Mikaela Mayer is gearing up for another week of huge fights.

There is some edge to it, though. A developing grudge. A war of words with opponent Sandy Ryan over the alleged betrayal of a former trainer who crossed the street to work with her now-fierce rival. The WBO welterweight title you feel is just part of what is at stake tomorrow night in Up-to-date York.

Mayer comes alive when a camera turns on or a microphone is placed near her. A promoter’s dream. A competitor with a seemingly endless supply of quotes worth millions of dollars.

I caught up with Mayer over Zoom just hours after she landed in Up-to-date York, with a full week of media commitments ahead of her. Before our interview, I had seen an aged quote in which she described herself as unpredictable. For the first time, Mayer paused for thought when I reminded her of something she had said a few years ago.

“I’m unrehearsed. I’m open. I can be unpredictable. I just live life to the fullest,” Mayer said.

I once described Mayer as a teenage rebel who found her cause when boxing came into her life. Her mother had a drinking problem. Demons to overcome. Her father eventually gained custody of Mayer and her two sisters when her parents divorced when she was just five.

“I had to take care of myself,” Mayer says of those formative years. “My dad worked all day, and my mom wasn’t around. I grew up quick. I always needed something, and I’m lucky I found something as extreme as boxing. Something that could hold my attention. Boxing has that extreme factor. That fear factor. It kept me on my toes, because I’m such an extremist. Boxing is demanding and scary. It was impossibly hard at first.”

Boxing caught up with Mayer when she needed it most. A typical teenager who liked to party a little too much. She didn’t come home for days. Playing bass in an all-girl rock band gave her some semblance of stability. She learned to play through repetition.
Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” was the first song she learned to play. A natural risk-taker, Mayer carried that mantra with her throughout her life.

“I’m such an extremist. Unless something is extremely hard for me, I get bored. I get sidetracked. I seem to thrive on stress,” Mayer once told me. “I feel most comfortable when I’m not comfortable.”

Women’s boxing wasn’t in the same place it is now when Mayer started out in boxing, especially in the professional ranks. You could argue that she would have been better served by seeing how her music life would pan out than risking somehow carving out a career in boxing at a time when there probably wasn’t a career to be carved out, a side of the sport that was still viewed with apathy and indifference. But Mayer sensed she was born different. Her unregulated upbringing certainly helped her roll the dice.

“I always admire that thought process in me,” she says. “I always have it in me. I think the older you get, the more you don’t want to take risks. But as a teenage person, I had no fear. That’s how my dad raised me. He never tried to impose his rules or his opinions. Literally, ever.

“My dad was very laid back. It was a very passive way of raising kids. It gave me a lot of confidence. He never put me down. He never said no or instilled any fear in me. But when boxing seemed impossible, I didn’t have the attitude that a lot of parents instill in their kids.”

Mayer found what she needed in boxing. The seed was planted. Very quickly, she began dreaming of greatness.

“After just a few weeks of training, I wanted to be the best fighter in the world,” Mayer says. “I wanted to fight Gina Carano. At the time, she was a huge name and I wanted to fight her. That’s what I wanted to do. I knew right away what I wanted to do and I put everything into it. Looking back, I had so much determination. I didn’t want to hang out with anyone. I just wanted to train, eat right and do everything I could to be great.”

Mayer has always exuded extreme confidence. Those words carry conviction. They’ve turned her harshest critic into a believer. “I’ve always had that confidence,” Mayer added. “My mom was very eccentric. She made us go out on the dance floor. She made us perform and party with her. She took us places and to parties to meet people, because she liked to party. So we had to fall into that, and she created this social persona. Then my dad got custody, and we had a lot of freedom. We had to make our own decisions. We were thrown into certain circumstances where there weren’t a lot of rules to follow.”

Mayer took that confidence into her fight with Sandy Ryan this weekend. After two controversial losses to Alycia Baumgardner and Natasha Jonas in recent times, Mayer will be hoping for third time lucky against Ryan, a fight that will see the American return home after four consecutive fights in the UK. Mayer despises the “former” tag, and defeating Ryan would make her a world champion after two years without a world title under her belt.

The bookmakers can’t separate them, but Mayer sees it differently. “I’m just better. I’m just going to do whatever I want. There’s no way I’m losing this fight.”

FIGHT PREPARATION typically focuses on two fighters jumping through the ropes, attempting to knock each other out.

