Into the Woods by Clinton Woods

Author:Clinton Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2017-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

22

All roads lead to Jones

MAKING the final break with Rainey seemed like an easy thing to do at the time. As usual, Dennis managed it for me, meaning I avoided the awkward situation of having to tell him to his face. When I mulled the whole thing over, I did have mixed feelings. There was no question that Howard improved me as a boxer. In many ways, he was the best coach I ever had. I just felt the relationship had grown stale. The changeover also caused a slight delay in my career.

I got back into training with Neil, who was his usual charming self.

‘Tha’s a filthy, fat bastard,’ he told me on the first day back. I was carrying a couple of weeks’ worth of chips and beer around my waist. ‘You need to train all that blubber off.’

I was happy working with Neil. I always had been, but Dennis still felt I needed a more prominent, guiding figure, someone to be my chief coach. He wanted a man with profile and a track record. Someone worthy of training a top contender. Months crawled past with no fight dates. After a while, I started going out with the boys and getting hammered at weekends again. Old habits can be hard to break.

Altogether it was six months before I fought again, in March 2001. This time it was for the much-vaunted WBC International belt. Again, the original idea was that I would box Nunn, but when the inevitable happened and he dropped out, Dennis finally gave up on that one. He tried to get another ranked American, a guy called Rodney Moore, over instead but that fell through too. In the end, he managed to get a bout with former British super middleweight champ Ali Forbes sanctioned instead.

Strangely enough, Ivor ended up coming over from Norway to run my corner. He arrived a couple of weeks before the fight and took me through some stuff in the gym.

Despite liking Ivor, I found his training amateurish. He preferred that very upright European style, which might have suited Ole but wasn’t my way. I always preferred to stay mobile and move my head. Ray had drummed all that so far into my brain I couldn’t ever forget it.

On the night, Porty still did most of the talking, or growling as it usually was with him. Forbes proved himself a tough guy and really put it all out there, as expected, but he had just turned 40 and his best days were in the past.

He was the sort of opponent I could have stopped early if I’d had a bit more devil in the right hand, but murderous power was never one of my attributes. I boxed him and boxed him, stayed on top throughout and eventually wore him down in the tenth.

Afterwards, Ivor went home and we took stock. With the international title in my possession, that win placed me as the number three light-heavyweight contender with the WBC. Dennis and Panos still had their sights firmly set on a bout with Jones.

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