Next month, the fight for the so-called “world No. 1 belt” will take place in Florida.

On December 6 in Pembroke Pines, Richie Leak, a 45-year-old removal specialist and father of four from Blackpool, will fight for the Police Gazette diamond belt in a bare-knuckle heavyweight fight.

The last British bare-knuckle fighter to come so close to a title shot was Jem Smith in 1887.

The Shoreditch fighter faced Jake Kilrain for the right to fight John L. Sullivan and fought for almost three hours in front of 79 spectators until it was declared a draw due to being outshone by Smith’s 74 supporters after the Londoner’s fall.

Leak is expected to have his lights out next month.

Gustavo Trujillo is the latest heavyweight to win the Police Gazette diamond belt, restored by Scott Burt, president of the Bareknuckle Boxing Hall of Fame, in 2016.

The “Cuban Assassin” – also a 6-0 (5) professional gloves boxer who lives in Miami – won all six of his bare-knuckle fights in the opening round.

“I would like to get to the second round,” said Trujillo, 31, “but they are too basic!

“There is no room in my fight plan for looking for a first-round knockout, it just happens.”

Trujillo showed off the shot selection and defense of the Cuban amateur boxer he was not.

“I wasn’t a boxer in Cuba,” he said. “I was a Greco-Roman Olympic wrestler.”

Which didn’t make him wealthy.

Trujillo left Cuba ten years ago with the intention of becoming a millionaire.

Boxing with gloves will likely make him more money than bare-knuckle boxing, but BYB Extreme keeps him busier and keeps audiences rooting for a sport in which 96 percent of fights go the distance.

Leak knows he faces a knockout next month and shrugs off the danger in the matter-of-fact way of someone who worked on doors in Blackpool as a teenager.

Leak gives the impression that no matter what Trujillo did to him, he’s had worse nights.

“I started working on doors when I was 18 because I could always argue,” he said, “but it was a terrible job.

“The local boys can’t misbehave because we’ll block them or bump into them, but the ones who come for the weekend think they can do whatever they want because they’re on the coach on Monday morning.

“They don’t care – and there are 20 buddies behind them.

“I got stabbed while I was working on a door, but luckily it hit my fat ass so there was plenty of padding!”

Leak looks very much like a Victorian boxer with a beard that earned him the nickname “The Viking.”

“It doesn’t assist me absorb the punches,” he laughed. “If I thought so, I would have grown it even longer.”

After the first round of his fight with Dan Podmore in March, his beard was stained with blood.

As is often the case in bare-knuckle boxing, Leak found the punches that turned the tide of the fight and won in the third round.

This won him the BKB heavyweight championship.

BKB has since been purchased by BYB Extreme and their champion is Trujillo.

The champions meet at the Charles F. Dodge City Center in a triangle described as the smallest fighting area in combat sports, and Trujillo is the first to defend the Police Gazette diamond belt first worn by Sullivan, the hard-living “Boston Sturdy Boy” who claimed that he inherited his strength from his Irish mother.

The belt was the invention of Richard Kyle Fox, a Dublin resident who, at the age of 29, emigrated to America in 1871.

He saved enough money to buy the struggling National Police Gazette and turned a struggling publication devoted to helping police find criminals into a colorful and controversial tabloid that gave away prizes for outlandish feats such as the longest frog jump.

Fox noticed that his readers had an appetite for sports, especially bare-knuckle boxing.

The sport was illegal in every state of America, and to counteract this, the Police Gazette reported on fights only two weeks after they took place.

Sullivan was considered America’s best fighter, and Fox supported Irishman Paddy Ryan to defeat him.

In the April 16, 1881 issue of the Police Gazette, he declared that Sullivan and Ryan would fight for “$1,000 a side, the American heavyweight championship” and “a facsimile of the belt for which Heenan and Sayers fought.”

Heenan is John C. Heenan and Sayers is Tom Sayers, the best fighters in America and England respectively.

