Ten years ago, you defended your British middleweight title against Chris Eubank Jnr, not that you need reminding. Every day since has been a reminder and some things we can never forget, even if we wish we could. Often, in fact, it is the things we could do with forgetting that are the hardest to shake. It’s everything else that tends to fade. All the small, supposedly insignificant details that make up a life. All those little moments you take for granted at the time, only to then realise with the passing of time their value and significance.
In 2016, it was just work – for us both. For you, the boxer, there was yet another training camp followed by yet another fight, while for me, the press officer for said fight, the job was a little less exciting and a lot less risky. I only had to ask you about Chris Eubank Jnr; you had to get in the ring and fight him.
Still, as champion, you fancied your chances. We both did. The year before, you had beaten John Ryder, Damon Jones and Jack Arnfield like it was nothing. You were also fit, prepared, never more confident. This was evident the day I watched you spar George Groves, a super middleweight, in London. You were there with your friend Jake that day and the energy and enthusiasm you both brought to the gym was infectious. The only worry at that stage was burnout; doing too much; working too hard. You were just 25 but you felt older. “I have no social life whatsoever at the moment,” you moaned, before telling me you hadn’t had a holiday for 10 years. “It’s just gym, eat, sleep. Will my life always be like this? It’s a bit of a worry.”
You said the dream was to one day move from Trowbridge to Cornwall. You described yourself as a “water baby” and said you could quite easily see yourself living out your days surfing. Your next holiday would be there, in Cornwall, after the fight. “When you’re down in Cornwall, you start turning soft,” you explained. “You don’t need that if you’re a boxer. You’ve got to be hard.”
That you were. In fact, no sooner had you fled the gym that afternoon than Groves and his trainer, Shane McGuigan, said how impressed they were with your ability to take punches and keep coming forward; a reminder that in boxing “impressed” and “concerned” can sometimes mean the same thing.
On the eve of the Eubank Jnr fight, you sat with friends in the bar of Wembley’s Holiday Inn and listened to your trainer, Gary Lockett, crack jokes and do bad impressions. At one point you were passed a package containing the black and gold robe you would wear the following evening. “You’ve changed,” one of your friends said. “Look at it. All sparkly and stuff.” You laughed as you sipped your coffee. You then said, “I can’t wait to smash him in the face with a right hand”.
For the fight you were to wear Grant gloves and Eubank Jnr would wear Winning gloves. Both weighed the same – 10 ounces – but the Winning gloves were noticeably larger, with more padding around the knuckle. The Grant gloves, yours, carried the weight mostly in the wrist area. “I know which ones I’d rather be getting hit in the face with,” said Lee Squirrell, Hennessy Sports’ event manager, as we passed the gloves back and forth in our makeshift office at Wembley Arena.
The next day, we saw the damage those Winning gloves could do. The extra padding around the knuckle protected the hands of the boxer throwing them – in this case, Eubank Jnr – and this allowed them to be thrown repeatedly at the target. You, the target, were partially sighted due to a haematoma above your left eye, meaning they had left their mark – the gloves, Eubank Jnr, the sport.
Even so, you kept going, as we knew you would. So brave, and so stubborn, you battled through to round 10, the round in which Victor Loughlin, the referee, asked the doctor to inspect your eye and decided enough was enough. The crowd of two-and-a-half thousand now booed. They wanted more. You did, too. You wanted to keep going, convinced you could turn things around, while Eubank Jnr, just as deflated, wanted to finish you in a manner more conclusive and satisfying. It was, we thought at the time, the ending nobody wanted. But we know now that we were wrong.
In your changing room after the fight, not one of us had the words to describe what had just happened. I hugged your friend, Jake, if only to acknowledge the uncertainty, then left. I still had a job to do.
In Eubank Jnr’s changing room, meanwhile, the victor and his team had a lot more to say. “Nothing new there,” you might have said had you been awake. Had you been where you should have been: in your changing room surrounded by your friends and family.
“His corner should have pulled him out of there or the referee should have stopped it,” said Ronnie Davies, Eubank Jnr’s trainer. “That boy took way too much punishment. I thought he should have been stopped around the seventh. He was just getting beaten up, thrashed. It was a severe beating. No matter what happens now, that kid will not fight again. He took too much punishment and is probably damaged now.”
