Great Prince Hamed article..

part 1


A prince without a crown

Naseem Hamed was the undisputed star of British boxing. A showman, supreme egoist and crowd-puller, he earned millions - then, in 2001, he lost his first fight. Today he is a near recluse who trains alone in his gym and dedicates himself to Islam. Acclaimed author Jonathan Rendall, who knows the fighter well, travelled to Sheffield where the star's family and former friends told of his struggles, the influence of religion and of his brothers - and why he may never box again

Sunday February 6, 2005

The Ponds Forge Arena, Sheffield, one night in May 1994. In only his 12th pro fight, 'Prince' Naseem Hamed, 20, is challenging Vincenzo Belcastro of Italy for the European bantamweight title. There is a fair crowd and all the London boxing writers have made the journey north. Among them are many doubters. This chance has come earlier than expected for Hamed. They have known 'Naz' - or 'the Naz fella', as his unmistakable and incurably optimistic trainer, Brendan Ingle, calls him - since he was a young boy, a diminutive, hyperactive presence hanging on to the robe of Herol 'Bomber' Graham, the most talented but unluckiest boxer Britain has produced. Even in Herol's darkest moments, such as when he was knocked out in a Marbella ballroom by the American puncher Julian Jackson, when on the brink of victory, there was no escaping Naz. There he was, cavorting inappropriately, just minutes after Herol had been taken concussed from the ring. Always in his own world, Naz, ignoring the efforts of another stablemate, the cruiserweight Johnny Nelson, to tell him to calm down. Wherever Ingle went, so did Naz. He is Brendan's masterwork, the boy who will do what the fates conspired to prevent Herol from doing. With Naz, there will be no mistake.

Many of the writers are weary of Brendan's boasts: how Naz will win every major title and earn '40 million quid'. But that's Brendan. He once said Nelson had the talent to beat Mike Tyson, but then rushed him into a cruiserweight title fight against Carlos De Leon. Nelson didn't throw a single punch - perhaps the most embarrassing night at ringside anyone had seen. Could something similar happen tonight? It's entirely possible. Belcastro has mixed with the world's best. Only four fights ago Hamed was in Mansfield boxing Kevin Jenkins, who had won precisely three of his 18 fights.

But even if it does blow up in their faces, it won't be the end of the story. For that, you can count on Ingle. At his St Thomas's gym, on the run-down hill on Wincobank, world-class boxers spar among a small band of waifs and strays aged from five to 50. These are the people Ingle invites into the gym, as part of his policy of teaching those seen as society's dregs, through boxing, some 'social skills'. It's a mythic scheme, a romantic pyramid, but one that requires concrete idols at its apex. And here they are, the triumvirate, Herol, Johnny and little Naz. There they always will be, somehow.

At Ponds Forge, Hamed's sizeable family awaits the bell nervously. He is one of nine children. His father, Sal, came to Sheffield from North Yemen in the late 1960s. He worked in the steelworks and then took over the corner shop just up from Ingle's house on Wincobank. His older brother, Riath, thin and studious, and who works at the Yemeni Economic and Training Centre, can barely watch. They need not have worried. In his leopard-skin trunks, Hamed handles Belcastro with ease. The Italian is down in the first and the 11th. Hamed does not try to finish him off. Instead, in the last, he taunts his beaten opponent. It is an unappetising spectacle. It goes beyond what Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard did. Why does he have to do that? The writers talk of his disgraceful behaviour. What is it about Hamed that incites them? He is only a kid, after all.

As we all know, the extraordinary story will continue. Naz will rise in weight and cut a swath through the featherweight division. His concussive hitting power, allied to a style that shows strongly the influence of Bomber Graham, will make previously formidable fighters crumble like novices. As they fall one by one it will be almost too outrageous to take in. He will earn millions - perhaps even £40m - and become a one-man industry. His bouts will be sensational and he will rise from the canvas to prevail. His mass 'appeal' will be paradoxical and his fights on ITV national occasions to rival even his predecessor Chris Eubank.