How the fight came about, the personalities of the fighters, their careers and their predictions all play a part in the weeks, days and hours leading up to the first bell. But sometimes a storyline comes along that steps into the middle of it all and has its own punch that gets the spotlight.

On Friday evening [September 27] Charlie Edwards will face European bantamweight champion Thomas Essomba at York Hall, live on Channel 5. Edwards, a former WBC flyweight world champion, is the older brother of Sunlit, a former IBF flyweight world champion. Essomba v Edwards is a unique twist though, as in addition to his own boxing career, Sunlit has immersed himself in the managerial side of the sport, and one of his clients is… Thomas Essomba.

Although the thought of his brother in the opposing corner has left him a little rattled, Charlie Edwards has focused on the game and seems fully focused on his second fight with novel coach Stephen Smith.

“It’s a novel belt for me, it’s part of my heritage and my trophy cabinet at home,” he says.

“That’s the belt I really want and want to put in. Although my brother is in the visiting corner and he’s actually choosing Thomas’ side in this fight.”

Edwards spoke on Zoom just weeks before his 21st birthday^saint fight knowing full well that his brother is a talking point in the supporting cast of two leading men. The 31-year-old spoke at length, moving between the European title fight and Sunlit’s place in all of this.

“We all know we’ve had some minor disagreements in the past, but I thought they were covered up,” he says.

Charlie admitted he wanted the fight personally. It wasn’t presented to him as an option, for example, after his points win over Georges Ory in April. However, Sunlit was pushing for the Essomba fight, which led to some back-and-forth, but the truth is Charlie wanted to face the EBU champion in his first fight after a 10-month layoff.

“All my attention is on Thomas,” says the challenger.

“Sunlit won’t bother me, he won’t shake me up. All I do is go to bed thinking about Thomas and wake up thinking about Thomas. In fact, I’ll probably end up missing him. So it’s all systems go in my favor. I’m ultra-professional, I always have been.”

However, Sunlit’s raw emotions on the other side haven’t gone completely unnoticed by his brother. Whatever those feelings are, Charlie knows that these are all business and special circumstances that are unlikely to repeat themselves in the future.

“He took his management career very seriously. Clearly, there was no wasted effort,” Charlie says of Sunlit.

“I’m grateful because it brings more eyes to this fight, which is what I need. Especially after all the inaction and politics behind the scenes that keep me inactive. I’ve put in a lot of strenuous work, grind and consistency over the past few years.

“I’m really looking forward to this fight because I feel like I’m entering the peak years of my career. I feel like my strength has skyrocketed. I’ve settled in [being] man, I gained a lot more weight than that.”

Edwards enters the fight with former two-time super featherweight world title challenger Stephen ‘Swifty’ Smith in his corner, and Edwards also gives the Liverpudlian plenty of credit in this novel phase of his career.

“He was the lithe I needed in my darkest days, giving me back my life and my confidence,” Edwards says of Smith.

“We all know his boxing brain is unmatched. His IQ in the boxing ring is top notch.

“The way he sees things, the way he explains them, and most of all, the energy that flows between us. We can be there doing 12 to 20 rounds in the gym. The entire time in the gym, I feel like I’ve been there for five minutes.

“That’s why I know he’s the guy for me. When you’re locked in and focused, the energy that’s being given just takes me to the next level. The knowledge that he puts into me and what he sees [in] My strengths and how I can employ them to the best of my ability.

“I’ve been working on a lot of other things that will come to fruition and shine on fight night. Now I’m forceful in the bantamweight division. Now I’m hitting. My feet are in the right place. I can only talk so much, but I have to walk and show it on fight night.

“It’s going to be a great performance, but also a terrifying performance.”

It would be difficult to imagine the mess in heavyweight boxing that we left behind so many years ago.

In just two days in January 1998, I wrote two separate but amusing stories in Daily Telegraph (the newspaper used to publish an article every day, which is crazy) which now read like a comedy. They were deadly solemn then.

In the first one I wrote about how Don King had returned to the Recent York courthouse, cornered, in trouble, in danger, and then somehow found a way to freedom. That was Don’s special trick.

In the second article, published the very next day, I wrote about WBO heavyweight champion Herb Hide and his planned fight in June in Las Vegas with Roy Jones. As I said, pure comedy.

King’s compromise was insane, and nothing that was discussed—none of what I wrote—ever happened.

