to give away weakness but Joshua can’t help mentioning time and again how tired he is. The training isn’t over. He has more sparring to come, further training. He’ll only catch a rest the following week, in the final two days before the fight itself.
A media lunch had been organised in Sheffield, eight days before the world title fight. Naturally I was in attendance for Boxing News, the magazine I’ve been working for over the last seven years. Anthony strode in, drawing everyone’s attention. He’s not just taller and far wider than anyone else in the restaurant, he is a big name now, a big star. He has the forbidding aura of someone who is recognised almost everywhere he goes, who is famous, someone who can generate £15 million, closing in on $20 million, with a single fight. Someone who doesn’t just carry financial clout, but whose physical power has meant none of his professional opponents, at this point, have made it to the final bell.
Taking a vacant seat next to me, he leaned eagerly over a plate of food. I muttered my usual platitudes, about whether he’d have a break, a holiday, after the fight.
‘I’m not being funny, John,’ he said grimly, ‘but the media lunch hasn’t started yet.’
Blinking, silenced, I turned back to my lunch, chastened, only to notice Joshua laughing with a familiar deep chuckle. Mentally at least he felt laid-back. Smiling, his enthusiasm for the job, for the fight, was apparent. Discussing the arena, the atmosphere as he made his ringwalks, he gleefully shadowboxed in his seat. When you’re in it, in that moment, evidently it’s hard to take in. ‘Is it good?’ he asked.
‘It’s the best part,’ I replied, somewhat uncharitably. What I should have said, what I do then say, is it’s like nothing else. There’s nothing like the roar of the crowd, willing their hero on, into a major heavyweight fight.
The talk meandered on before the media roundtable began in earnest. Still light-hearted, Joshua said quietly, ‘I’m not the amateur you used to interview.’ On that score he was absolutely right.
He is known. It takes a while for the Joshua team to roll out. There are always hands to shake, people to meet, fans to greet. In this instance they wound their way out of the hotel through a wedding reception. That appearance was enough to disrupt the celebration. The bride rushed up to ask him to pose for a picture, closely followed by the bridesmaids, then elderly relatives. He’s a public figure; to him these are duties and he carried them out with a smile.
Such public outreach came from the top, it came from him and it was paying off. A week later hundreds pressed forward at Covent Garden Market in London to see him weigh in in the open air on a warm summer’s afternoon. He didn’t have a weight limit to make but this was one of the rituals of the sport, giving the people a chance to see, and to appraise, the fighters on the final day before their contest. He went face-to-face with his challenger, his last staredown with Breazeale before they were in the ring. Normally Joshua loomed over opponents, a silent, intimidatingly impassive presence. But on this occasion he spoke softly to the American, turned and gestured to the crowd.
‘You talk about these different processes, learning through experience how to deal with that, and now once I get it right I’ll be able to play these opponents at their own game,’ Anthony said. He wanted to take control of his opponent. He was telling him to embrace the occasion. Breazeale declined to accept the invitation, just glaring at Joshua, breathing heavily. They were parted and Joshua snatched up his world title belt and held it aloft in his fist, showing it to his crowd, an offering.
‘He’s seen in my face that I’m ready to go,’ the American insisted, speaking in the clipped tones of the college athlete he frankly was. ‘He was doing a little blinking. I was doing a lot more staring.’
But Joshua saw the fight. ‘Even when I’m looking at him, I’m calculating what shot I’m going to knock him out with,’ he said. ‘A hundred per cent. Slip, with a left hook. That’s how I am. I’m actually picturing boxing him, when I’m doing the eye to eye, thinking what shot will he throw. He’s a big guy. He’s going to throw jabs and then you have to keep your head moving and counter-punching.’
Stepping down from the stage, Joshua endeavoured to exit down a side street, but the crowd simply mobbed him, rushing round waving phones, trying to get a picture, a fist bump, just getting close to the champ. As security clustered round him, they picked their way through the people step by step, rather like, I imagined, a presidential candidate being manoeuvred through a campaign rally. In a way he was running for office – to be the heavyweight champion of the world. He had one of the belts, but there were three other major titles. In the meantime he just had to fight for the crowd, try to impress them enough to prove he was a true champion. It was a court of popularity and, if this weigh-in was anything to go by, Joshua was winning their support.
The champion liked to spend time with fans, posing for pictures, shaking hands, bumping fists. On this occasion if he’d done so, who knows what kind of a riot, or stampede, that might have caused. ‘It’s mental. I haven’t seen that for a while for a sportsman,’ his commercial manager, Freddie Cunningham, said. The adulation was reaching rock star levels. On occasion they had fans just running after his car. ‘Some kids made it through four traffic lights, down the main road, like a mile and a half, and they kept making every light. I couldn’t believe it,’ Freddie continued.