In time, he will split from Ingle and from promoter Frank Warren. He will be managed by brother Riath and promoted by Barry Hearn, the former snooker impresario. Just as his cloak of invincibility seems permanent, he will lose widely on points in the one match he really has to win, the one that would make him a legend: against the Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera. Barrera doesn't just beat him: he takes him to school. With his customary bombast, Hamed will announce his intent to take revenge, but it will not happen. Instead, he will take a tune-up against an obscure Spaniard, Manuel Calvo, during which he will be booed for his extreme caution. And shortly after that, from Hamed at least, there will be only silence.

The Calvo fight is now more than two-and-a-half years ago. On 12 February, Hamed will be 31. His last interview, with psychologist Geoffrey Beattie, took place shortly after the Calvo fight. Hamed disparaged Ingle. He questioned Ingle's relationship with his son, John, who worked Hamed's corner. 'You could see they despised each other,' Hamed said. 'I'm talking from father to son. There was jealousy. And you'd look at the family as a whole and think, "How can this be a family?" '

Riath told Beattie: 'Brendan has no right to say he made Naz. He may have enhanced and nurtured his talent, but no one apart from the Creator can say, "I made this person". When Brendan once said to me that he had done the hard job and that I was feeding off his rewards, I saw him for what he was. Brendan didn't let Naz grow up.'

Such was the enmity between trainer and fighter that in their last fight together, against Wayne McCullough in Atlantic City, in October 1998, Hamed said that he was sure that Ingle wanted him to lose.

There was a time when Hamed was a regular on the Sheffield nightclub scene. Now he is scarcely ever seen out. He and his brother Riath are committed to Islam - Naseem is the benefactor of a local mosque. Not far away is the boxing gym he owns in Abbeydale Road. It has a Jacuzzi and ornate pillars in the Arab style have been installed on the frontage. Opinions vary as to how many boxers use it. Some say six; others, just one - Hamed. While in his time Hamed has paraded in Ferraris and Lamborghinis, he now favours a more discreet Merc. He lives behind security gates with his wife, Eleasha, a local girl, and their two young sons in a £3m house he has just bought near the main fire station. He is said to be considerably above his fighting weight. Nowadays, he seems to speak only through Riath.

When I ask Riath about recent newspaper stories suggesting that his brother was planning to fight again somewhere in the Middle East this summer, probably Dubai, he says, cryptically: 'We're not in the habit of forecasting. We leave our destinies in God's hands. We live a good life now. I'm glad to be out of the boxing environment. No spiritual individual can exist in it. It's an environment of cheating and lying.'

What he doesn't say, emphatically, is no.

The Hameds have moved into what Riath calls the 'property and agriculture business'. When Naz was king, they made signs of building an empire as promoters, perhaps one day to rival Don King. But when, in June last year, Sky declined to renew the Hameds' multi-fight promotional deal, Riath said: 'It is another step away from boxing for the company, which we welcome. For this to die a natural death like this is a blessing.'

Hamed and Riath seemed to have made a clean break from their past life, the life that made them their money. Now it re-intrudes almost as a dream.

And yet, as I'm finishing this article, Riath calls again, to talk about Amir Khan, the boxing sensation from Bolton who won a silver at the Athens Olympics. A rumour has linked the Hameds to Khan. Riath confirms it is true. 'We are talking to Amir. We're advising, if you like. I'm not necessarily looking to promote him. He and his family came to Sheffield and I talked to them. Was Naz involved? Not initially but he has since talked to them several times on the phone.'

Wasn't Warren set to sign Khan to a promotional contract? 'That's why we feel we should give him advice,' Riath adds, archly.

One afternoon in Sheffield I visit the former boxer Glyn Rhodes. He knew Hamed better than most, trained with him at St Thomas's from the day when Sal sent his son there at the age of seven. When Herol Graham and Brendan split, it was Rhodes who trained Herol. Rhodes, by his own admission, never stepped above journeyman status. He did have talent, however. His speciality was the delayed right hand. He just never trained properly and would take fights on a day's notice. In 65 fights his best win was on a Chris Eubank undercard. 'I saw Naz in his car the other day,' he says. 'In his face he looked all right, but he'll never come back. All that training in his gym is no good. It's destroying him mentally. He always had that bit of devil in him, that nastiness which you need to be a good fighter. I don't think he should box again. He has to get that something special back that he had as a kid. It's not going to happen.'