Standing across the changing room was Chris Eubank Snr, who ate chunks of pineapple from a plastic pot and thought about Michael Watson and the tragedy that befell them both at White Hart Lane in 1991. He never wanted this for his son – the boxing, the tragedy. Nor did he want this for you. “You can see I’m teary now, can’t you?” he said to me that night. “You’ve been there,” I said in response. “It’s not that I’ve been there,” he stressed, wiping tears from his eyes. “I am there.”
Thirteen-and-a-half minutes after you left the ring on a stretcher you were placed in an induced coma. They said you died in the back of the ambulance and that only a shot of adrenalin, injected into your heart, brought you back to life. The ambulance then took you to St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, where we all waited for you to wake up.
***
Five days later, you were still in a coma – stable, sedated – but had avoided the need for surgery and, though we remained in the dark, the sun had entered your room to brighten things up. Mick Hennessy, your promoter, stood by your bedside and said, “Nick, if only you could see the sun right now. It’s great surfing weather. Come on, mate. We’re supposed to meet you in Cornwall this summer.”
By that time your friends had transformed the hospital’s ninth floor into their own private living quarters. They slept on black leather chairs they relabelled “pods”, they wandered around half-naked, they ordered takeaway food, and they hooked up a laptop to a television to play movies. The hospital staff didn’t like it, but your friends didn’t care. This was a vigil. This was teamwork. This was love. On the window ledge were some tulips sent to you by the Turkish family from whom you had ordered your post weigh-in meal.
In that waiting room on the ninth floor, your friends made a habit of watching Escape to the Country as a kind of bonding exercise; same time each day; shards of normality. Oh, and Jake, to keep spirits high, told us your real nickname: “Bing Bong.” He then showed us a video of you singing a Britney Spears song in a car on your way to Monaco. Also, your brother, Dan, said his 61st professional fight would now officially be his last. He had a family to think about. “It’s not worth it,” he said. However, he would, as you know, fight 15 more times.
You woke from the coma on April Fools’ Day, a Friday. The first person you called was your dad, who failed to recognise the number on his phone and naturally thought he was being pranked. Then, once convinced it was you, he rushed to your bedside, where he was informed by nurses that you yourself had pulled the tube from your throat. He was not surprised. It sounded like the sort of thing you would do.
Tyson Fury, they said, was the first person you had requested to see. Why? “Because he is the only one who will break me out of here,” you told them. You later asked your friends to contact Mick Hennessy and have him loan you the money to get yourself a safe house. This – your creative mind – amused them greatly. Now they all tried to convince you that you were staying in a Novotel hotel and that the nurses were waitresses at your beck and call. All you really wanted, though, you told your dad, was a roast dinner.
When we entered the room, you gave us two thumbs up. There was a Galaxy chocolate bar, a bag of Mini Eggs, and a box of blueberries on your bedside table. You recognised each visitor, called us by our names, and interacted with us as though no great drama had unfolded and no time had elapsed. Your left leg was in a splint and dragged a bit when you moved, you said. You missed your dog.
Asked what you remembered of the fight, you called it a “slugfest” and believed you were just caught by a “clean shot”. You thought you were knocked out, it soon became clear. “I remember the referee trying to shove veins or straws up my nose and then I tried ripping them out,” you said. “I was like, ‘Fuck off!’ I didn’t want the fight to be stopped.” You shrugged; acted like it was fine. You said you would get your revenge one day and smiled at us. It was at that point we revealed to you that you had not been knocked out. We told you tales of your own bravery and didn’t stop until you believed us.
***
The next time I saw you was in September and we were at the Fight Science gym in Aldershot’s military barracks. You wore boxing gloves on your hands and were back in a fighting stance. I wanted to yell “Stop!” the second I walked in and caught you, but resisted. It was, after all, just for show. A bit of fun. You were teaching lessons to others. You had learned your own.
When, having finished, you finally sat down beside me on a bench, you mentioned that you had sparred on Monday. “Only did a few rounds, but I felt good,” you said. “I took a few shots.” One of the army blokes then sauntered over, wiped his forehead with a towel, and asked you if you had a fight lined up. You joked that you did: Manchester, December 15. “The rematch,” you said. “Time to get my revenge.”
