By Elliot Worsell
THIS time 20 years ago I was about to start writing my first ever feature for Boxing News with the aim for it to find a home in an August issue of the magazine. There had been two previous attempts – a news piece about Paulie Ayala, and a pro-Audley Harrison fluff piece – but this, I was promised, would be the first bit of writing submitted to BN that would actually end up in print.
Even though I was just 17, it had already felt like a journey. The Harrison piece, for example, although terrible, had taken a lot of time and effort only for it to receive no response once sent. Worse than that, my interview with Ayala, a former world bantamweight champion, was not only ignored upon submission but a week later I saw quotes from it appear in the old news section at the front of the magazine – without, alas, reference to a source.
Still, rather than bear any grudge, I just kept trying and trying and by the summer of 2004 there was a big fight to which I had the kind of access nobody at BN could match. The fight in question was a cruiserweight fight between David Haye and Carl Thompson at Wembley Arena and the assignment was a simple one: write 2,000 words from Haye’s training camp.
So, that I did. I interviewed the challenger on numerous occasions and then, by the time I was part of his training camp in Bournemouth, the story was already written and in print. This time the piece had not only my byline attached to it but several exclusive pictures provided by the boxer himself, so keen was he to also experience the thrill of featuring in a magazine he had once collected as a child.
It was, for us both, an exciting time. For Haye, a 10-0 prospect, the sight of a big spread in Boxing News was a sign he was upwardly mobile, whereas for me it was just nice, at 17, to be trusted to write something as long and as detailed and as personal as that. For days I would admire the finished article in its published form and the only validation I received or would ever need came from having it in my hands. It was, after all, a physical thing, something to be held and something to behold. It did not require being shared, liked, or discussed, as is the case these days. The mark of its success was in the execution rather than the reception; the resulting joy pure and self-produced.
In fact, the only disappointment was realising that a small portion of the feature had been cut, likely for reasons pertaining to space, and that by cutting it the way they had, and shortening one of its paragraphs, the editor had conspired to make a grammatical error. It was then, rather begrudgingly, I came to understand that while there were myriad perks to having your work in print, there were also negatives; chiefly, the permanence of it all.
Anyway, thinking we both had life sussed, Haye trained half-heartedly for Thompson in a ballroom in Bournemouth that August and each afternoon I watched him. I then watched him night after night leave our sea-front hotel to visit strip clubs and either went along with it or, as was true one evening, found myself rebuffed at the door having been unable to convince the bouncer I was 18.
As for the fight itself, that too was defined by a youthful ignorance. It started, initially, with me receiving a coloured wristband from Haye’s girlfriend, the supposed purpose of which was to get me into the afterparty. “You are 18 now, aren’t you?” she asked me before the fight, and yes, by that stage, I was. However, with a few additional weeks of insight and maturity, I had also made friends with pessimism. So, I asked her, “Shouldn’t we wait until he wins the fight first? I mean, isn’t this tempting fate?”
Which it was, of course. But she was not to know. We were all young and dumb back then, you see, and despite my developing instinct for spotting danger and preparing for the worst, still I sat there on press row that Friday expecting youth to conquer experience and for Haye, the 23-year-old about whom I had written so fervently, to triumph. Only that never happened, did it? As well as young and dumb, I was also wrong. Totally wrong. Instead of ceding, Carl Thompson, a 40-year-old mocked for being slow, rusty and old-school in his approach, weathered an early storm and exposed Haye’s new-age training methods in the most humbling way possible; substance conquering style.
This fight, for Thompson, was not a changing of the guard, as billed, but rather an opportunity to demonstrate to everybody that just because you are new, and have new ideas, does not mean these ideas are necessarily good ones. There was, as I feared, no afterparty that night.
Carl Thompson drops David Haye (John Gichigi/Getty Images)
Indeed, it was a lesson not just for Haye but for us all; a reminder that nothing should be celebrated until it has happened, regardless of excitement levels or the need to plan for the future. It was also a lesson in respecting experience and understanding that new ideas count for nothing unless they have weight, resonance and, yes, substance.
Both these lessons I took away from that fight and Haye, the defeated fighter, did too, I think. His journey, once presumed to be simple and straight, was anything but and this he came to accept early, which is perhaps why he still managed to achieve most of what he wanted to achieve. Mine, on the other hand, would follow a similar trajectory and, despite writing semi-regularly for Boxing News since 2004, it wasn’t until 2017 that I was finally offered a full-time job with the magazine by its editor Matt Christie. By then I actually knew a thing or two; about life, about boxing. By then I could almost write.
Now, nearly seven years on, I find myself thinking about my very first article for BN while putting together this – sadly, my last. In so doing I try not to wrestle with all I currently know and believe but instead imagine how that determined 17-year-old would have felt to be told that after experiencing so much pride upon seeing his first byline in Boxing News he would be lucky enough to have two decades of seeing it appear most weeks. Frankly, it is all he would have ever wanted.