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The Sweet Science of Boxing |
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Johnson  |
FROM LONDON |
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The Little Prince |
 "Prince" Naseem Hamed |
A strangely polite Naz returns
to the boxing ring in March
of TheColumnists.com
Naseem Hamed is the most original and unorthodox young talent to enter the boxing scene here in 10 years. Quibble over his big mouth if you will, but watch him twisting and floating in the ring and you are quickly rendered breathless. So are most of his opponents, as he knocks them into next week one by one--many in the opening rounds.
I was briefly breathless again when Naz confirmed he will meet European featherweight champion Manuel Calvo Jr. March 23 at the London Arena. It will be a major turnaround for British boxing. Even the hard-nosed London sportswriters are cooing over the return of the “Little Prince” they love to hate. The event is sure to be a sellout.
It will be just two weeks short of a year since he last fought, a bout that saw him hand over his three world featherweight belts to Marco Antonio Barrera. That was his first defeat as a professional fighter, and it was a heartbreaker for his fans.
In fact that loss meant that his promoter’s entire strategy of taking Naz to the United States for his big fights and the big money was in tatters. He had won a close scrape in Madison Square Garden against Tom Johnson in 1999, and he tried to keep his name alive with some moody Adidas commercials for the U.S. market calling himself a legend. But Johnson had nearly nailed him. Then Barrera in Las Vegas was his second U.S. outing and he blew it badly, losing a unanimous points decision. It will be some time before the Americans take him seriously again.
I remember watching these dangerous fights at 3 a.m. London time, pacing my living room and shouting obscenities at the TV screen. “Naz flat on his ass? I’ve gone to sleep. This is a nightmare!” No fighter has ever got me on my feet like this. My wife thought it was indecent behavior for a guy my age.
I wasn’t alone. There was sheer disbelief in London when he lost his titles. He was so silent for most of the past year that most fans thought he actually had quit the ring. Today I note that the Naz support has not waned. His fans are screaming to see him emerge as the comeback kid.
This is the fighter who invigorated the British boxing scene single-handedly by amassing a brilliant record (31-1) by the age of 26. He was right to claim at his recent press conference that the normally vibrant British boxing world has lost its sparkle since he dropped out of action to rest, rethink and retrain. He promises to change all this when he does his famous bodyflip into the ring in a few weeks. His year off has made him a new man with new techniques, he says.
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year, Prince Naz always entered the ring with loud music, clouds of smoke and much posing. How he'll enter the ring in March is anyone's guess. |
More surprisingly, he made his promise in calm and measured tones, never boasting, always crediting Barrera for his superiority on that night last April. In a rare glimpse of Naz-style humility, he acknowledged that he considered retiring forever after that beating, but he decided a real champ is the guy who can come back and defeat the man who took the title away. “I want to be remembered as the kid who boxed against the highest in his class, the kid who didn’t duck anybody,” he said.
Such sentiments are a welcome change from the mindless bluster he formerly allowed himself to deliver to the media in his annoying Northern England working class accent. His post-fight interviews always left me torn between admiration for his fighting skills and distaste for the uncontrolled mouthing off about his alleged legendary status.
To be fair, we really cannot expect sports heroes to be towering intellects. I know of only one fighter who is also a Mensa member. He is Nicky Piper and his style in the ring was as stiff as a wooden Indian. But at least his big brains told him to get out before it was too late, and he did. Piper still does television commentary--unfortunately about as stiff and wooden as his fighting style.
The upcoming London bout was to have taken place last November but Naz--an ardent Moslem--asked for a postponement out of respect for the victims of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. This was the first sign of maturity I had ever seen from the arrogant little scrapper, and it was long overdue. If this is now the real Naz, he has clearly undergone some counseling, or at least got himself a good PR adviser.
He calls himself “Prince” Naseem but that is only for show. He is the British-born son of poor Yemeni Arabs who emigrated to the gritty industrial town of Sheffield, England, 30 years ago and opened a convenience store. Naz, dubbed the “Little Prince,” by some of the London sportswriters, is nevertheless claimed by Yemen as a national hero. His mug even adorns a Yemeni postage stamp.
