Three months after getting knocked out by a Carl Froch right hand inside Wembley Stadium, George Groves was back. The only difference this time was that there was no boxing ring in the middle of the pitch and he was now wearing clothes – a suit, no less – rather than trunks, gum shield, and gloves. He was also just one of 80,000, not the focus of 80,000, and was sitting up in the gods, therefore no longer a god. “See that spot there,” he said to his wife, Sophie, as he descended the stairs en route to his seat. “That’s where I got knocked the fuck out.”
For anyone aware of Groves’ mental strength, the decision to make a hasty return to Wembley, the scene of the crime, would have come as no surprise. However, it was still somewhat early in the so-called rehabilitation process, coming as it did just weeks after the throwing of Froch’s right hand. In truth, few would have seen it as a sign of weakness had Groves turned down the invitation to attend a football match – a friendly – between England and Norway that September evening.
“It’s always nice to go out at Wembley,” he said. “For me, it was more like, Wow, this is Wembley Stadium, and not, Wow, this is where I boxed. The two didn’t look the same anyway. When I boxed there, it was dark and full. It was light and half-empty for the football.
“It’s kind of nice that it isn’t a big deal for me anymore. As we’re going back to Wembley to fight, you certainly don’t want to have any animosity or weird feelings towards it.”
It’s perhaps like Jane Austen once said: “One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it.”
That was clearly true of Groves, who not only returned to Wembley as soon after that Froch loss as he could, but also booked his next fight – a European title tilt against Christopher Rebrasse – in the same location. Just four months after fighting Froch, in fact, Groves was set to fight again at Wembley, only now at the Arena and not the Stadium. For Groves, it made complete sense to move on by first going back. By doing so he could make peace with what had happened there and rewrite his association with the place. Better yet, by going back to where it had all happened, Groves was able to soak himself in the reality of it all, even seeing the experience – the downgrade – as a necessary exercise in humility.
“It’s nice to have that bit of normality,” he said. “You take it in your stride, because you have to, but that must take up some energy, even if you’re really enjoying something. You go to Thorpe Park and enjoy it but you’re still tired at the end of it all. The Froch fight was a rollercoaster ride. This is much more normal. We’ve got a foreign opponent [Rebrasse] who doesn’t talk at press conferences. Nobody is coming up to me in the street talking to me about what he said this week. Everybody’s buzzing about the fight – so that’s a big encouragement and motivation – but it’s just a fight, this one. It’s at the Arena, not the Stadium, and it feels like any other fight.”
Unlike the Stadium, where it all went wrong, the Arena had once been a happy hunting ground for George Groves. It was in fact there that he had produced a second-round knockout of Paul Smith in 2011 when defending his British super-middleweight title. It was also there that he beat Dario German Balmaceda the year before he was upended by Froch across the road. In that respect, then, there wasn’t much to worry about, nor any danger of being triggered by familiar surroundings. Had his comeback fight been at the Stadium and not the Arena, things could have been different. As it is, we’ll never know.
Ultimately, visiting the same stadium in which one was once knocked out is presumably easier to do in the role of spectator – as Groves was when watching England vs. Norway – than active participant. At least if only visiting and watching there is very little danger of a repeat. Not only that, there is room to make jokes, self-deprecating remarks, and show a bit of gallows humour, so often used to conceal the truth and/or pain.
The real challenge for a boxer is to revisit a venue which holds bad memories and fight there again. After all, a venue, like a boxer’s body, holds within it a history that is hard to shake or forget. It counts the punches thrown and landed and keeps a record of those boxers who were both successful and unsuccessful during their visit. In this a boxer has no say. Whether their hand is raised in victory, or their head bowed in defeat, associations inevitably form on the night of the fight and seldom does a boxer forget where they were when it happened. Give it time and there will be reminders. The name of the venue. The smell of the venue. The layout of the changing room. These things, depending on the result, will either come back to haunt the boxer in question or give them cause to smile the second their head hits the pillow at night.
But “a ring is a ring” they will sometimes say, aiming to downplay the impact of the venue, the crowd, and any external factors. That may well be the case, that a ring is a ring, yet the link between some boxers and some rings is occasionally so strong it cannot be ignored.