You first got heavy. Thirteen-ston- six was the heaviest you had ever been, by your account, and you hated how it felt. How you felt. When you were again quizzed about the possibility of boxing, this time by a chubby lad in a tight Ralph Lauren polo shirt, you said, “Yeah, as a heavyweight”. You then opened your car boot to fetch a fresh T-shirt and showed me your flat stomach. You fixated on a barely-there ripple of belly fat and said, “That has never been there before”.
Before you headed home to Trowbridge, we went from the barracks to Caffe Macchiato in Aldershot town centre and you claimed you wanted to read more books. Forget your body, that temple of old, you wanted to now work more on your brain, you said. You had a new-found respect for it, apparently, and now understood not only its importance but the need to treat and train it like a muscle. It was then that I told you I had spent the past couple of years writing a book about ring tragedies and their aftermath. I suggested you should read it. Said it might be a good time now that you were free from the sport and deemed one of the “lucky ones”. But no, you said, not yet. You liked the idea of buying your own copy once it was published. Better that way. You asked me if you got a mention, I called you my “happy ending”, and you asked me not to spoil it – the ending. So, I didn’t. You also reiterated your desire to go surfing. You had, as originally planned, done a bit back in July when you travelled in a VW Transporter with Jake, but the thirst was still not quenched. The thirst to surf; take risks. The way you told it, you had, in July, walked the Pentire headland and took turns jumping 40 feet from a giant rock. “I just love that fear that you might hurt yourself,” you said. “I’m surprised I didn’t die.”
You then sparred one more time, in November, and some said they were surprised you didn’t die. You were at a boxing club in Devizes and back in the ring, gloved up, just eight months after the Eubank Jnr fight. To you, it must have felt like progress, or a return to normality, but it was in fact the opposite. There was to be no comeback. You instead returned to a coma and now required emergency surgery. You tried to fight again. Now you had to.
***
Two years later, in 2018, I spotted you from a distance at an outdoors weigh-in in Manchester. Tyson Fury was there, loud and out of shape, and so were you, invited and heroic. It was his comeback fight, the first of many, and like so many, he couldn’t keep away. I remembered, watching you greet him, the time when you were in St. Mary’s Hospital certain he was the man to come break you out. You posed for pictures with him and fans asked for pictures with you, fists up, big smiles. I thought, briefly, about approaching and saying hello, but I didn’t want to confuse matters, so decided not to. It was, I could tell, a lot for you to take in. You were back in that world again; that world you so dearly loved; that world that had damaged you. There would have been mixed emotions, for sure, and the last thing you needed on top of that was some extra confusion. Besides, I could tell, when you walked past, that it would take more than a wave or a handshake to reconnect. I just smiled like a stranger, respectful rather than familiar.
In 2022, you sent me a message out of the blue. It had, by then, been several years since we last communicated, yet such is the voyeuristic nature of social media, following from afar – a safe distance – was made easy. There, online, you were busy, insightful, inspiring. Some days you were up, some days you were down, but there were, in your videos, glimmers of the old Nick: the sense of humour, the bright smile, the “Bang Bang” catchphrase. You seemed to be not only helped in your recovery but also loved. Each post was a reassurance.
From me, you wanted the same, nothing more. You had, I discovered, recently gotten around to reading some of the material I had written about your last fight and couldn’t believe the degree of detail in it. The stuff about the fight, the stuff about the aftermath, the stuff about surfing in Cornwall. It was as if those memories, that time, had been stolen from you – by me. You now wanted to understand how I, this stranger, had managed to recall and describe a situation sadly beyond your grasp. Even in your messages I could sense you reaching for it. I could sense, too, your panic and confusion. I asked you if you remembered me. You said, “Name rang a bell but can’t remember any interviews”.
Still, though, that was fine; to be expected. It is not your job to remember the names and faces of the supporting characters with whom you crossed paths during your fighting career. It is in fact our job, as observers and admirers, to provide reminders as and when they are required. It is our job to remind fighters like you of their heroism and fill in any gaps that may have appeared as a result of that heroism. Sometimes the greater the gaps, the greater the heroism. Sometimes, true in your case, no matter how much a fighter forgets, there will always be somebody on hand to remind you. It’s called leaving your mark.