But the support he’d accrued, that was palpable the following night. Boxing crowds tend to drift in late, perhaps only arriving for the particular fighter they support. For this event the queues were building early on, fans massing to take in the excitement five hours before the main event was due to start. By the time Joshua was in the ring they were delirious on that heady cocktail of anticipated violence.
His cornermen reached up to strip the white robe from his shoulders. Joshua stood there, broad across the chest, chiselled. ‘Carved in mayhem’ was another of his expressions. Breazeale, his opponent, may have been taller but at that moment Joshua seemed far the bigger man. He looked up now, to zero in on the opposite corner. Stripped to the waist he advanced on Breazeale to touch gloves, one more pre-fight ritual, only to throw fists in earnest in a few moments’ time. Joshua backpedalled to his corner, waiting for the first bell. He squatted down on his heels, his long arms stretching up to the ropes. He bent deeply at the knee, carrying his 243-pound bulk lightly. The crowd roared again at the sound of the bell, propelling him up on to his feet, forward into the centre of the ring.
Breazeale stuck his jab out, trying to hold Joshua off. The American was hesitant; Anthony’s lead jab hit out cleaner, faster. With a straight left-right combination, the one-two punch, Joshua drove him back, too far back. He threw a left to follow up, hooking it round from the side. It curved away from Breazeale, falling short, catching only the light.
Breazeale tried a one-two of his own, only to see it easily blocked. Joshua went looking for him, flinging two straight right hands. The American cupped his gloves over his face to protect himself. Joshua’s heavy right cross, the back-hand power punch, shuddered into his guard. He cuffed a left hook at Breazeale, catching the edge of the American’s right glove. The hook comes round from the side, harder to block than a straight left or right despite being a slower punch. An ideal shot for prying apart a stubborn guard.
Joshua opened up with a firm four-punch combination, bombarding Breazeale’s defences. He even ducked a defiant jab, wheeling away underneath it, enough to whip up a round of applause from his supporters.
Joshua’s jab shot through to start the second round. He doubled that, punching Breazeale’s guard so he could hammer his right to the body. He lanced his cross in again to set up his left hook. The American felt it. The crowd sensed his hurt, a rumble of sound starting to reverberate round the arena. Joshua followed their prompting, stepping up his attack. A burst of punches rattled off Breazeale’s gloves.
The Briton scored with another clear jab. It landed clean. The shot moved fast but there was real weight behind it. At once a red mark swelled up around Breazeale’s right eye. The left, for an orthodox boxer, was normally the weaker hand. Joshua wielded his like a piston. It thudded out and Breazeale, a lesser fighter, could never figure out how to escape it.
Joshua stepped forward quickly. He sent in a sudden uppercut, a blow that, as its name suggests, cuts upwards. It sliced through the gap between his opponent’s elbows, a short shot that swept through a tight arc. It snagged Breazeale’s chin. At first glance it didn’t look like much. But its effect was delayed. A second later Breazeale lost control of his legs. They wouldn’t obey him. Instead, for an instant, they loosened beneath him. His knees buckled. He wobbled backward, putting distance at least between himself and Joshua. Through an effort of sheer will Breazeale kept himself upright. But he listed, trying to reclaim his balance. He lurched away, stumbling into a neutral corner. He needed to lean his back on the corner post just to keep himself on his feet. Joshua advanced on Breazeale, a shadow looming over him.
The American, however, was spared. The referee stood between them, an error, although he was taking a close look at Breazeale to see if he ought to intervene and save him from Joshua. It served as a block, shielding Breazeale for a few crucial seconds. He reeled out to the clear space of the centre ring. Joshua sent a right after him, and piled forward to press his attack, a hint of recklessness that saw Anthony catch a wayward punch. Breazeale clinched, desperately holding on to Joshua’s arms to survive the second round.
Joshua normally rushed his bouts. He was never willing to spare an opponent when he had him on the hook, lest he manage to regroup and come back at him later. There is always danger the longer a heavyweight fight continues. The big men have heavy hands. Give an underdog more time and the more chance he has of landing a knockout blow, however lucky. In this weight class an unknown like Hasim Rahman can take out as great a champion as Lennox Lewis with a single punch, as he did in 2001.