They met near Farnborough in April 1860 and both received their belts after beating each other unconscious for two hours and 20 minutes.

The Police Gazette belt would have been in jeopardy when Ryan, Tipperary, of Troy, Modern York, and Sullivan faced each other in Mississippi City on February 7, 1882, in a 24-foot ring under London Prize Ring rules.

“Back when Sullivan was fighting, you could throw your opponent and the round would end when the knee hit the ground,” Burt said. “Some rounds lasted a few seconds, some lasted 20 minutes.”

The fighters were given 30 seconds to recover from the knockdown, and then the fight was resumed.

“Officially, Sullivan has had 51 fights,” Burt said. “If we include all the fights in bars, it will be closer to 500!

“He only fought three times bare-knuckle, against Paddy Ryan, Charley Mitchell and Jake Kilrain.

“He hated bare-knuckle boxing. You could point your eyes out and grab your hair.

“It was tedious to watch too. People left the fights. They just kept fighting until one of them gave up and they landed too many punches.

“The promoters talked to the players and told them they were afraid of breaking their arms.

“The promoters put on gloves, so they threw more punches, there were more knockouts, and it was better to watch.”

There were another 5,000 people there to see Sullivan fight Ryan, including outlaws Jesse and Frank James in drag.

They saw Sullivan drop Ryan to the jaw after 30 seconds and recalled the fight on “Memories of ’19.”vol Century Gladiator” Sullivan said the match was called off after 11 minutes because Ryan was “so disabled that the best medical care was required.”

After the fight, Fox found himself at the same bar as Sullivan and asked the waitress to invite Sullivan for a beer.

According to Burt, Sullivan replied, “No reporter is taking me away from my friends. He will have to come here.

Fox heard – as Sullivan intended – and became furious.

Burt said: “Fox wanted revenge on Sullivan and got Jake Kilrain to challenge him.

“Sullivan refused because he thought Kilrain was out of his league.

“Fox took the belt off him, put diamonds in it, called it the belt of the world and gave it to Kilrain.”

Kilrain, another Modern Yorker of Irish blood, therefore became the first holder of the Police Gazette diamond belt – until Sullivan took it from him in 1889 after a fight lasting 75 rounds – that is, two hours and 16 minutes.

This was the last world heavyweight title fight under the London Prize Ring Rules, and subsequent holders of the Police Gazette diamond belt during the glove era included Bob Fitzsimmons before the rise of The Ring magazine and the decline and eventual demise of The National Police Gazette in 1932 The belt was undisputed for over a hundred years.

Burt decided to refurbish the belt in 2016 and gifted it to Bobby Gunn, a former Canadian professional glove boxer with roots in the Irish traveling community, to “set the ball rolling in the current era.”

In 2019, Joey Beltran, a former UFC fighter from California nicknamed the “Mexecutioner,” became the first heavyweight to capture the Police Gazette diamond belt in a bare-knuckle heavyweight fight since Sullivan defeated Chase Sherman 130 years earlier in over five innings in Mississippi.

AJ Adams and now Trujillo have won the belt.

Burt said: “It was the first belt passed from champion to champion.

“There were other belts that were put up for battle after the match was over, but in the case of the Police Gazette diamond belt, you had to defeat the champion to win the belt.

“It’s the No. 1 belt in the world. There is no other belt like this. The history of no other belt comes close.”

ROBBIE DAVIES JR didn’t want to be a stepping stone for some up-and-coming prospect. If his career started down this path, he would retire.

After a memorable defeat to Sergei Lipinet in May, which was the fifth defeat of his career, no one would be surprised if the colorful Scouser finished this match. But his display and resilience were so great that the 35-year-old still sees the airy of day and the potential for more huge fights.

On November 1, Davies will be in Belfast, specifically at the SSE Odyssey Arena, to fight Dominican Javier Fortuna in the super lightweight division on the Pro Box card. The 34-year-old’s career looks similar to Davies’s, and his fifth defeat may mean the end of “El Abejon”.