I have lived in London 20 years and watched this kid’s entire professional career develop. It has been one compelling confrontation after another. I even expanded my cable TV package by $25 a month to keep track of him on the various Sky Sports channels.
I wasn’t much of a fight fan until I got hooked on Naz, and thousands of other once-lukewarm fans were similarly drawn back to the game by him. So much of boxing had descended into farce. Naz was right to assert at his press conference that boxing needs him. There has been “no drama” in London boxing since he last appeared here, he said, and he’s right.
The attraction of this little shrimp is down to his highly athletic, almost contortionist, patterns of ducking and diving. It’s a style developed under Brendan Ingle, the Sheffield trainer who worked with him since he was eight. Ingle taught him to avoid punches by bending deeply from the waist, almost brushing the deck with his head, then surfacing where the other guy least expects him, firing wicked combinations, leaning back out of reach, and sloping off around the ring as a moving target.
Naz is a firm believer in the boxing mantra that not getting hit is at least as important as knowing how to hit--although he can certainly take a punch, and his hitting power is probably his greatest weapon.
Yes, he also has a long list of bad habits, including dropping his protection when he thinks he is winning, and showing no respect for his opponents. He mugs, he mutters insults. For laughs he will sometimes wind up like Popeye to unleash a punch. He taunts mercilessly and showboats with an imitation of the Ali Shuffle. All this is gone now, one hopes.
Naz never cooperated with the usual boxing promoters’ scam of picking no-hopers for their men in order to build up a strong record of wins. If he faced a few obviously weaker men it was usually because others were reluctant to fight him.
When he did have what looked like an easy match he displayed reckless insousiance before the fight. None of this head-in-the-towel meditation, or endless warming up by hitting the mitts with his trainer. I recall live coverage of him at the posh Grosvenor House hotel where he was staying before going into the ring for one of his shorter bouts. Just two hours before the bout he finally piled into the back of a BMW convertible with a bunch of his pals and raced off to the venue, laughing hysterically at the assembled media. He actually looked invincible. Or possibly mad. And he won easily.
Over his rise to the top featherweight ranks, some of the Latinos and blacks have underestimated him, grimly stalking him for a few rounds. But he took them out one by one--until Barrera’s’ excellent skills, mental focus and meticulous study of Naz videos unraveled the Little Prince. Unfortunately, the Naz camp had allowed a fly-on-the-wall BBC camera crew into his life for the two months prior, and all was caught on videotape. The documentary was aired in Britain a few weeks ago and Naz looked like one devastated little fighter.
Naz’s detractors, including former manager Frank Warren, who had the big plans for him in the U.S., were quick to say this was the end, that Naz would be unable to deal psychologically with the Barrera result. Indeed Naz had set himself up for a huge fall. In all his post-fight interviews up to that point he had acquired the habit of claiming no one could match his punching power, which he called a gift from Allah. It was irritating even to this admirer to hear him proclaim himself a legend time after tiresome time. I felt someone had to get this guy under control or he was going to lose his box office appeal very fast. Ali had been much the same in his early years but he came down to earth nicely as he matured.
In Vegas, Naz seemed to make his image worse by taking the mike before the fight and making a fanatical speech in Arabic, then translating it, asserting that there is only one god and he is Allah. It was an ugly display of religious intolerance. I know very few fans who weren’t secretly begging him to shut up and concentrate on getting out of there a winner. I also felt his sermon that night left him somewhat glassy-eyed and unfocused. He had a faraway look I was not used to seeing. Sure enough, Barrera had the edge on him that night.
When September 11 came and went, I wondered what effect the terrorist attack, with its radical Islam backdrop, might have on Naz. To my relief, he handled it very well by postponing the November bout. His brother Raith agreed at the recent London press conference that it was time to “soften” the religious element of his public persona.
I suspect in March he will rely less on Allah and more on his earthly skills to deal with Calvo.
My money says Naz in three.
© 2002 by Michael
Johnson.
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