Joshua rarely gave his opposition much time to linger, typically snuffing out any potential threat as quickly as he could. But before this first world title defence he had promised something else. Instead of a ferocious assault, Anthony wanted to lay down a defensive foundation; he wanted to be in control of the fight before he disposed of his challenger. So he measured out Breazeale. He was methodical now, but no less impressive for that. His jab zeroed in on Breazeale’s right eye, the swollen damage starting to close it. Joshua’s right flew across. But even as he attacked, he still palmed a Breazeale jab down.
The American tried to unload shots of his own but Joshua screwed up a right to stop him in his tracks. Breazeale held that ground, looking to hit back. Joshua jabbed him down, scored with a cross. Stubborn still, the challenger responded with a jab. Joshua flung that sweeping uppercut through the air. He worked to usher Breazeale to the ropes. Normally trapping them on the strands left his victims vulnerable as Joshua stormed forward. But here, with his back resting on the ropes, Breazeale gamely traded blows with him. Joshua nevertheless had the edge, hammering his left and right home. He kept his eyes wide, focused on the job. He unleashed a fast combination in close and all the time kept Breazeale on his jab. Still the American couldn’t step round it, couldn’t slip that lead left.
Joshua built on his work, unhurried, patient enough to back off from a feint, letting Breazeale recover himself. He doubled his jab to let his right hook crash round the American’s guard then stepped in with his jab again, this time to tee-off his uppercut. Joshua could still drag his right hand back fast enough to block an oncoming left hook. Breazeale unearthed defiance, hacking at Joshua with his backhand uppercut and firing off a left. He made it through the fourth round, something only one of Joshua’s previous professional opponents had managed before. Perhaps exultant at the feat, Breazeale stood firm at the bell muttering darkly at Joshua, his face contorted with the pain and the effort.
Breazeale might have been standing up to the bombardment, but he wasn’t winning. Joshua in truth was subjecting him to a systematic beatdown. It was a question of how long the Englishman could maintain his patience.
Joshua was commanding but his defence was not impregnable. As thickly muscled as his torso was, his body was the point to attack. Breazeale worked punches through to his midriff. For an instant Joshua felt those. But again Breazeale wandered on to a left hook. Anthony was moving, he slipped a right cross. All the while his jab tore through again and again. For a big man Anthony could shift sharply. He ducked beneath a lead hook and bobbed back to strike in his own left.
The American sat rooted to his stool at the start of the sixth round. He was slow to rise, slow to emerge from his corner, feeling the pain. Then he walked straight into Joshua’s double jab. Anthony applied it cruelly, relishing the damage he did with it. Breazeale couldn’t escape it and Joshua, licking his lips at times, sent his jab slicing heartily through the openings. It allowed him to blast his backhand straight to the body or set up a one-two. ‘You’ve got to pop that jab, man,’ he once said. ‘It’s a smokescreen for this bad boy,’ he added, brandishing his clenched right fist. Breazeale tried to swing back, heaving a left hook over, to no avail. Joshua began to break him apart, hitting a left hook over to open his prey up for a straight right cross. Breazeale was left wearily trying to rekindle that stubborn resistance. The bell ended the round and the American again attempted to hold his ground and stare Joshua down. Bruising twisted Breazeale’s face into a grimace. Joshua simply patted him on the back and ushered him back towards his own corner.
Such mercy was short-lived. In the seventh round Joshua suddenly increased the intensity. Upping the tempo, he threw the jab-cross. At once another straight left scorched through after it. The punch slammed in hard, snapping his head back. Breazeale, now woozy, found himself on the ropes. This time he couldn’t fight his way off. Joshua was quick. He sprang on the American, letting loose fast punches, cuffing him heavily down to the canvas.
Breazeale had to beat the count. One … Two … Face-down still, Breazeale scarcely moved. Three … Four … Yet he had a stubbornness deep-rooted within him. He stirred. Five … Six … He hauled himself off the deck, on to his knees and up on to his feet before the referee counted eight.
Joshua stayed on him, maintaining that intensity. He launched a cannon-like right hand and with both fists battered the American to his knees once and for all; a fast blur of white leather and Breazeale was down. Joshua strode away casually, like a gunslinger marching across a saloon bar floor.
Sixty-one seconds into the seventh round and it was over. Joshua raised one arm in the air to celebrate before the referee had even finished his count. As suddenly as he had switched his attack, unleashing rapid flurries to end Breazeale’s challenge, the atmosphere in the arena changed. For the crowd Joshua had delivered the knockout they expected. As they exulted, cheering, shouting, at this moment Breazeale was no longer the enemy. He was just a man, cutting a forlorn figure as he picked himself off the canvas. A man who had come up against the limits of his ambition. Through boxing the American had actually made a connection to the father he had never known. His father had been in and out prison, and out of his life, during Breazeale’s youth. Only later, when the young man had already become a boxer, did he discover that his father had been a fighter, too. With this challenger now bludgeoned into submission, at a time like that you also remembered that his wife and child were in the crowd. You hoped Breazeale had been well paid for what he suffered. You hoped he’d be the same afterwards.