Asked if there was a special flaw in Hamed, Rhodes says: 'I think the flaw was in himself. Barrera did for him all right. The sign of a good fighter is when he gets sat on his a*** and comes back. I thought Naz was going to be an Ali or a Hagler, but maybe he was just the best of a bad bunch. The Barrera fight was the natural death to his career. Naz was not just a puncher, though. He had very good balance. But like all of us Naz was a bit of a Herol Graham clone. You can't try to be anybody else. All of us tried to be Herol. But it's still a shock. To me, Naz has always been this young kid and now it's all over. What I'd like most of all is to sit down and have a good chat with Naz. But no one can reach him. He's lost to us.'

part 2


A couple of miles from Hamed's new gym is where Herol Graham now lives. He answers the door in his tracksuit. He is looking after his two young children. He is in his mid-40s, but looks 10 years younger. The scars of world-title wars with Julian Jackson, Mike 'The Bodysnatcher' McCallum and others are not evident.

Of Hamed, he says: 'It's all mental, not physical. It's all about invincibility. He can't accept it's gone. He fought the wrong fight against Barrera. Barrera beat his mind. Now there's people around him. He doesn't know who to trust. It's all to do with him. But boxing is his glue. He should have come back sooner. If he's going to have a fight now he's got at least a stone and a half to lose. I still text him. I say, "Believe in yourself". But he doesn't believe in himself.'

Once inseparable gym-mates, Hamed and Johnny Nelson no longer talk. No one quite knows why. Some say their rift is to do with an HBO TV date, or with Nelson's refusal to leave Ingle after Hamed did in 1998. In 2003, Nelson's career, which he had manfully resurrected (he is the long-standing World Boxing Organisation cruiserweight champion) was put on hold after he was the subject of kidnap threats. Police put surveillance cameras on his house and on Ingle's Wincobank gym, and suggested a north-west criminal gang was to blame.

After Ingle had departed, Hamed was trained by Manny Steward, the trainer of Lennox Lewis. Steward left after the Barrera fight, disappointed by what he called lapses of professionalism in Hamed's preparation. The Hameds strenuously deny these accusations. Steward's parting shot was: 'Between you and me, he only sparred 12 rounds for Barrera. The kid simply did not want to box.'

A mere three weeks before his comeback fight against Calvo in May 2002, Hamed brought in an old gym-mate from the Ingle days, Dave Caldwell, to train with him. Caldwell was not impressed. 'Naz is all right,' he says now. 'It's his brothers who've messed up his career.'

Brendan Ingle is halfway through his daily routine when we talk. He was up at seven, down at the gym, back at the house opposite, where he lives with his wife, Alma, and will be at the gym this afternoon.

He explains the Hamed problem in one quite unexpected word: teeth. 'If you look at the old photographs of Naz, you'll see he has big gaps. One of his teeth was knocked out in the amateurs. Now this goes back to Herol. Herol also had some teeth knocked out and he had dentures put in. One day at the gym this woman saw him putting them in and she laughed. Now, Herol didn't like it. He went and had a bridge put in. I said, "You're mad. Wait until you've finished boxing".

'Then we're in the Jackson fight. Herol is winning but he's got hit. At the end of the third, all his teeth are in the gumshield. I had to keep them in. I couldn't take them out. But, well, he had to keep his mouth closed. He was knocked out by a right hook.'

His logic may be obscure, but one goes with it. 'So then we're back home and I take the Naz fella up to Herol's place,' Ingle continues. 'I go to Herol, "Well, it happens to all of us". He says, "What does?" I say, "Vanity. I told you not to have that bridge put in". Then I drove the Naz fella back and I've told him, "I've taken you there to teach you a lesson'."

Did he learn it? 'No,' Ingle says. 'He came back with Calvo - and Calvo was a soft touch. But six weeks before the fight I see a picture of Naz smiling. He'd had his teeth done. The front four were beautiful. Now Calvo was crap and the Naz fella is hitting and running. No one can understand why. So I says, "It's obvious. He's had his teeth done like a film star. He doesn't want to get hit in the mouth'."

