By Elliot Worsell
AT THIS TIME 20 years ago, I was about to start writing my first article for Boxing News with the aim of getting it published in the August issue. There had been two previous attempts – a Paulie Ayala article and a trashy pro-Audley Harrison article – but I had been promised that this would be the first article submitted. BN and will finally be printed.
Even though I was only 17, I felt like I was on a journey. For example, Harrison’s article, while terrible, had taken a lot of time and effort only to receive no response after it was sent out. Worse still, my interview with Ayala, the former bantamweight champion of the world, was not only ignored upon submission, but a week later I found quotes from it in the old news section on the front page of the magazine – alas, without any source.
However, instead of holding any resentment, I just kept trying and trying and by the summer of 2004 there was a big fight that I could get to that no one else there could. BN The fight in question was the cruiserweight bout between David Haye and Carl Thompson at Wembley Arena and the task was simple: write 2,000 words about Haye’s training camp.
So I did. I interviewed the challenger several times and then, when I attended his training camp in Bournemouth, the story was written and printed. This time, it not only had my byline but also some exclusive images provided by the fighter himself, who was keen to experience the thrill of appearing in a magazine he had collected as a child.
For both of us, it was an exciting time. For Haye, a 10-0 prospect, the sight of a big spread in Boxing News was a sign that he was on the rise, while for me it was a thrill to be trusted, at 17, to write something so long, so detailed, so personal. For days I admired the finished article in its published form, and the only validation I got or needed was when I held it in my hands. It was, after all, a tangible thing, something to hold and something to admire. It did not need to be shared, liked, or discussed, as is the case today. Its mark of success lay in its execution, not its reception; the resulting pleasure was pure and self-generated.
In fact, the only disappointment was realizing that a small portion of the article had been cut, probably for reasons related to space, and that by cutting it the way they did, and shortening one of its paragraphs, the editor had conspired to make a grammatical error. I then, rather reluctantly, understood that while there are countless benefits to having your work in print, there are also negatives; mainly the permanence of it all.
Anyway, thinking we both had life figured out, Haye had a casual rehearsal with Thompson in a Bournemouth ballroom that August and I followed him every afternoon. After that, I watched him leave our seaside hotel night after night to go to strip clubs and either follow or, as happened one evening, find myself turned away at the door because I couldn’t convince the guard that I was 18.
As for the fight itself, it was also defined by youthful ignorance. It started with me getting a colored bracelet from Haye’s girlfriend, supposedly to get me into the after-party. “You’re 18 now, right?” she asked me before the fight, and yes, I was 18 at the time. However, with a few weeks of more understanding and maturity, I’ve also made friends with pessimism. So I asked her, “Shouldn’t we wait until he wins the fight first? I mean, isn’t that tempting fate?”
Of course. But she didn’t know. We were all young and stupid then, you see, and despite my instincts to spot danger and prepare for the worst, I sat there in the press box that Friday, expecting youth to triumph over experience and Haye, the 23-year-old I had written so enthusiastically about, to emerge victorious. Only it never happened, did it? In addition to being young and stupid, I was also wrong. Completely wrong. Instead of giving in, Carl Thompson, a 40-year-old who was ridiculed for being slow, rusty and old-fashioned in his approach, weathered an early storm and exposed Haye’s new-age training methods in the most unpretentious way possible; style conquers nature.
For Thompson, the match was not the team shake-up that had been advertised, but rather a chance to prove to everyone that just because you’re new and have new ideas, doesn’t mean those ideas are necessarily good. As I feared, there was no after-party that night.
Carl Thompson eliminates David Haye (John Gichigi/Getty Images)
Indeed, it is a lesson not just for Haye but for all of us; a reminder that nothing should be celebrated until it happens, no matter the level of excitement or the need to plan for the future. It is also a lesson in respecting experience and understanding that new ideas are worthless unless they have weight, resonance and, yes, matter.
Both of these lessons I learned from that fight and I think so did Haye, the defeated fighter. His journey, once thought to be simple and straightforward, was not and he accepted this early on, which is probably why he still managed to achieve most of what he set out to achieve. My journey, by contrast, would follow a similar trajectory and, despite writing semi-regularly for Boxing News from 2004, it wasn’t until 2017 that I was offered a full-time job by the magazine’s editor, Matt Christie. By then, I actually knew a thing or two; about life, about boxing. By then, I could almost write.
Now, almost seven years later, I find myself thinking about my first post BN While putting this together – sadly, my last. In doing so, I tried not to fight everything I currently know and believe, but instead to imagine how that determined 17-year-old would feel to be told that after experiencing so much pride in seeing his first line in Boxing News He would be lucky enough to have two decades of seeing it come on most weeks. Honestly, it was all he ever wanted.