The mood in the ring had changed as well. Joshua could walk to the opposing corner smiling now. He touched fists with Breazeale’s trainers and they could exchange grins, relieved that that was it, the worst was over, and their man might just have shared the ring with someone special. Joshua’s world title belt was returned to him and he stretched up, raising it high above his head, presenting it to his crowd once again and smiling broadly still.
He shrugged off the necessary, concentrated cruelty of the fight. Warm satisfaction settled over him as he sat back, feet up, in his changing room after the battle was won. Usually after a knockout victory he got on the pads to complete the rounds which had been scheduled for the bout but remained unfinished in the ring. He spared himself that now. Joshua might have controlled this contest but the camp, the weeks of training he had endured to make sure there could be no doubt as to the outcome of this fight, had been hard, harder than ever. That work was now done. His title belt sat alongside him, lying ahead of him only rest.
It is summer and this is the picture of a champion.
FEW GREAT ADVENTURES start in Argos.
Anthony Joshua left Watford when he was eighteen. His mother, Yeta, moved to London and the six foot six teenager went with her. Joshua didn’t plan on leaving his friends or his life behind, but when he went back he wanted them to see he’d grown in stature. Which was why he found himself in Argos, his big hand holding a little pen, filling out a slip of paper to buy a bench press, some weights and other training paraphernalia.
His mother would be a constant in his life and, if he was more distant from her when he was young, Anthony would find they grew closer as he matured. In Golders Green he may not have had new friends to hang out with but he had family. His cousin, Benga Ileyemi, had come round to his mum’s house and the two exercised with these new weights. ‘You know I’m doing real workouts at the minute,’ Ben said. ‘I’m going down the boxing gym.’
‘Oh yeah, is it?’ Anthony’s deep voice replied.
In Watford he’d played football with his mates after school, like any normal teenager. New in this part of town, Joshua had little to do. So he went along to the Finchley Amateur Boxing Club to watch Ben and this real workout. Boxing had made a fleeting appearance in Joshua’s life four years earlier. When he was fourteen the boys he’d grown up with all went down to Ricky English’s gym in Watford. Young Anthony had tagged along, more for the fitness than anything else. Before football had entirely taken up his time after school, he managed three sessions in total before knocking boxing on the head, dissuaded not so much by the difficulty of the endeavour than by the far too hefty cost of six pounds a go. He never bothered going back.
Four years on, in 2008, he’d been in a boxing gym another three times but only watching. He could see it was serious. The coaches at Finchley had little interest in wasting their time with ‘dead wood’. You came here to work or you went back home. And Anthony was still bored.
Ben lent Anthony twenty-five quid for his first pair of boxing boots. He dug out some vests from home, borrowed a pair of shorts from Ben, too, and stood on the wooden gym floor being shown how to wrap some bandages from the club round his fists.
The wrapping of the hands is one of boxing’s rites. In the still moments before a contest, the boxer and his cornerman share a quiet moment in the changing room as the trainer tightens bandages round the fighter’s tools of his trade, his fists. He makes his fighter feel strong. For Joshua the wrapping of the hands on this occasion was an initiation into another kind of family.
So new was Anthony to the sport that he didn’t even watch it. If he had, he might have turned his TV on to the Beijing Olympics that year. He might have caught a glimpse of his future.
But in 2008 such high-minded aspirations were far from Anthony Joshua’s thoughts. He wasn’t thinking about international amateur boxing. He was getting to grips with the humble jab, the very basics of their sport. Finchley ABC had the grizzled coaches you’d expect of a boxing gym; John Oliver, a member of a family which had become a boxing dynasty synonymous with the club, ever ready to break into a smile beneath his thick, square-rimmed glasses, and Sean Murphy, whose face and flat nose bore the scars of a hard career as a professional fighter. When Joshua first entered the club, John Oliver had returned home with a smile on his face. He’d seen what he needed to see. He for one knew that a teenager had arrived in the gym who could become a special fighter.
But Anthony, of course, had to learn. Foot placement first for Joshua, standing on the wooden floor of the Finchley gym to get his legs about shoulder width apart, left foot to the front, body turned side on. Getting his fists up, sending the jab out, getting the twist on it, tucking his chin in. Making sure that when he brought the jab back, his gloves stayed high, keeping that chin safe.
