No Ordinary Joe

Just a week after beating Eubank I had to fly to Los Angeles for the WBO convention and to collect my belt. Naseem Hamed, Ryan Rhodes and Carl Thompson were all going too and I’d just arrived at Heathrow airport when someone told me I was late, that I had missed it all kicking off between Naz and Eubank. Apparently, Naz had taunted Chris with ‘Do you want to look at my belts?’ and Chris, who was meeting somebody at the airport, had turned round and sent Hamed’s belts flying across the floor. There was a short stand-off before Naz caught Chris with an open-handed punch to his nose, just as Chris was making to slap him for the disrespect he had been shown. Security had to separate them and it was still the whole talk as we boarded the plane.

I was on cloud nine, a twenty-five-year-old lad from a small town who’d just won a world title and all of a sudden I was travelling first class on Virgin Airlines and I’d never travelled first class on anything in my life. I couldn’t believe the luxury. A girl came up to my seat offering to do a manicure and I couldn’t believe they did this, so I had it done. There were video games, a telephone and you could eat and drink what you wanted. Carl was quiet but I got on well with Ryan, who boxed with Naz out of Brendan Ingle’s gym in Sheffield. He was down to earth and the feeling was that he was the next big thing but, unfortunately, it never happened for him. I wish he’d done better with his career. Naz was a different guy, he got on well with me but he kept slagging off Carl and I could quickly see why Eubank might have had a problem with him.

I’m not very close to other fighters. I speak to Richie Woodhall when I see him and I’m pretty friendly with Takaloo, the light middleweight from Margate. I’m big mates with Enzo Maccarinelli and I get on really well with the other lads in our gym, Bradley Pryce, Gavin Rees and Nathan Cleverly – and I talk to Barry Jones and Eubank a lot. I see Collins and Benn at dinners from time to time and there’s always mutual respect. We may not know one another but we know what we do and there’s a camaraderie that’s forged by all of those years we’ve spent in the ring. We’re like a large family in many ways. But not Naz. He was all right with me, though it was pretty superficial. Naz was the only millionaire among us and very money-oriented. None of the rest of us had money at all and he kept on about his money the whole time. ‘Check out my rings, man,’ he’d say before telling us how much he’d paid for each of them. When we arrived he ordered a limo for all of us, then we had to sit and watch his fight against Badillo and listen to his endless self-praise: ‘Yeah, look at me, man. Am I good?’ Actually, he was funny, you couldn’t say he wasn’t. He made people laugh even with his arrogance. That loud personality made him famous and he was exciting to watch, though not necessarily over and over in that limo as we drove through LA. Me and him were cool but the way he was with some of the other people on the trip was downright insulting. Brendan Ingle, his trainer, was with us and I’d always assumed that he and Naz got on well, but it was the first time I’d been around them and suddenly Naz was really having a go at him. I was embarrassed because he was so disrespectful. That surprised me, but it was the way he spoke to Carl which was especially cruel. Carl was a good fighter from Manchester and a WBO champion himself, though he had never made the fortunes Naz had and couldn’t dream of making that amount of money.

We went to a store on Rodeo Drive and Naz said he was going to buy a watch and, of course, it had to be a Rolex that was priced at $250,000. ‘I’ll give you $150,000 for it,’ he told the guy in the store. I don’t think he wanted the watch, he was just giving it big in front of all of us. I know that I would never go into the gym in Newbridge and say to the other boys, ‘How much are you getting for your next fight? A grand? What? I wouldn’t piss for that.’ But Naz was all into that. Carl’s a guy who keeps himself to himself but he was getting seriously wound up to the point where you could see that he wanted to rip Naz’s head off. Naz was like the schoolyard bully, trying to ridicule him and belittle him: ‘What you wearing, Carl? What’s that on your head?’ Finally, Carl snapped. ‘Shut it, man. What is your fucking problem? Look at you. I don’t need to see your belts because you’ve got ears like a trophy. I could pick you up by grabbing them. Look at you. The only reason you have a bird is because of your money.’