What happened with Naz - the circumstances of their separation - is still raw for Ingle. 'After he won the title he wanted me to become a Muslim. He said, "You don't drink or smoke or gamble. You'd make a great Muslim". I said, "Naz, listen, what about you? You don't pray five times a day. You don't wash five times a day. You don't go to the mosque. All you do is get on your mobile. You cause trouble all over Sheffield, all over Britain, and all over Europe. Eff off".'

Ingle pauses. 'But he won't box again.'

He recalls the occasion when Claude Abrams, editor of Boxing News , arranged to spar with Hamed for a soft feature. 'I said to just mess around, but Naz beat the S*** out of him. He is a horrible person. I had this for 18 years. There was not a day went past when he didn't try to humiliate or belittle me.'

What were his weaknesses as a boxer? 'Listen, there's no such thing as a natural. The weakness was in his personality. He tried to give you the idea that his family were united. But the in-fighting was horrific. I look at my family and they're smashing. All my friends from 40 years are still there. Naz hasn't got a true friend in the world.'

While in Sheffield I receive a message from Naz, delivered via his younger brother, Murad. It says: 'I'm sorry I couldn't meet you, but I'm moving house this week. I hope you understand.' Riath is more forthcoming, however, but still hostile to Ingle. 'Psychologically, Brendan is stuck in the past,' he says. 'And he is very controlling. He will probably take his bitterness to his grave. Only God can be the judge. Down at the gym there used to be a camaraderie. But when Naz left, everything fell apart.'

It is evening and Barry Hearn is considering going for a run. For all his promotional interests - snooker, boxing, Leyton Orient FC, pool, fishing and, increasingly, poker - he has never forgotten the emotional release of running. Once he turned up for an important meeting with Terry Lawless, Frank Bruno's former manager, in his running gear and thinks the shock value may have given him an edge.

Hearn first signed Hamed as a professional in 1992, before losing him to Mickey Duff, then Frank Warren, and then getting him back on a fee-only basis six years ago, which gave Hearn the opportunity to return to the big stage which once was his in the days Chris Eubank ruled the boxing world in the early 90's with the highest global viewing figures in the game. Eubank, ofcourse, was a big influence on the Prince. Hearn last saw Hamed, he thinks, in January last year. 'He weighed 12 stone [3st above his fighting weight] to be generous to him... I started him and then he signed a deal with Duff. Duff paid him a few pieces of silver and Brendan said it was better for Naz. I said, "What you mean is that it's better for you". I don't rate Brendan at all. I don't want to be mean, I know what he does with those kids in Sheffield, but I don't believe in the mystique of trainers. Fighters make their trainers. And what Naz got out of Brendan Ingle is nothing compared to what Brendan got out of Naz.'

Second time around, with Ingle out of the picture and the Hameds in need of a promoter of record, Hearn was more than willing to accommodate them, though he says he was essentially an employee. 'The trouble with all fighters is that while, at first, they are grateful, once they start making you a lot of money they don't want to pay you.' Presumably this was not the case with Hamed and that was what, for Hearn, made it good.

So, if Hamed came back, would Hearn want to promote him? 'Definitely not. The market is dire. He would have to take significantly less money. Would I come back with him for the money? If I were skint, of course. But once the curtain has come down I don't want to be there selling the ice creams.'

Hearn believes the Hameds were a one-off commercial force, who squeezed the best deals from the TV companies but could not have done so with any other fighter. 'They don't have the knowledge,' he says. 'They never trusted people outside their group. They never really trusted me.'

Where, then, does all this leave Naz, Riath and the rest of the Hameds? Hearn is surprisingly sure. In two of the last fights he was involved with, against Augie Sanchez and Barrera, he was aware of the increasing influence of Islam on the Hamed camp. For the Barrera fight Naz was theatrically called to the ring by a mullah and had 'Islam' stitched to his shorts.