Whether it was fate or luck or random chance that brought Joshua to the gym, it was his choice to stay there. He respected the seriousness of his coaches and the dedication of his new gym-mates. If he didn’t feel like doing his roadwork, soon enough cousin Ben would have him on the phone, insisting Anthony come for a run. He’d found something here.
But the going was hard. His coaches got him in the club’s ring for sparring. He was getting beaten up. ‘You know what, I need to change,’ he thought to himself. ‘I need to sort this out.’
‘It’s easy not to do it the right way,’ said Anthony, ‘and make your time in the gym a lot harder. I remember one day, when I was eating chocolate and McDonald’s and I wasn’t living a clean lifestyle. But I was still training like I was Olympic champion. I remember saying, “This is getting tough.”’
He realised he faced a decision. Do it properly. Or don’t do it. Joshua continued, ‘I said to myself, “Either I’m going to clean up my act, clean up my diet or I’m going to stay on the chocolates, stay on the McDonald’s.” That was the decision: do I want to make my life in the gym easier by living a healthy lifestyle and watching boxing videos?
‘That was a turning point for me. I made a decision. I said I was going to focus on my training and get better and live the life properly.’
He had been in the gym six months before he was put forward for his first competitive bout. The club, considering his travails, was divided as to whether he was ready. Amateur boxing coaches are careful with their charges, matching them thoughtfully. They don’t want their boxers harmed physically or their confidence damaged. And super-heavyweights can hurt one another. But Joshua’s coaches were prepared to back him.
‘You know the thing with boxing, your coaches can see the future. They can see what you don’t see. So my coach saw that I was ready. I had something about me,’ said Anthony.
Finchley was having a home show at the Boston Arms, a pub in Tufnell Park and no stranger to violence. The function room out back, the Boston Dome, could create quite a buzz, especially around a boxing ring. Joshua, as the super-heavyweight, would be on last, a routine he would have to get used to.
‘A lion’s always patient before he goes in for the kill,’ Joshua laughed. ‘I’m patient. I bide my time. I look forward to getting in there. The day’s been set and I’m boxing on that day so, whatever time it is, it doesn’t bother me.’
The two bouts before Joshua’s had been thrilling ones, stirring up that heady excitement of the fight crowd. Finally it was Anthony’s turn to go on. In your first contest, it’s so easy to forget everything, all your training; all your practice deserts you when you first experience the unique stresses of entering the ring for a real boxing match. For Anthony this fight was a blur. He remembered his opponent coming out of the corner, coming towards him. He just threw a jab-right cross, a straight one-two combination. Watched his opponent fall. The room erupted. Anthony accepted their applause.
‘This is all right,’ he thought.
IT WASN’T ALL easy. Boxing soon becomes extremely tough. Anthony Joshua racked up a couple of knockout wins. But in the amateurs, sooner or later, everybody loses. The name Anthony Joshua meant nothing to Dillian Whyte – a rough and ready kickboxer making the transition to boxing – who competed for Chadwell St Mary, a small club east of London. Whyte had always been a fighter. ‘I’m from Jamaica, I had a strong Jamaican accent so a lot of people thought it would be funny to take the mick until I started knocking people out. A lot of people thought it would be funny to laugh at the way I talk because I didn’t speak proper English,’ he said. ‘As soon as I started knocking people out that changed.
‘It’s what I had to do to survive. I had to fight. Even in my house I had to fight because I’ve got big brothers and a big sister who used to whup my arse, so I had to fight my brothers and my sister growing up.’
A street brawler who’d grown up in Brixton, Whyte always welcomed a scrap. ‘I was working the doors when I was fourteen years old in south London,’ he recalled. ‘So I’m used to people being unpredictable and being crazy because you tell them they can’t come in because they haven’t got the right shoes on or something. I’m used to all of that crap so to me it’s nothing.’
In 2009 he was twenty-one years old and trying to get his amateur boxing career rolling. ‘We were looking for somebody to box, we couldn’t find anybody and they said there’s this kid from Finchley but he’s dangerous. Obviously he’s knocked everybody about, etc., etc. I said I don’t really care. I’ll fight him anyway. My coach said we’d find somebody else. We looked, we looked and there was nobody else. We said, all right we’ll take the fight. We took the fight,’ Whyte said simply.
The bout was set for a working men’s club on Whyte’s home show. The ring was small and a rowdy crowd, a couple of hundred strong, leaned forward, close to the ropes, growing increasingly lively as the evening progressed. ‘People like to see two heavyweights going at it,’ Whyte grinned.