Take Michael Conlan, for example. He has been synonymous with big fights in Belfast, particularly at the SSE Arena, for almost a decade now and has managed to build quite the catalogue of memories in that location. He fought there for the first time as a pro when beating Adeilson Dos Santos over eight rounds in 2018 and then, in 2022, he outpointed Miguel Marriaga over 10 and stopped Karim Guerfi in one.
All was going well in that relationship until suddenly, in 2023, Conlan and the SSE Arena fell out. It started with a fifth-round stoppage loss against Luis Alberto Lopez in May and culminated in a seventh-round stoppage loss against Jordan Gill in December. With that, the SSE Arena was no longer the holder of happy memories for Conlan. Those memories still existed, of course, but they were now overshadowed by failures and nights he wished he could forget.
Twelve months ago, when plotting his return to the ring, Conlan was advised against going straight back to Belfast and the SSE Arena. He could easily sell tickets there, that was never in doubt, but more appealing than selling tickets and fighting at home was the prospect of detachment – getting away.
“After two defeats your confidence is a bit knocked, there’s no point denying that,” Conlan said. “I can sit here and go, ‘My confidence is just fine. I know the reasons for the defeats and I am going to put things right.’ But I’m not saying that. There are reasons for the defeats, yes, but when you lose, no matter the circumstances, you do look at yourself and go, ‘Fuck me, am I as good as I think I am?’”
“In terms of being in the arena, it wasn’t me who said we should go elsewhere. It was actually Jamie [Conlan, brother and manager]. He said, ‘Let’s take a step back and fight somewhere else.’ But it wouldn’t have bothered me if I had to fight back there in my first fight after that Gill loss. It doesn’t bother me. It’s just a venue. I don’t think it will affect me as much as people probably expect it to affect me. Something was definitely missing in those fights there, but that didn’t have anything to do with the location.
“Being an amateur – an elite amateur – you end up fighting in venues all over the fucking world. You win in some; you lose in others. In the end, every venue is the exact same. They all kind of blur into one. It doesn’t fucking matter where it is. Also, with me, I’m bringing the same atmosphere everywhere I go. So it’s not like fighting somewhere other than Belfast is any different. There’s still going to be fucking thousands of people there watching and making noise.
“Once it was said to me [to fight away from Belfast], I did accept that it was probably the right thing to do. It makes sense to go somewhere else first, for a change of scenery if nothing else, and then we can rethink things after that.”
Since then, Conlan has boxed twice. His first comeback fight, an eight-round win over Asad Asif Khan, took place in Brighton, a seaside town hardly considered a boxing hotbed, while his second comeback fight, an impressive fourth-round stoppage of Jack Bateson, landed in Dublin, Ireland. That wasn’t quite Belfast and the SSE Arena, but it did mark a gradual creeping back towards the location that, for many, defines his past.
Now, on Friday, Conlan will complete the journey with a 10-round WBC international featherweight title fight against Kevin Walsh. The fight itself is significant, for all the usual reasons, yet its location and the fact that Conlan will again box at the SSE Arena is just as significant. It is, whether he likes it or not, another thing the 34-year-old must confront and conquer.
“I still look at it that way,” Conlan, 20-3 (10 KOs), said when reminded of our conversation last year. “It’s just another fight for me. But you have to be straight with yourself as well and say, ‘Yeah, you’ve had two bad nights fighting there. Will it be different?’
“Who knows? I’m just looking forward to getting in there and performing. Being back here doesn’t really mean anything in terms of how I am going to approach the fight. I always approach it the exact same way, regardless of where it’s happening. Having bad memories of somewhere doesn’t really matter. You’ve got to rewrite those memories and change them into good ones.
“This could even be the last fight at the SSE, because the bigger fights are abroad now and there’s the potential to do the park [Croke Park] in the summer. This is potentially the last fight in this arena, so I’m just going to go in there and make sure I enjoy every moment – take it all in, live in the moment, bask in it. I’ll get the victory and then fuck off home.”
Win on Friday and Belfast’s SSE Arena will again feel like home for Michael Conlan. It will look the same, it will sound the same, and he will no doubt be embraced by 8,000 Irish fans just the same as before. There will be no ghosts, echoes, or negative voices in the building, only the sounds of his supporters welcoming Conlan home and reminding him of why he had been so eager to return.