‘What you being like that for?’ Naz said lamely back to Carl and that was the end of it. That’s what happens when someone stands up to a bully and that’s what Naz was, exciting for the brief period he was at the top but a bully all the same. A lot of big punchers, deep down, are really bullies who rely on intimidation and the fear they instil as much as they do on their punch. Take that intimidation factor away from them and there’s no plan B, which was the case when Naz fought Marco Antonio Barrera in 2001 in Las Vegas. As soon as he took off his gloves in the dressing room, because he wasn’t happy with the way his hands were wrapped, I knew that Naz wasn’t right. I could see it from four thousand miles away and I knew he was going to be beaten. Naz must have delayed the fight by close to an hour, moaning that he wasn’t happy, which of course he wasn’t. Naz lost the fight long before he even got in the ring. He didn’t do his flip over the top rope, he just walked through the ropes, and because of the body language Barrera knew he had the psychological edge. Some men fear big punchers, so it’s a powerful tool but, once he was exposed, Naz never recovered from what happened in the Barrera fight.

The same thing happened to Jeff Lacy when I beat him in 2006 and it didn’t surprise me at all that he looked so bad in his next fight against Vitali Tsypko. It’s difficult for any bully to recover from outright humiliation. They’re just not accustomed to another man standing up to them, much less beating the crap out of them. They can’t recover from it. Naz fought Spain’s Manuel Calvo a year later and he was done. People booed him and walked out of the arena after a handful of rounds. Like a lot of people, I loved to watch Naz in action because he really could bang. For a period of time he was exceptional and exciting. At least he left a legacy: one of the hardest pound-for-pound punchers we have ever seen in Britain. When he hit his opponents they went.

There were six thousand people at the International Arena in Cardiff when I made my first defence of the title against Branko Sobot, a Croat who was based in Germany. For me, it was great to be boxing in front of my family and friends and a partisan home crowd as the new champion. The reception was terrific and the fight was brief, a comfortable three-round win after I dropped Sobot with a beautiful left uppercut and finished him off against the ropes. It was my first fight in the arena and the feeling was beautiful.

The packed house was singing long before the end of the first round as their man in his black-sequined trunks threatened to demolish Sobot as quickly as he had seen off so many of his previous opponents, 10 of whom fell in the first round. From the first bell there was no questioning the Welshman’s superiority. All that Sobot, a late substitute for the American, Tarick Salmaci, could do was hide behind gloves held high. Calzaghe was soon delivering the most ferocious left hooks to his body in an attempt to bring them down, but it was clear that Sobot had little to offer. The best that could be said was that he had a sense of durability, but that takes nothing away from the sheer fighting brilliance of the man from Newbridge. In the second round Sobot delivered a right hook as he emerged from a clinch, and it made Calzaghe stand back for a split second but it was his only moment and he must have sensed that much, much worse was yet to come as the Welshman went looking for that winning left-hook. Instead, he had to wait until 1:35 of the third round when that same punch caught Sobot clearly on the jaw and sent him tumbling backwards to the canvas. He was soon up, albeit groggily, and referee Paul Thomas ensured he took a count of eight before allowing him to go on. It was a momentary respite because Calzaghe followed up with a flurry of punches too numerous to count as he hammered Sobot mercilessly against the ropes in a neutral corner. No answer was forthcoming and his eyes were rolling as he looked in a desperate plight before the referee jumped in and decided the Croatian had taken enough.

Worryingly, I began to have problems with my right wrist during training for my next title defence against mandatory challenger Juan Carlos Gimenez, who had been the distance with both Eubank and Benn. It was a recurrence of the problem that jeopardised my career as a teenager and affected my preparations a lot in sparring and general bag work. I went to see a specialist but there wasn’t much I could do except protect the hand as much as I could. Gimenez was strong and durable and it was only my superior skills which made this a routine, easy fight for me. I won every round before his corner retired him ahead of the tenth, the only time he was ever stopped apart from in a WBO light heavyweight title fight four years later. Amazingly, at forty-six, he’s still fighting, winning the Paraguayan cruiserweight title in 2006. Wales’s cruiserweights, I can confidently predict, will be able to rest easy when I reach the same age.

I underwent another operation on the problematic wrist, which didn’t seem to do much except keep me out of the ring for the next ten months, which was terribly frustrating at a time when I was hoping to build some momentum in my career. Over the years I’ve tried loads of different methods to try to make the wrist better, even soaking the bandages in vinegar before I wrapped my hands, a treatment suggested by an old guy called Fred Taylor, a lovely man who used to come to the gym on a walking stick and sit himself down in a chair every day to watch me train. ‘Vinegar on the hand will make it better,’ he said. He was old school and it was worth a go, but it didn’t help. Hand injuries are an occupational hazard in this profession, and you have to get on with it. The operation itself left me unable to throw a punch for three months, and then I injured my left elbow in an innocuous sparring session with Gary Lockett, who had just turned pro and is now one of the fighters Dad trains in our gym. I was only throwing a few jabs when I jarred the elbow but it was enough to extend my stay on the sidelines. A bout which had been planned for the autumn had to be scrapped, so I set my sights on having a better year in 1999, and having Robin Reid lined up to come out of the opposite corner in February at the Telewest Arena in Newcastle was a perfect start, if only the performance had matched.