Joshua was the taller man, but he was a callow boxer, tall, but yet to fill out round his shoulders and arms. There was a solidity to Whyte, shorter, squat, but as destructive as a wrecking ball. And he attacked with relish. He jabbed in quick, scoring first. Joshua threw a clumsy right cross, his chin popping up too high. His technique evidently raw: he was after all a novice. Joshua reeled off a jab of his own and pushed out another cross, aiming it at the body. Already in the first round Whyte was muttering venomously at Joshua. Less a boxing match, the contest was quickly turning into a brawl. Whyte looked for Anthony’s head with big swings from either hand. He charged in and Joshua began to slug with him. It left him open to a right then a left hook. Whyte tagged him with that right again: the weight of the shot knocked him back off balance, falling into the ropes.
To start the second round Anthony tried to stave off the aggressor with a one-two combination, a straight left-right. But still Whyte came on, belting him with a furious left hook. He struck Joshua with a one-two. The shots clattered in, dropping him to the canvas. He was hurt momentarily. But then his pride kicked in. He bounced straight up to his feet. Whyte accepted the invitation. He swarmed over his opponent, bulling forward. Anthony’s arms were tiring and Whyte released the faster punches. He was overeager, though. Too many missed the mark.
Joshua sucked in air to recover in the break between rounds. He dragged himself off his stool, digging deep to unearth new energy. His work was still loose and ragged. But his left hook hit Whyte on the way in. He landed a clear jab. A left hook from Whyte smacked in high but Joshua slung a cross right back at him. The success encouraged him. He came on more strongly. His right hit in again, he even ducked a jab. He landed a final left on the bell, but it was too late to affect the decision. Breathing heavily, his shoulders a touch stooped, Joshua’s arms hung at his sides. The referee raised Whyte’s hand, the unanimous victor.
Whyte forgot his animosity at once. As Anthony trudged back to his corner, he stepped across to meet him. He reached out to grab him round the waist, a movement so sudden for an instant it looked like an attack. But it was an embrace. He hugged him, lifted him up off his feet, a gesture of respect after a hard bout.
Ultimately, though, it would not prove to be a happy victory for Whyte. It prompted closer scrutiny of his past experience. His kickboxing background had come at a higher level than many had thought. He’d fought professionally. If the Finchley coaches had known this they would never have matched him with a novice like Anthony. The fallout would eventually see Whyte’s amateur boxing card revoked, forcing him out of the sport and obliging him to turn professional, with no amateur titles on his résumé. ‘How many boxers have gone into amateur boxing that’s done kickboxing? Loads,’ Whyte lamented bitterly. ‘As long as I’m in boxing, I’m going to have a hard, tough career. I just need to be strong and keep pushing forward.’
Joshua for his part had proved something. His technique had had none of the precision Sean Murphy expected. John Oliver would only send a boxer to the ring expecting him to win. Yet Joshua had demonstrated an ineffable quality. He had what boxers call heart. Knocked down, hit hard, he clambered up and fought back. He even finished strong. It was a sign of a promise.
‘I fought a guy that was more experienced than me,’ Anthony noted. ‘I realised boxing wasn’t as easy as I thought, so I thought I had to up my level.’
His coaches would keep on testing him. As well as putting him into novice championships, which Joshua duly won, they put him through it in training. He was still just learning the ropes. But they made it punishing for him in the gym. His trainers got wind of a six foot nine heavyweight from Manchester who was in London for sparring. The fighter had only recently turned professional, and no one then knew that Tyson Fury would one day become the heavyweight champion of the world. The big Traveller was just beginning to make a name for himself, boxing on undercards screened on ITV. Joshua was still a novice but his coaches decided to sling him in to a spar with Fury. There was another lure for Joshua, too. The Mancunian was offering his Rolex as a prize to anyone who could knock him down.
‘If you want that Rolex,’ his coach said, ‘take it to him.’
Joshua did so. He went for him. ‘We had a little war,’ Anthony chuckled years later, ‘it wasn’t really a technical thing, it was holding on with one hand, trying to hit with the other, lowblowing me and all that.
‘This was about 2009, I wasn’t on GB. I was really inexperienced back then. I had my first fight November 2008. I was really inexperienced but we just went to war. I didn’t know who he was. I was never a maniac boxing fan. I just thought there’s this big guy, he’s from Manchester,’ he added. ‘We had a good spar.’
Not that anyone suspected it at the time, but seven years later both men would win versions of the world title and Joshua would remain eager to renew hostilities. He wanted another shot at that watch. ‘I’ve got the G-Shock on,’ he laughed. ‘I need that Rolley.’
