The communal head guard was always too tight. The gum shield always dug in a little on one side. The ring was small and the shallow vaulted ceiling narrowed the space above still further. I sat on the ring apron, sweat flooding from every pore. In the ring a 17-year-old with a mop of blond hair and pale blue eyes was dancing, feet sliding effortlessly across the canvas as my fellow 30-something plodded toward him. Two minute rounds that lasted a week inside the ropes, a handful of breaths on the outside, ticked past.
The youngster was talented. A natural. Quick, elusive and brave, he punched harder than a Lightweight should too. I was the bigger man, I mumbled in the torment of knowing I had to get back in when the two minutes ended and the minute’s rest the kid didn’t need was up. His quarry’s nose sprang a bloody leak and brought an early close to my wait. Most of the time I’d spent on that apron I’d contemplated how I could get out of this position with pride in tact. Or whether I really cared about my pride. A childhood spent avoiding fights had brought me to this place twenty years on. I’d smirked at the swell of dread, tasted its familiarity. A nervous response to the absurdity of being where I was. As the other victim climbed down, bright red ribbons running into his mouth the colour correspondingly drained from my face.
Knelt on the floor in the previous round I’d shared, a shot to the gut the invitation to succumb, I’d realised the depth of my ineptitude and the scale of the challenge. I should probably mention that this was left hand only sparring. Hagler-Hearns it was not. Nevertheless, the claustrophobia of the head guard, the rub of the mouth-piece, the hot stinking air and the smiling assassin prowling above stole what breath I’d regained. It is a feeling that stays with me. Of not wanting to be there.
Overcoming it was important. I knew it then and I recognise it now.
I’ve thought of that moment and summoned that feeling many times since. Occasionally to empower me in times of similar dread but more often to wallow in how it felt, what it must have looked like. I thought of it again on Saturday night when Sunny Edwards said; “I don’t want to be here.”
I knew exactly what he meant, the circumstances almost entirely different of course. Sunny wasn’t afraid. Sunny wasn’t scared. He was just done. Life is scarier than a fight, high though the risks can be. For most fighters the ring is home, not a place to fear. A place of respite, triumph, affirmation or, more modestly, a boxer’s place of work. Their factory floor.
But for Sunny, aged 28, two decades of staring across at opponents, whipping himself into shape, weight and condition to beat quality men, it was no longer that place. As he revealed to a watching audience in comments to his trainer after the second round – that he simply didn’t want to be there – the emotion of the realisation was writ large in his eyes. Not just because he was facing a surging Galal Yafai but because what he once had; the spark all fighters need, was gone. He was finished, the bravado, the soundbytes all a delusion. He looked the same, but he didn’t feel the same. A body failing and a will to try tumbling behind.
“From the moment he walked in the gym he could just do it.”, the trainer had said about the youngster I was now resigned to ambling towards once again. He said it again a decade and half later in messages when news the kid of 15 years ago, by now a man, a former soldier and a father, had decided being here was just too hard.
Boxing doesn’t save everyone. In the scheme of the tribulations of that young man’s life those few moments he spent in the ring, this old fool watching from the apron, as he landed combinations and slipped back out of range, feet, hands and wit in perfect union, were merely dust.
But I hope he knew I looked at him like a King.
When I think of great fighters in the future I may sometimes think of Sunny Edwards but I will always think of that kid with the pale blue eyes.
BOXINGWRITER.CO.UK 
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