“They gave me some local names, like the odd Irish baby and the odd British baby. I don’t want to mention any names, but they didn’t excite me at all,” Davies said Boxing news.

“If I’m going to fight, I like to fight names that are at a certain level. And Fortuna was with some of the best, such as: [Joseph] Diaz and Ryan Garcia. If you go through his list, there are tons of players. He’s a very technical, solid player and I’m looking forward to it.”

Davies is at a point where his reasons for continuing to box are different from those of years ago. The victories still matter and the ambition never wanes, but these days it’s more about the love of the sport. Now in its 12th yearvol year on the track, Davies experienced good and bad moments in his 28 fights.

A recent career outside of sports is on the horizon. For now, though, he’ll keep punching as long as the huge fights last.

“I know what’s going to happen next if I beat this guy,” the maverick fighter said.

“It’s a constant fight for a huge fight, a huge fight, a huge fight. I couldn’t even say I was doing it because if I came to it [big fight]I’ll get a huge payday and I’ll just do it. I just love it.”

When asked who will be next, Davies wouldn’t reveal, but it’s definitely a fight and a fighter that excites him and keeps his career on the pulse. But before that…

“I’m going to airy this guy up [Fortuna]I’m not having fun.”

Lipinets vs. spectacle Davies could be repeated if the Liverpudlians have their way. In addition to not wanting to be used to benefit someone else’s career, he also doesn’t want to spend 10 or 12 rounds chasing his opponent around the ring.

“I just can’t be bothered,” Davies said. “But if you want to mix it up, that’s my type of fight.

“I feel like I will have a huge advantage in this fight. I know that anyone I can hit, I can hit. I showed that in my last fight Lipinets was injured many times.

I think in all my other fights I’m always the same, so depending on how he takes it and how he recovers, it will be [put] at him. But I’m going to spend the full 10 rounds there and I’m definitely going to strive for that.

Davies is still pushing for a life outside of boxing. Initially, he thought he would stay in sports or take up personal training, but after his mother’s suggestion, he was presented with an unlikely alternative. She initially helped at the local food bank and told her son that there weren’t enough adolescent workers in the area, and he eventually fell into this trap.

“I work a lot with neglected children,” he said.

“I have been running courses for years [and] I work with Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) and ensure that children are treated well, whether the result of neglect or abuse. I started this because I was doing it part time at a local youth club. Kids now ask me to go and watch school football games and stuff like that. And then their fathers say to the children: Did you know he is a boxer? From there it escalates.

“At first, I did it voluntarily, because my mother had something to do with this place, and I was just helping her, and that’s how it started. The people who worked there, without blowing my own horn, said, “You’re great with kids. Would you never think of doing this? And then I started looking into it, but of course there were a lot of qualifications required to work with children, and being in boxing, I had a lot of free time for so many years.

“I know that when I work with kids, I know when I can assist them or just do that 1% of that [it] can do something better for them. It’s also rewarding.”

But Davies’ competitive spirit never fades, even when he’s playing soccer with his kids.

“I’m like Ronaldo against a 10-year-old and I’ll skin them all,” he said with a laugh.

In every area of ​​life, having something to fall back on is extremely crucial. Shoot for the stars, but make sure there is something there to land on if you miss your target. Davies has won British and European super lightweight titles, and now he mixes it up with former challengers and world champions.

He has already started GNVQ Level 4 in Children’s Social Care, which can take up to two years to complete. Working with younger people who had experienced complex situations in their lives opened Davies’ eyes beyond what he had seen in boxing.

“There is no end to what you can do to assist children,” he said.

“You don’t realize how much some people struggle until you’re actually there.

“It’s a gloomy thing. No matter how much you can do, you will never assist or repair the trauma, but you can assist the 1%. This gives you satisfaction while working. Plus, with the time I need and how much I have to do, I can obviously still do boxing, which I still love, so it’s a good balance of what I have at the moment.”