ANTHONY JOSHUA WOULD ascend to the summit of the sport with astonishing speed. It says something about my talent-spotting abilities that I hadn’t detected any such brilliance in him. Watching the 2010 ABA super-heavyweight final, the last bout of the annual senior national amateur championships at York Hall in Bethnal Green, my focus was on his forlorn looking opponent in the opposite corner. By reaching this stage of the national competition, Dominic Winrow had already done sterling work putting boxing on the map in the Isle of Man. The island has only two boxing clubs so it’s hardly easy for Manx ABC, whose boxers travel to the mainland by boat, to get sparring, bouts, or, indeed, boost its reputation.
Winrow was a likeable bloke – a newly qualified PE teacher – and ready to settle down with his new wife. Ginger hair cropped short, he had a problem quite common to the super-heavyweight division. He was chubby. The only stricture of that weight class is to be over ninety-one kilos. Unlike members of any other division, their weight is unlimited. It means a lax diet won’t stop a super-heavyweight from boxing. Modern angst about heavyweights revolves around their decline and that is bound up in the appearance of many, particularly professional, contenders. They don’t look like athletes. They’re fat.
Anthony Joshua is not fat. Seeing him in the ring for that final in May 2010, it wasn’t his height that caught the attention, though he is tall. It was his breadth. Massive, heavy shoulders, thick arms hanging down to his waist. I found out later he was a mean sprinter. It marked him out as an athlete. Born in another country he could have made a fortune charging across the turf with an American football in his hands. Born in another time you could imagine him swinging an axe on an ancient battlefield.
His unblinking stare completed the fearsome aspect. His eyes were wide, the whites clear. They blazed at poor Winrow and that concentration was not to be broken. ‘I watched a lot of Tyson. You never take your eye off your opponent in the corner. It’s the staredown,’ Anthony would say.
Winrow’s knot of supporters had moved to the ringside seats right alongside me. They were loud, cheerful, enthusiastic. A woman took off her shoes to clamber happily up on to a chair to cry out Dominic’s name. But just looking at Joshua I feared the worst for Winrow.
The intimidation – Anthony just standing, staring – worked. Winrow stayed within himself. At the bell, Joshua charged out of his corner, slamming great fists down on his prey. Winrow tried to box properly, kept his mitts up to form a shell-defence, hoping to ride out the early storm. It was a vain hope. A blow, glancing along the top of Winrow’s head, had his legs jittering.
Joshua was simply too strong. Wide shots that might have left him open to counters cannoned off either side of Winrow’s head, those huge shoulders heaving behind them, generating force. It was over fast. Joshua stopped Winrow in the first round.
Even then I didn’t realise Britain had its next super-heavyweight hope on its hands. Yes, he was a level above Winrow, on physicality alone. But that isn’t enough. Power has to be controlled. That is especially true in boxing. Raw strength needs skill to be translated into any kind of outcome in the ring. On the night it was teenage featherweight Martin Ward and other finals in the lighter divisions generating the buzz. Joshua only made the final sentence of an online BBC report.
Anthony was senior ABA champion only a couple of years after taking up the sport. His potential was clear. But the domestic super-heavyweights were nothing like the beasts that lurked in international competitions. I had to assume Joshua was far off that level. Not that I wanted to. In the pros there is nothing like the heavyweights, the equivalent of amateur super-heavies. Competitors at that size always carry the threat of a knockout, regardless of how dire their predicament in a contest may be. Big men bring big money, too. A promising American heavyweight prospect would cause such a stir that Floyd Mayweather actually fighting Manny Pacquiao might no longer seem the only thing that could save boxing. A bright, charming, English-speaking heavyweight prospect, from the battling island on the far side of the Atlantic, would be the next best thing.
But I had to be careful to take note of what was really in front of my eyes, rather than what I wanted to see. Anthony Joshua was still raw.
And Joshua had yet to experience international action. In days of yore winning the ABAs granted instant elevation to the national side. In the modern age, of course, the Great Britain team is far more advanced, categorised into its Development and Podium squads, constantly monitored. Domestic success is now just one more criterion for the GB assessors.
Joshua’s exploits earned him that call from Sheffield. He went up to the Steel City, invited to train with the GB Development squad. It was a shock to him. The boxing facility at the English Institute of Sport was a world away from his home club. The gym in Finchley looked like a chapel. It had a vaulted roof, wide wooden floor, punch bags bolted into the wooden beams. A side room, with mats on the floor and a few assorted weights, led to a changing room that barely had space enough for your kitbag. That’s boxing. You need your coach’s brain, your body and a pair of gloves. Luxury can’t make you a fighter.