I hadn’t been sparring, so I struggled to regain my fitness and I messed up badly over my weight. The most I can be over on the day of the weigh-in is four pounds. That’s the most I feel that I can comfortably lose but when I weighed myself on the official scales an hour before we were due to step on them in front of the Board of Control and the TV cameras I was six pounds over the twelve-stone limit. I had to go straight to the hotel running machine but even with thirty minutes on that I was still two pounds over. I was panicking because I’d totally misjudged it and the weigh-in was starting in just over ten minutes. The only thing I could do was throw on a sauna suit and head for the sauna, jogging up and down to shed those last few ounces. It worked because I weighed in on the button. However, it isn’t a method I would recommend to anybody who’s about to walk into town to do their shopping, let alone someone taking part just twenty-four hours later in a world title fight.

Losing those six pounds in such a short space of time was way too much, especially when I was tight at the weight in any case. My face was drawn and I felt horrible, so I went back to my hotel to get some food and liquid into me as quickly as I could. When we sat down in the restaurant I was so dehydrated that I had no appetite and couldn’t eat but I was incredibly thirsty and decided to have an ice cream. All of a sudden I felt something hard in my mouth, which I thought was ice at first, but it was razor-sharp, so I spat out what turned out to be a piece of glass. I then discovered there were bits of shredded glass all the way through the ice cream. So what do I think immediately? Conspiracy, that’s what I think, for there was never any love lost between me and Reid. The Barcelona Olympics were long forgotten, and it wasn’t his fault that I hadn’t been selected anyway, but I wanted to fight him when he was WBC champion and a unification bout would have made us both a lot more money. But Reid didn’t even want to hear my name when he was champion. He would choke whenever someone mentioned me, he wouldn’t say a word. But all of a sudden, when he lost his belt to Sugarboy Malinga, he wanted to come after mine. Why hadn’t he started talking up the fight before then? He was smarmy, we just didn’t like one another and the press conferences became a bit heated. I didn’t hate him, and I don’t hate him now, but he rubbed me up the wrong way, so I got under his skin. The week of the fight we squared up and posed for publicity shots and I had to duck down a bit because he’s short.

Reid has been like a scratched record over the years, shouting his mouth off that he really won the fight and he’d fight again any day. I don’t think there was anyone more gutted in the MEN Arena when I did the job on Jeff Lacy because he had clung on to the delusion that he was always as good as me, but we’ve had very different careers. He fought the best he could in Newcastle and I was poor, which evened things out. Every fighter has bad nights and that was one of mine. We weren’t exactly in his backyard because it wasn’t Runcorn, but he was an Englishman in Newcastle and I was very much the outsider, though I don’t think that can explain how Paul Thomas judged Reid to be the winner by 116 to 111, which equates to five rounds, when the two other judges saw it precisely the other way round. That’s a massive difference in scoring. Maybe Paul Thomas was influenced by the crowd but I definitely won the fight, even though it’s one of the tapes I would gladly chuck away for good. I don’t watch a fight again whenever I’ve boxed badly and I never watch this one. Reid was pensive in the first few rounds, grabbing my arms and even my legs and holding on for dear life. No fighter grabs your legs unless they’re afraid, and he fought like that a few years later against Jeff Lacy who destroyed him in eight rounds. But Reid did fight a good tactical fight against me, he stood back and counter-punched effectively at times and managed to connect with some good right hands. It was going my way until the sixth round when I broke the metacarpal bone in my left hand and, although I could still punch, I was only able to tap with it. As the fight went on, the crowd got behind him and he fought a decent fight.

I was able to get back in the ring in June to face Rick Thornberry, an Australian, but I didn’t spar a single round in training because of my hand again. Thornberry had been stopped by Henry Wharton, so I thought that I would just go through him in one or two rounds but, although I dropped him in the first round, it didn’t happen. He was able to hang in there and I was uninspiring. In fact, I had reached a critical juncture in my career.