Davies is full of energy, whether you talk to him on the phone or in person. It’s straightforward to see why working in children’s social care would be a good fit for someone of his character and personality. However, a few years ago his life took a different direction when his desire to run marathons won.

After injuring his leg during the fight with Darragh Foley in March 2023, which ended with the Irishman winning by TKO in the third round, Davies needed time to regenerate. He predicted he would be back on the road three months later, but doctors thought otherwise.

Bored Robbie Davies clearly needs extreme medication and completed his first marathon in August.

“I signed up for my first marathon two and a half weeks in advance, obviously not knowing what it would take to run a marathon,” he recalled. “I ran the Chester Marathon and my body just fell apart.

“I had 60- and 70-year-olds running away, tapping me on the shoulder and saying, come on, adolescent man, you can keep going. And I say I’m fucking dying here,” he laughed.

“From that point on, I thought I’d get right into it, and then I ran Up-to-date Year’s Eve, Up-to-date Year’s Day and back-to-back marathons. Then I went from Manchester to Liverpool, 50 miles, ultramarathon. Then I did London, I’ve done some now.

Looking back on his career, Davies doesn’t think he’s achieved any success, but he feels inside he could have done better. A conversation that led him to briefly sing “Ooh La La” by The Faces, which includes the line, “I wish I knew what I know now…”.

“I remember when I was younger I went on a men’s holiday every year and no other player did it,” Davies said.

“They were solid, focused in the box. I probably enjoyed life. And then when I turned pro and started focusing more on zones, I was winning titles and stuff like that.

“If my career ended now, I’d probably say I’m ecstatic, but I’ll always be haunted by the thoughts that I would have done this and I should have done that. But I think a lot of players do that.”

WHEN Nathan Heaney’s hand was raised at the Manchester Arena last November, the world went blurry for a moment for Denzel Bentley.

The Londoner was the clear favorite to retain the British middleweight title against the popular challenger from Stoke, but after 12 rounds in Manchester the belt was gone and Bentley’s career suffered its biggest ever setback.

There was no doubt that he wasn’t at the races that night, and the immediate question was, “Why?” This was a man who had mowed down many other domestic opponents, but he simply could not impress the inspired and spirited Heaney.

Bentley hinted at problems behind the scenes, suggested he didn’t want to be in Manchester at all this week, but didn’t want to make excuses. He didn’t want to dim the glow of Heaney’s crowning glory by revealing what had happened in the weeks leading up to the fight.

The truth, however, is that his world was rocked as training camp reached its most crucial stage, and in this exclusive interview with Boxing News, Bentley revealed how the premature birth of his first son sent him through the most arduous period of his career.

“So I was at camp, I had a fight, everything was ready, everything was fine, and my lady was pregnant,” Bentley recalled. “The baby was supposed to be born in the last week of November, but it was born six weeks earlier. That means I’ve been deep in camp for the last three or four weeks.

“But he was so early, he wasn’t vigorous. He was in intensive care, his lungs weren’t fully developed because he was so early. It came suddenly, three days after the baby shower, boom, it came.

“I was in hospital and was told that if they left him for half an hour he could die. I thought, “This is mental.” Right now my brain is fried, but this fight is coming up so I’m trying to find the balance between being a father, helping the lady and everything else preparing for the fight. Everyone tells me I have to fight even though everything else is happening. But I didn’t want to miss a moment.”

This meant that Bentley lived solely off hospital food and stress, hoping that if he could just make the weight, he would be able to carry himself to victory no matter what. But Heaney had other ideas.

“For me, it was gym, hospital, home, gym, hospital, home for the last three weeks of camp, the most critical weeks,” Bentley adds.

“Now I’m going to Manchester and I can’t see my son. All I can think about is whether he’s okay or not, what does the midwife say? How is my lady? So when I said I was in Manchester but I didn’t want to be there, I really didn’t want to be there.