'They will become more religious,' Hearn predicts. 'They'll become fanatics - but I'm not saying in a terrorist sense. I suppose it keeps them centred. Basically, they have withdrawn from normal society. It has taken them over in an almost dangerous way.'

Riath is dismissive of Hearn. 'With him you see what you get,' he says. 'He's got a bit of flash. No, I never trusted him, but he's the lesser of the evils with the boxing promoters. It would be impossible to have a spiritual conversation with him. If we were Christians or Jews, he wouldn't have said what he did about our religion. It's because we are Muslims and we believe in God.'

In truth, this isn't a story about Islam. It is about Brendan Ingle and the triumvirate: Herol, Johnny and little Naz. But now only Johnny is still boxing. Perhaps they should all grow up, admit what they mean to each other and move on. It doesn't seem likely. There is too much bad history whistling through the old slag heaps and neglected estates of Sheffield. Sometimes it can seem as if a whole city derived its hope from the talent that emerged from that St Thomas's gym. 'I am a stubborn B******,' Ingle says now. 'That's probably one of my bad failings. I've told the Naz fella what he's going to do with himself. I've predicted it all. When we split, I said, "Let's see what happens in three or four years". It's the same with Herol. They're both prisoners of the past. Naz has put himself in a prison in his own mind - and I'm the jailer. Unless he tells the truth of what he's done, he'll never get out of jail.'

Riath says how delighted he is to be free from boxing. Does his brother feel the same? Perhaps Riath doesn't quite understand what boxing meant to Naz nor how much it costs - physically, psychologically - to bring a fighter from nowhere, as Brendan Ingle did, to the world title. To do this takes many years of hard work, no matter how talented or committed the fighter. As the novelist WC Heinz wrote, in The Professional , 'Boxing is too intricate an art for the average person, fight fan or not, to comprehend.'

Perhaps none of us can ever comprehend what Naseem Hamed achieved, how his one and only defeat and separation from Ingle affected him and how it feels to fall so far so fast.

Winners who faded away

Randolph Turpin

In London in 1951, Turpin became only the second man to beat Sugar Ray Robinson in his first 134 fights when gaining the world middleweight championship. The 23-year-old from Leamington Spa inflicted a cut that required 14 stitches on the ill-prepared champion. Turpin's reign lasted only 64 days as Robinson won the rematch in New York, stopping his opponent with just eight seconds of round 10 remaining. Turpin continued boxing before retiring in 1958 amid personal problems. Several failed business ventures affected his mental state and he committed suicide in 1966, aged 37.

John Conteh

When the 23-year-old Conteh (top) out-pointed Jorge Ahumada to win the WBC light heavyweight title in 1974, it should have signalled the start of a long reign as champion. 'Some boxers have power,' his manager George Francis said, 'others skill. Not many have both. John was one of the few.' But the Liverpudlian suffered badly with injuries and could only manage three defences before he was stripped of the title in 1977 for refusing to fight Miguel Cuello. Conteh's private life was in turmoil as he battled alcoholism and his management. Unsuccessful in his three attempts to win back the title, he retired in 1980.

Terry Marsh

The fireman-turned-boxer became world light-welterweight champion when he beat Joe Manley in 1987, aged 29. It was the high point of an undefeated career that saw the Essex boy retire within a year after admitting he suffered from epilepsy. After splitting with his wife Jacqui, Marsh (right) was acquitted of the attempted murder of his former promoter Frank Warren in 1990. Marsh has since tried to make careers in acting and politics.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by WWatt

His mass 'appeal' will be paradoxical and his fights on ITV national occasions to rival even his predecessor Chris Eubank.

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Naz's last fight on ITV was the Angeles fight.

Angeles was on SKY at Shepton Mallet.

Liendo was the last ITV fight, the way Hamed took him out was the final straw for them and they stopped showing boxing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Memphis

Angeles was on SKY at Shepton Mallet.

Liendo was the last ITV fight, the way Hamed took him out was the final straw for them and they stopped showing boxing.

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That's right, I was thinking of the Bruno fight at Shepton Mallet for some reason.

I remember Hamed dedicated the Liendo fight to Gerald McClellan.