Joe Calzaghe has sacked his father as trainer just as he enters the most important phase of his career. Enzo Calzaghe began coaching his son when Joe was nine and he turned the boy into a star, forming one of the most successful partnerships in British boxing. But Frank Warren, Joe’s manager and promoter, has insisted the WBO world super middleweight champion must now make a clean break from his dad after 27 unbeaten fights. Warren said, ‘I have been promoting for nearly 25 years and I’ve had to make some very difficult decisions. But telling Joe and his father the time had come for them to part was perhaps the hardest thing I have had to do. I shall never forget the look of misery on Joe’s face when I spelled out what has to happen. Joe and Enzo are extremely close and I felt bad at doing this, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. I happen to feel Enzo has taken Joe as far as he can and someone else should take over. And I didn’t pull any punches. I told Joe quite forcibly I think he has become complacent and, where his father is concerned, he is the one calling the shots. Enzo agreed Joe has been cutting corners in training and that simply couldn’t go on any longer. Fortunately, Enzo is a sensible man and he only wants what is best for Joe. There is no suggestion their relationship won’t be the same away from boxing. There is definitely no rift over this. But there’s no doubt it will be a terrible wrench for Enzo after nearly 20 years to have nothing more to do with Joe’s career.’ The Calzaghes’ gym is a dilapidated wooden shed with a postage stamp-sized ring. Joe has always bandaged his own hands, which is probably why he is always injuring them. Hand problems have been his excuse for lacking sparkle in his last two fights and his training methods came under attack when he admitted he could not spar a single round in preparation because of his damaged hands.

We’ve had many disagreements, me and Dad, and after the fight with Thornberry many people were suggesting that I shouldn’t stay with him. Frank made his position clear, so we went through a rough patch. I was having loads of injury problems and we were arguing a lot, but maybe I was looking for an excuse. My career was losing impetus and I was in danger of losing everything. I needed to find something to get me back on track. It was nothing to do with my dad really, it was about me and where my head was with all these injuries. George Francis, who worked with Frank Bruno, John Conteh, Cornelius Boza-Edwards and many other British and world champions, was being lined up by Frank to come in and train me, but I wanted him to work with Dad. My dad has always been part of my career, the biggest part, and it will never happen that he’s not there in my corner. I only reached the highest level because of him and what was being written in the newspapers was upsetting for both of us. Yes, he’s my trainer and, yes, we were having a bad time, but most of all he’s my dad and that will never change.

We spoke and I told him that what I wanted to do was bring another trainer in and he said very simply, ‘Joe, first and foremost you’re my son and that’s what matters. Whatever decision you make will be fine by me.’ I have a lot of respect for my dad for saying that. Deep down, he would have been broken-hearted if we’d changed the way things had always been but he still wanted what was best for me. If he felt he wasn’t helping me, he would have gone. If I had said, ‘Dad, I can’t listen to you any more because I don’t respect you as a trainer, I love you but we can’t go on,’ he would have respected that. He would have walked away but I know that he would still have been there as my dad. That’s the way he is and that’s the relationship we have. He’s never treated me like a little boy. He knew he was good for me, he knew that the real problem was with my injuries and he knew I was being influenced by other people. I was just going through a bad time with myself, finding it all very difficult because my career was stagnating. All I was doing was considering my options and the truth is that, from the very beginning, it’s always given me more incentive and encouragement to know that my dad is there in my corner. No one can motivate me or get underneath my skin the way my dad can. He’s my blood, and if I was ever in a crisis, Dad would be the first person to be at my side to bring me home safely. If I had been beaten up like Jeff Lacy the night we fought, I know that my dad would have pulled me out after eight or nine rounds. He’s never told me that but I know it’s the truth. I wouldn’t want to be pulled out and I’d bite the head of him for doing it, but he would do the right thing, I can count on that.

People probably don’t realise the way we are with one another, the fact that I infuriate him and he infuriates me, but all the time we love each other to bits. Back early in my career I went to Harley Street to have an operation on one of my knuckles. It had become inflamed and they had to tidy it up. During the surgery I was under anaesthetic but when the operation was done I left more or less straight away with my dad, who hadn’t wanted to pay when he parked the car. We walked along a couple of streets and I was still half asleep, my hand heavily strapped, and I just wanted to go home.