“In my mind I thought I was going to win this fight and then explain everything because it was very arduous and it was something I hadn’t gone through before. But when I didn’t hear a nod, I thought I’d keep my mouth shut and not make excuses.

“I took a step back and held that loss for as long as I needed to, but now I’m back on track and I can explain it a little better.”

Ultimately, Bentley lost by majority decision in one of the biggest upsets in the British ring all year. However, a lot has changed in these 11 months; Heaney lost the belt to Brad Pauls and Bentley got back on track with two second-round knockout wins at York Hall over Danny Dignum and then Derrick Osaze. And after a hazardous birth, Bentley’s son, who is now approaching his first birthday, is completely vigorous and content.

“It’s all right now,” Bentley says with a broad smile. “He’s content, he’s in a good place and I see the little things about him, his laugh and stuff, so it’s pretty now. He sleeps well… or at least I sleep well, so I really don’t know. His mom does a good job of letting me sleep and continue training.

“Being in the gym and accepting the circumstances I was in, and being with my son and knowing that everything was OK, still put me in a better place. When I trained later, I realized I was enjoying it and the loss wasn’t so bad.

“I needed these two performances and I wanted them to be just that – vicious and explosive. I’m content with how they went and to be sincere, I didn’t expect any of them to go that swift, but I needed explosive performances and I got them.

“I just had to show that the loss I suffered was just a bump in the road because of my situation, and now that I’ve been through it, I can produce performances like that. The two wins put me back in my position and I proved to myself that I should be competing at a higher level and that’s what I’m getting back to.

The nature of his victories certainly suggests that the man who pushed Zhanibek Alimkhanuly in a 12-round race in 2022 is ready for world class performance again despite his defeat to Heaney on November 18. This reignited the clamor for Bentley to face another top British middleweight, Hamzah Sheeraz.

The pair have been heavily linked in 2022 and 2023, and a win over Heaney could well set up a showdown with Sheeraz for the British title. The fighter from Ilford is currently the European champion with a record of 21-0, 17 KOs and is considered one of the most promising fighters in the division.

However, like Bentley, he is promoted by Frank Warren, and the Queensberry boss recently told Boxing News that he is ready to fight the pair this year, and a place at the gala scheduled for December 21, headlined by Oleksandr Usyk against Tyson Fury, he believes considered possible.

Bentley says: “I am No. 2 in the WBO and Hamzah is No. 1. It makes sense. I don’t think I’m too far away from a shot at the world title. I think I’m in a good position now and I’m thinking about winning the world title next.

“If this doesn’t happen with Hamzah, everything will be on his side. I called for it, I said I would do it next time before my last four or five fights, but he’s come a long way, climbing the rankings and everything. I can accept it and appreciate it, but now we are number 1 and number 2, we are just interrupting each other. I think this is the only natural fight that could happen next. If that doesn’t happen, I think he’ll try to find a reason to avoid it, but I’m willing to go through Hamzah to get to the world title.

“This is the division calling for someone to come and take it over. Hamzah probably feels the same way, that he’s the guy to do it. I feel like it’s wide open wherever you go; Erislandy Lara is a great champion, although he is 41 years ancient. Carlos Adames is a good player, but I think he is beatable. Janibek has two belts, but what does he do now? Will it be demolished? Will he get promoted? Either way, it’s wide open and I’m ready for any call.”

Given his sadness in the weeks following the defeat to Heaney, which even included thoughts of retirement, Bentley’s turnaround is further evidence of how quickly things can change in boxing. He also knows that he may be one step away from gaining money that will change his and his family’s life.

“If I do this right, everything will be sorted for him forever,” Bentley says of his son. “I brought him into this world, he didn’t ask me, so I have to secure his future. I want him to have a nice life where he doesn’t struggle and doesn’t have to do the things I had to do to get by.

“Now everything depends on me and everything is clear in my head.”