|
EYE ON EUROPE |
 |
|
FEATHERWEIGHT  Artist's rendering of wire photo showing Naseem Hamed and wife after court appearance. |
The cocky rooster winds
up in a prison "coop"
of TheColumnists.com
I have never been much of a hero-worshiper but little Naseem Hamed came as close as anyone to prompting some irrational exuberance from me. He was an unlikely object of admiration--a 5-foot-2 Islamic boy from the north of England with a big mouth and no idea how to control it.
But he stunned the world with his big talent in the ring. He turned pro at only 18 and his favourite catchphrase after his featherweight boxing victories was, “I am already a legend!”
I’m not even a true boxing fan but this brash kid was irresistible. I watched all his professional fights. He energized the moribund London boxing scene and was so appreciated in Yemen, where his parents were born, that a postage stamp was issued in his honor. He called himself “Prince Naseem.”
His light-hearted confidence was a rarity in the high-stakes boxing game. Naseem was so sure of himself he would breeze through the streets of London in his convertible sports car surrounded by a noisy, laughing entourage, and burst into his dressing room as if going to a party. His dramatic entrances to the ring were choreographed with strobe lights and fireworks. Clad in his leopard-skin shorts, he always did a handspring into the ring.
His methods were new to the ring--an acrobatic style in which he dodged his opponents with his sharp reflexes and could spring back at them from unexpected angles. He proved that good boxing is more than half about not getting hit.
The crowds loved the little guy from Sheffield. Most of his fights were quite short. In some he didn’t have to break a sweat before his opponent lay flat on his back wondering where that left came from. (He had an extremely flexible body and is left-handed, a significant advantage over fighters who are not used to seeing danger in reverse.)
Throughout the 1990s, I would stay up all night if necessary to catch the live broadcast of his fights. If he got hit, which was rare, I felt the pain. If he got knocked down--which was even rarer--I yelled in dismay and turned away from the television. He amassed a near-perfect record and millions of dollars in winnings.
To me, the occasional enthusiast, it was a mystery why he disappeared from boxing after a 2002 narrow win in the London Arena. He stopped fighting and coverage of the “Prince” in the sports pages just faded away.
Last week he was back in the news. Now 32, he is in prison, bloated and humbled, scarcely recognizable from his heyday as the world champion featherweight fighter. It had all happened so fast.
Hamed’s weakness turned out not to be young girls or boys, not strong drink or drugs. He had a weakness for speed on the highway and his McLaren-Mercedes was his undoing.
One of the drivers in the three-car 90-mph pileup he caused last year says he watched in horror as Naseem overtook him in a no-passing zone and struck his Volkswagen Polo head-on. In court a year later, he called Naseem’s driving “stupid, suicide, ridiculous.” The driver of the third car nearly died, with “every major bone in his body” broken.
Naseem was sentenced last week to serve 15 months for dangerous driving, and is banned from the roads for four years. This will probably destroy an already damaged young man whose main interest seems to have become cars and how fast he can push them.
My daughter Raphaelle, the first New England Women’s Boxing champion, attributes Naseem’s predicament to the trajectory she saw so often in her fight days. She also studied the stats and viewed hundreds of boxing microfilms while earning her master’s degree at Boston University.
As she put it: “It’s a pattern in this sport. Humble origins, a fast rise to stardom, inability to deal with money and fame, and then the freefall into drink, drugs, bad sex or fast cars.” Other elements can be low intelligence, premature Alzheimer’s disease or brain damage caused by repeated battering of the head.
“It’s not just boxing that does this,” she says. “The stats are similar for pro football. Once these guys realize after they retire early that they have no useful skills--and that they may have suffered brain damage--depression hits and they often turn to drugs or alcohol.”
Champion fighters, she adds, harbor a dark
side that allows them to go that extra distance and pummel opponents
unconscious. The dark side is embedded in their makeup and can
surface in various threatening forms. An extreme case can become
a death wish. This sounds a lot like Naseem to me.
Naseem’s downfall began in 2001 when highly regarded Mexican
featherweight Marco Antonio Barrera took him on in Las Vegas.
Watching that event was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
I noticed he was behaving strangely and had a funny look in his
eye. His ego was out of control.
His training and pre-fight preparations were being captured by a video documentary crew he had brought along as part of his legend-building exercise. In the ring before the bell he grabbed the announcer’s microphone and yelled--half in Arabic half in English--a long, inappropriate tribute to “Allah, the only God,” and predicted a decisive win, “In’ch Allah.” The audience had long been ready to rumble by the time he finished, and cheered when Barrera methodically took him to pieces, winning decisively on points. Allah couldn’t help him.
Naseem had only one more fight, at the London Arena, before thousands of fans hopeful for a comeback. But the strangeness of that night in Vegas was still eating at him, and he had no more of his bumptious self-confidence. He eked out a victory on points and disappeared back to Sheffield where he is sure to stay for at least another 15 months.
Naseem fans dread the inevitable comparisons with Mike Tyson and other fighters who have gone to prison after displaying such courage to dominate their fearsome sport.
A fighter believes that pressures in the ring are the worst a person can face--literally life-and-death situations. Getting too comfortable with that superior attitude can lead to delusions of invincibility. Naseem isn’t the first and won’t be the last to crumble under the pressures of real life that follow the ring or the football field.
©2006 by Michael Johnson. This column first posted May 23, 2006.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Michael Johnson. To send
an email, click here and don't forget to mention Michael's name:
talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|