I was already walking off in the opposite direction, looking for the nearest lamp post to kick or fall asleep against, and I muttered under my breath something about ‘scatty’, ‘brain’ and ‘goat’. He became all het up and we must have looked like Basil Fawlty and son, looking for the car. Finally, we found it, about an hour after leaving the surgery. I was sweaty, cranky and my hand was throbbing, and I don’t recall that it was the most pleasant journey back to Newbridge. But that’s how we are all the time. My dad and I have similar personalities. Sometimes we have little arguments in the gym. Sometimes they’re much bigger. There are times when I’m pissed off and my dad will just get on my nerves and vice-versa. I’ll come to the gym in a bad mood, not wishing to talk to anybody and he’ll say, ‘Come on then, what’s wrong with you?’ Sometimes it can get heated.

Dad stopped the car, I got out and walked through Cardiff on my own to the weigh-in. We have barneys, the two of us, but we always get over them. I’m moody, I can be a pain in the arse and my dad knows just how I am. We see one another every day and it’s inevitable that some days he’s going to be in a mood himself and won’t be ready for my shit, so we’ll clash. But half an hour later we’ll be best friends again. We never hold a grudge. Whatever gets said in the heat of the moment is done, it’s out of the way and that’s the way we are.

Most of the time I’m pretty relaxed, a fairly easy-going fellow, but people perceive me as being more relaxed than I really am. I get tense before a fight because I have to lose thirteen pounds in two weeks. I half starve myself to do it and Dad understands me in that situation better than any other trainer would. I know the sport. I know about technique. I know the moves because I’ve been doing them my whole life. The ring has been my workplace for twenty-five years and I’m a very stubborn, strong-willed guy. But I need someone around me who knows me, who knows how to push the right buttons and knows when to push those buttons. That’s so much more important to me than having someone say, ‘Don’t turn that way, turn this way. Don’t throw that punch, hit him here and here.’ Fighters are great at finding excuses and going through six or seven different trainers when the only thing that needs changing is their own attitude. There’s always the bullshit way to deal with everything and, for a fighter, that way is to shoot the guy in the corner. Sugar Shane Mosley has been trained by his dad, Jack, through most of his career. He lost twice to Vernon Forrest, decided to change trainer and looked far worse. When they got back together he was effective again. I don’t blame the guy for wanting to try something different but in the end he looked in the mirror and accepted that maybe it was him and, finally, that’s what I did after the Thornberry fight.

I went through names in my heads, the names of top trainers, but when it came right down to it I didn’t want to take that step. I’m not a conventional boxer, my style is different to other fighters and this makes me what I am. If someone came along to try to change me, would we be completely at loggerheads? Probably so, but the truth is this. I was with my dad when I started boxing and he’s helped to make me the champion I am today, so there’s no one who can take his place and no one ever will.

I stayed out of the ring for seven months before I fought David Starie in Manchester and, because my elbow was still hurting, I didn’t spar a single round for my second consecutive bout. I just hit the bags and worked the pads and tried to get sharp, but my timing was way out. The fact that my fight was being broadcast on the Showtime TV network in the United States meant that my timing was doubly poor. This could have been a big break for me, boxing on the same card as Mike Tyson who was making his first appearance in a British ring. I wanted to put on a show to steal Tyson’s thunder.

Tyson had based himself in London and everywhere he went he was mobbed. I went to train for a week at the Grosvenor House Hotel, where a ring had been set up for Mike, and it was bedlam, with hundreds of people being allowed in every day to watch him work. I tried to introduce myself one day but he blanked me, which pissed me off. Whether you’re a former heavyweight champion of the world or a kid fighting in the preliminaries, every fighter’s a fighter and we all want respect. I just asked to have my picture taken with him and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ a bit arrogantly, as if it was a chore. I realised that a lot of people had been hassling him for autographs and there were women waiting to see him but I was fighting on the same bill and I thought he could make a bit of an effort. I said nothing but, of course, my dad couldn’t hold back.

Not many people, I guess, have spoken that way to Tyson and just walked away, but later I actually sat down on a little couch beside him, out in the corridor as we were both staying on the same floor, and he was great to talk to. ‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You’re my friend, my brother.’ This Tyson was charming. ‘You got kids?’ he asked and he started to talk about his own kids and he talked about Don King and how he wanted to ‘rip him up’ and this was the only time in the conversation when he got angry and bitter. For the most part, he was softly spoken, so I got to see the two sides to his personality, the charmer and the monster, which sadly could not be said for Julius Francis who lasted two rounds.