But it can sometimes help. The GB gym in Sheffield is a modern cathedral. Three full-size rings occupied the floor, the shining new bags hung all the way from the high ceilings, so boxers could circle them fully as they worked. The hall extended into an area for strength and conditioning, containing gleaming devices for exercise that Anthony had never seen before. A back office looked out on to the training floor. A treatment room housed their physiotherapist. As well as a crack team of coaches, they had a performance psychologist on call, a doctor, a nutritionist, everything a boxer didn’t even know he wanted.
Luxury in a boxing sense, but a new, difficult world for Joshua. ‘I trained hard in Finchley,’ he said. ‘I did loads of extra stuff when outside the gym and so on. But when I got to Sheffield and I had my first week there, I had to make a serious decision again.’
He was on the Development squad, training Thursday to Monday every fortnight but four times a day. He simply wasn’t used to that sort of work. He had Paul Walmsley, a coach militaristic in his attitude, on his case. His first meeting with the tough Liverpudlian trainer was memorable. ‘This guy, he’s training and hitting the bag and I thought, “Fuck me. This is completely different to what I’m used to.” We had to train four times in a day. I didn’t even train as much as that in a week when I was at my local club. I thought, this guy’s nuts,’ Anthony said.
He had to ask himself whether this was for him. ‘I might just stick to being ABA champion,’ he thought. ‘It was a touch of reality for me that this is what it’s about. If I want to go to another level.’
Joshua could have walked away. He was already getting offers to turn professional. ‘Only from chancers, not so much solid promoters. Like managers acting as promoters and that was it,’ he said. ‘Which was interesting because Jonny Oliver would always tell me to be careful of these people, so when it started happening I was already aware of it. That’s why I kind of kept away and I stayed with the amateur circuit.’
His clubmate Dereck Chisora, the super-heavyweight before him at Finchley, had gone pro after winning the ABAs. With GB Joshua was only on a small grant, about £500 a month. There were other ways he could make more money, in and outside of boxing. ‘When you’re a young kid everything runs through your head. Because Chisora was pro at the time and he was making headlines. He’s from my local club, he only won the ABAs and went pro so there was a formula that worked without doing all this extra graft.’
The training camp in Sheffield gave him no quarter. ‘I would get dropped out there. I was getting battered,’ he said. ‘It came to a stage where I was thinking this ain’t for me. It was tough. It was brutal.’
But then he added, ‘The tough times, either you get disheartened or you come back and get better. I needed to get beat up.
‘You start to adapt.’
What he had achieved in the past was simply his pass to the GB gym. It meant nothing here. ‘Someone said to me, “You can’t take your ABA Championship to a Russian or a European champion because they won’t respect you,”’ Joshua recalled. ‘You need to aim higher.’
Mounted on the walls of the gym were images of Britain’s past Olympic heroes. The display charted them chronologically, finishing with a blank silhouette of an unnamed boxer. Above read the words: ‘London 2012’. Below: ‘This could be you’. It took Joshua a while to embrace that concept and seize the top spot. Back in May 2010 he wasn’t even the number one super-heavyweight in Britain. A man called Amin Isa occupied the super-heavyweight berth. You sensed that he was just a place-holder, there until someone better came along.
Isa wasn’t considered worth sending to the European Championships of that year in Moscow. I had seen him box, in the less exalted environs of Fairfield Halls in Croydon. Isa is tall but spindly for a big man. He didn’t impose himself in the ring, so much so that speaking to him up close I was surprised at the real size of him. He didn’t carry the menace of a heavyweight boxer. In Croydon I watched Isa boxing Dominic Akinlade, a solid lump of a super-heavyweight. Akinlade, a bus driver from the London institution that is the Fitzroy Lodge Amateur Boxing Club, brought a diffident attitude to his boxing. He occupied the centre of the ring but moved little from there.
Isa decided to showboat, staying on the outside, switching to either stance, trying to inject some flair into the bout. He made his work ungainly, his aspirations at nimbleness let down by the lack of grace, and speed, in his feet, legs and hands.
And yet his tools were such to put him near and, for a time, at the top of the domestic super-heavyweight talent pool. He didn’t possess the aura of a world-beater, though he was sent to the Commonwealth Games later in 2010. For Great Britain the Commonwealths are significant, though they do not rank high in the amateur boxing firmament. Its entrants do not include the fearsome Russians and Ukrainians who populate the European Championships, let alone the Kazakhs, Cubans and more who illuminate the Worlds. In that sense the attention victory at the Commonwealths brings a British boxer is disproportionate to the challenge.