THIS time 20 years ago I was supposed to start writing my first article, with the goal of having it in the August issue of the magazine. There had been two previous attempts—a news piece on Paul Ayala and a pro-Audley Harrison piece—but this one, I was promised, would be the first submission that would actually go to print.
Even though I was only 17, it already felt like a journey. For example, Harrison’s article, while awful, took a lot of time and effort, and after sending it, I received no response. Worse, my interview with Ayala, the former bantamweight champion of the world, was not only ignored after sending it, but a week later I saw quotes from it in the vintage news section at the front of the magazine – unfortunately without a reference to the source.
Still, rather than hold a grudge, I just kept trying and trying until, in the summer of 2004, a large fight came along that I had access to that no one else could match. The fight in question was the cruiserweight fight between David Haye and Carl Thompson at Wembley Arena, and the brief was uncomplicated: write 2,000 words from Haye’s training camp.
So I did. I had interviewed the contender on numerous occasions and then, when I was part of his training camp in Bournemouth, the story was already written and printed. This time, the article not only had my signature but also some exclusive photos provided by the boxer himself, so keen was he to experience the thrill of appearing in the magazine he had once collected as a child.
It was an thrilling time for both of us. For Haye, a 10-0 prospect, seeing a large spread was a sign that he was on the rise, while for me it was just nice, at 17, to be trusted to write something so long, detailed and personal. For days I would admire the finished article in its published form, and the only validation I got or ever needed was holding it in my hands. After all, it was a physical object, something to hold and look at. It didn’t need to be shared, liked or discussed as it is these days. Its success was in its execution, not its reception; the resulting joy was pure and self-generated.
In fact, the only disappointment was the realization that a tiny portion of the article had been cut, probably for lack of space, and that by cutting it in this way and shortening one of the paragraphs, the editor had conspired to make a grammatical error. It was then, rather reluctantly, that I realized that while there are innumerable benefits to having one’s work in print, there are also disadvantages; chiefly the permanence of the whole thing.
Anyway, thinking we both had our lives in the palm of our hands, Haye half-heartedly trained for Thompson in a Bournemouth ballroom in August and I watched him every afternoon. Then I watched him leave our seaside hotel night after night to visit strip clubs and either agree to it or, as happened one night, be turned away at the door because I couldn’t convince the bouncer I was 18.
As for the fight itself, that too was defined by youthful ignorance. It started, initially, with me being given a colorful armband by Haye’s girlfriend, whose supposed purpose was to get me into the afterparty. “You’re 18, aren’t you?” she asked me before the fight, and yes, at that stage I was. But after a few more weeks of insight and maturity, I also befriended pessimism. So I asked her, “Shouldn’t we wait until he wins the fight? I mean, isn’t that a tempting fate?”
Of course it was. But she couldn’t know. We were all youthful and foolish then, you know, and despite my developing instincts for spotting danger and preparing for the worst, I still sat in press row on Friday, expecting youth to triumph over experience and for Haye, the 23-year-old I’d written so fervently about, to triumph. Except that never happened, did it? Apart from being youthful and foolish, I was wrong. Wrong all along. Instead of backing down, Carl Thompson, a 40-year-old who had been ridiculed for being snail-paced, rusty and old-fashioned, weathered the early storm and exposed Haye’s up-to-date training methods in the most humiliating way possible; the style of beating substance.
This fight, for Thompson, was not the changing of the guard as was billed, but rather an opportunity to show everyone that just because you’re up-to-date and have up-to-date ideas, doesn’t mean those ideas are necessarily good. There was no afterparty that night, as I feared.
Carl Thompson drops David Haye (John Gichigi/Getty Images)
Indeed, it was a lesson not just for Haye, but for all of us; a reminder that nothing should be celebrated until it happens, regardless of the level of excitement or the need to plan for the future. It was also a lesson in respecting experience and understanding that up-to-date ideas don’t matter unless they have weight, resonance and, yes, .
Both of those lessons I took from that fight, and Haye, the defeated fighter, did too, I think. His journey, once thought to be uncomplicated and straightforward, was very different, and he accepted that early on, which is perhaps why he achieved most of what he set out to achieve. Mine, on the other hand, followed a similar trajectory, and despite writing fairly regularly since 2004, it wasn’t until 2017 that I was offered a lasting position at the magazine by editor Matt Christie. By then I knew a thing or two; about life, about boxing. By then I could almost write.
Now, almost seven years later, I think about my first article as I put together this – unfortunately, my last. In doing so, I try not to grapple with everything I now know and believe, but instead imagine how a determined 17-year-old would feel if he were told that after experiencing such great pride in seeing his first signature in a book, he would be lucky to see it almost every week for two decades. Honestly, that’s all he ever wanted.
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