At least Francis tried to come forward. David Starie moved away for the entire twelve rounds, boxed as negatively as he could, and the result was a stinker of a fight, really frustrating for me. I prefer to face fighters who come towards me, that’s when I’m at my best, but Starie was defensive the whole way and I was all the time in clinches or off balance. Starie was happy just to survive. He bottled it a bit and it was horrible because Frank had introduced me to Jay Larkin, the head of Showtime TV at the time, and they both wanted me to do well, as it could have made my name in the American market. But Starie was too awkward, my performance was dire and the crowd booed through most of it. When Frank Warren stepped in the ring at the final bell he walked over to me and said, ‘You boxed shit.’ He was right but he wasn’t half as devastated as I was.

Calzaghe started brightly, eager to make the most of the worldwide television exposure which could have helped the 27-year-old Welshman substantiate his claims of being Britain’s best boxer. In contrast Starie, with cuts over his right eye, seemed to want to do little more than survive, and the fight degenerated into a messy, mauling bore which had the crowd loudly jeering and slow-hand-clapping from the sixth round onwards. Neither man seemed unduly troubled at any stage, which made their unwillingness to gamble all the more extraordinary. At least Calzaghe tried to force the contest. He remains undefeated and he has talent. But his excuse of ring-rustiness does not adequately explain his problems against Starie. Once his initial flurries of attacks had failed to budge the challenger he ran out of ideas and when he needed to vary his game plan he was unable to do so. Brave talk of him stepping up to light-heavyweight to meet the formidable Roy Jones Jr, the undisputed champion, seems foolhardy unless he wants one big pay-day and a painful defeat. The biggest problem facing his promoters is how to sell him as a headline act; those who jeered him while waiting for Tyson’s arrival will not be rushing to buy tickets for his next outing. Calzaghe’s handsome features and pleasant personality, allied to a natural aptitude for the sport, should by now be reaping rich rewards. He may be Frank Warren’s chosen one but chances such as this are few and far between and on Saturday he blew it.

The only positive effect of the Starie fight was that it helped to persuade me to stop saying I was going to knock every opponent out. People used to think that I was arrogant, so I started watching interviews of myself and it was like I was trying to mimic Eubank or Naz mouthing off. It wasn’t me. Maybe I saw the recognition they had at the time, which I was being denied, and I just thought that was the way to go. I’d said ahead of facing Branko Sobot that I was going to knock him out in three rounds and I did, but it’s not my style to say those things and I felt bad when I realised I was belittling people. I never said it angrily, just matter-of-factly, all part of the hype. But it’s arrogant and it demeans the opponent. Great fighters don’t need to mouth off and I stopped doing this after the Starie fight. Besides, I wasn’t knocking anybody out any more. I’d just gone the distance three times in a row against Reid, Thornberry and Starie and was starting to look a little silly. My strike rate at the time, it could be said, made the decision easy.

Soon there was a bigger decision to be made. Frank had put together a fight against Omar Sheika of the United States for 4 July, Independence Day, but I just didn’t fancy it. I’m in constant conflict with my demons but when I’m not 100 per cent I know I’m not and I told Frank that. I was injured all the time, couldn’t spar and I couldn’t bring myself to watch the tapes of my fights. I could watch the Eubank tape and Sobot and Jimenez, but the Reid fight, a good one for the public, was crap for me. He shouldn’t have hit me with a bag of rice because he’s slow and cumbersome, flat-footed and predictable, yet he hit me with countless right hands. I couldn’t see the punches coming back any more because I wasn’t sparring. I should have beaten Thornberry inside three rounds but I had to go twelve again and I couldn’t land a punch on Starie all night because of my balance. I told Frank that my elbow wasn’t right and I wouldn’t be able to fight Sheika in July, so we had a heart-to-heart.

I was quite blunt about it because I just thought it was time to face up to reality. Fighters like John Conteh and Naz suffered from hand problems in their careers and got on with it, so I said to Joe, ‘It’s your decision but you’re either going to have to live with the problems or turn it in. We can’t keep on making a show only for you to pull out, so are you going to box or are you going to quit?’ It was as simple as that. I would never force any man into the ring who shouldn’t be in there, but Joe was allowing these problems to get the better of him when really he needed to sort them out himself. – Frank Warren