King was in court delayed in 1997, trying to settle a dispute with Frans Botha and his manager, Sterling McPherson. It was the kind of ugliness that ruined almost every heavyweight relationship at the time. King was asked to produce potentially damaging documents, which could have been costly. Instead, the survivalist made a compromise, a deal that would get him out of trouble and out of court. It was always said about King that the moment a contract was signed, negotiations began. He found a rabbit in a hat in a Manhattan courthouse.

King promised Botha a chance to fight Evander Holyfield for the IBF heavyweight title in early August. Botha, it seems, accepted. However, at the same time, King was also negotiating and offering Lennox Lewis and Henry Akinwande the same fight. King kept his options open and juggled like a champ. At the same time, the IBF ordered Holyfield to defend his title against Vaughn Bean. I had to cover this soap opera every day.

“He [King] he called me on Christmas Day,” confirmed Kellie Maloney, Lewis’ manager at the time. Lewis and Maloney chose to ignore the offer and fought Shannon Briggs in Atlantic City in March 1998. The Lewis-Briggs fight is one of the biggest losses in heavyweight boxing. It’s brutal, extraordinary.

Bean’s dilemma was perhaps best summed up by McPherson, who was Frank Warren’s American partner at the time. Warren and King had a spectacular falling out in September 1997. By then, meanness was everywhere, a backdrop to almost every argument that happened.

“I know the only fight Holyfield can take is [to avoid being stripped] Bean’s fight,” McPherson said. “And I also know there’s no hotel or casino in the world that would pay enough money for a fight.” He was absolutely right, and the same stupidity still exists.

The next day the carnival continued and I talked about the Hide-Jones fight in Las Vegas in June. Hide was meeting with Warren to work out a deal; a week later John Fashanu was in Hide’s game and they took an alternate route. As I said, it was the everyday comedy of the heavyweight business.

Jones, I wrote with conviction, had been eyeing Michael Moorer, but Moorer had lost to Holyfield. Jones had turned his attention to Hide. Jones had followed fellow former middleweights Iran Barkley and James Toney into the heavyweight division. Barkley briefly held the magnificent World Boxing Board heavyweight title, and Toney was scheduled to fight Larry Holmes on January 21, less than three weeks after my column.

All this nonsense was treated as if it were true.

Finally, it happened. And I wrote every crazy detail, twist, turn, blow, and non-event. Some of it is in the modern book

So there was no Holmes and Toney, Akinwande and Holyfield, or Holyfield and Lewis in 1998, but there was Bean against Holyfield. It wasn’t a substantial spectacle. Jones never moved up to heavyweight and fought 12 more times at featherlight heavyweight, and eventually moved up and beat John Ruiz for the WBA heavyweight title in Las Vegas in 2003. That was the same year that Toney, who had never fought in 1998, stopped Holyfield.

Akinwande and Holyfield were close to fighting in the summer of 1998 at Madison Square Garden in front of an estimated 15,000 empty seats. But about 48 hours before the first bell, Akinwande was discovered to have hepatitis B, and the fight was canceled. That was a relief. King, by the way, had been out of Recent York all week—he was somewhere in court fighting the charges. The man is Teflon.

April 10, 2010: Frans Botha arrives at a press conference after their heavyweight fight at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. Evander Holyfield won the WBF heavyweight title in the eighth round, earning Botha the WBF title. (Photo by Daniel Gluskoter/Icon SMI/Icon Sport Media via Getty Images)

And Botha, who was once at the center of all this turmoil? Well, in 1998 he fought and won twice, and Holyfield was nowhere to be seen. Huge Frans, who was a nice guy, had defeated Stan Johnson and Dave Cherry in a combined 185 seconds in their 1998 fights. Cherry and Johnson had a combined nine wins and 50 losses; in January 1999, Botha was stopped by Mike Tyson in January in Las Vegas. Their fight, riddled with fouls, ended in the fifth round.

In 1999, Lewis and Holyfield met.

It was then and now, well, it’s amusing. Martin Bakole’s emotional homecoming was off the charts, Moses Itaum’s promise and shopping list is amusing, the danger of Daniel Dubois and Anthony Joshua is very real, the Frazer Clarke and Fabio Wardley rematch, Joseph Parker’s experience. And then in December Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury two. Does anyone want to throw Bean, Botha or Barkley in there? Two completely different worlds. Remember, living in history is hazardous. But it’s nice to look back without rose-tinted glasses.