https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg5qEyZ8UJo
With less than a week to go before David Haye and Tony Bellew step into the ring at the O2 Arena in London to settle accounts in one of the most bitter grudge fights British boxing has seen in some time, the cultural and lifestyle differences between both fighters could not be more stark.
By the time David Haye meets Tony Bellew in the centre of the ring on March 4, 2017, at the O’2 Arena in London, we will already have witnessed a build-up that many would have paid to watch regardless of the fight itself, given the personalities of both fighters and the needle taht exists between them.
Every Scottish fighter operating in the lighter divisions who shows the first hint of potential is immediately burdened by comparison to Ken Buchanan, the greatest fighter this small nation of five million has ever produced. It is a burden they are forced to carry as they try to live up to the great lightweight world champion’s tremendous legacy, one of the greatest ever cultivated by a lightweight anywhere in any era. In every case up to now it has proved a curse, damning the unfortunate recipient of such high expectations with unrealistic promise.
Twice in two weeks British world champions – Kell Brook and Liam Smith – have stepped up to the elite level and come up short. Of the two a case can be made that Kell Brook does belong at the elite level, just not at middleweight; and certainly not at middleweight against the machine that is Gennady Golovkin. The Sheffield welterweight world champion’s next outing at light middle will prove beyond doubt if he’s as good as many of us believe he is when up against the likes of Canelo Alvarez – assuming, of course, that the Mexican stays at 154lbs to defend the WBO belt he just won from Britain’s Liam Smith, against whom he looked superb, securing a 9th round stoppage on the back of a vicious left uppercut to the body.
If ever a national anthem was suited to a fighter it is the Kazakh anthem that booms out before a Gennady Golovkin fight. It conjurs up the image of a column of tanks coming over the hill, guns blazing as they sweep all before them. The fighter known as GGG has a style redolent of said column of tanks on the offensive – merciless, relentless, and unstoppable.
Kell Brook did everything he could to withstand the middlewight world champion’s assault, but apart from a tremendous second round he spent the fight backpedaling like a man trying but failing to ward off a swarm of angry bees. GGG is every bit as fearsome and machine-like as his astonishing KO percentage suggests, a fighter who combines ferocious intensity with the ability to generate truly frightening torque behind his shots.
The stories of talented boxers with star quality failing to achieve their potential, due to bad coaching and/or management, are legion. In every gym you go to, in every part of the world, you hear their names spoken with the kind of sadness and regret normally associated with mourners discussing a deceased friend at a funeral.
“It’s for the soul of boxing.”
This was Freddie Roach’s summation of the stakes involved in Manny Pacquaio’s upcoming fight – the most lucrative in boxing history – against Floyd Mayweather Jr at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on May 2.
“I can’t lose this fight,” he went on as we sat downstairs from Wildcard in the private gym he opened last year for the sole purpose of working with the likes of Manny Pacquaio and Miguel Cotto in seclusion.
It had been six years since my last visit to the Wildcard Boxing Club, and ten years since I’d been a regular while living in the city. The changes that had taken place in that time were immediately obvious during my initial arrival at the gym two days prior.
Someone once described boxing as show business with blood. Joe Frazier’s take on it was perhaps more to the point. “Boxing is the only sport where you can get your brain shook, your money took, and your name in the undertaker book.”
How to place boxing as a sport in the second decade of the 21st century? Whenever we take a measure of ourselves and society today the word civilized automatically springs to mind – and yet, interrupting this smug belief in our own sophistication, up pops a sport like boxing to remind us of the uncomfortable truth that barbarism still has its place.