Naseem Hamed seems to have calmed down, but that doesn’t mean he’s lost his bite, writes Kevin Mitchell
In his suite at Caesar’s Brookdale, a shiny resort in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania for newlyweds and others who prefer their entertainment in-house, Naseem Hamed is one lonely little geezer.
In fact, he is so lonely he can’t wait to see the British fight writers who will be going to Detroit this week to watch his featherweight world title bout against Mexican Cesar Soto. That’s lonely.
“I’m missing ya!” he says to whatever is the collective noun for six journalists huddled around a conference call in London. We are touched; the last – and second – time he went to box in the United States, against Irishman Wayne McCullough in October 1998, he had us for breakfast, lunch and tea. We were “scum”.
But last week the Naz fella was eerily mellow, so subdued he sounded as if he had been asleep for a week. A voice most comfortable in shout mode struggled up towards a whisper and carried none of its usual unpalatable menace. Maybe it was a stand-in.
“I can’t wait to see you,” he says, “because I’m in a place where I’m, like, on my own. Yes, I’m homesick. But somebody’s got to pay for this and I can only think of one person, and I’m afraid it has to be Cesar Soto.”
A year ago when the Prince finally deigned to arrive in Atlantic City to defend his World Boxing Organisation belt, he was in the closing moments of his 17 years with his trainer Brendan Ingle, as well as his previously amicable relationship with promoter Frank Warren, and he took out his frustrations on everyone but his father, Sal, a dignified man appalled by his son’s scattergun rudeness.
Naseem Hamed reduced Sky’s eager young reporter Adam Smith, a big fan, to a lachrymose wreck (which naturally has not deterred Sky Box Office from showing the fight); The Sun’s Colin Hart shrugged under his onslaught. He’d seen it all before – although few others could remember an uglier day.
Then an ordinary points victory over McCullough and a flawed late stoppage of the Yorkshireman Paul Ingle seemed to still an ego that had been allowed to grow too fast for too long. Hamed let his feud with his old mentor simmer and entrusted his future to his brother, Riath. He seemed to have learned some lessons about dealing with people not so obviously blessed from above as himself.
There was also the small matter of marriage to the down-to-earth hairdresser Ailsha and the birth of a baby son. Nowthe change in Hamed is unmistakable, striking even.
That is not to say he has lost his bite altogether; he wouldn’t be a fighter if he could not muster animosity over a few favourite demons – such as Ingle and Nigel Benn, who was drawn into resurrecting an old slanging match with Hamed while he was plugging his autobiography, The Dark Destroyer, recently. It was harmless, ego- driven stuff, but Hamed’s allegation that Benn lacked heart towards the end of his career had stung the former world super- middleweight champion, and he wouldn’t let it lie. When we talked it over at lunch later, Benn still had not calmed down. He retains a lot of ill-feeling for Hamed, and it’s mutual.
Nonetheless, Hamed gave the impression he is starting to grow up. If so, he might finally be ready to reach for the ring greatness he prematurely claimed for himself when he barnstormed into New York two years ago and declared he was a combination of “Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley”. The Gotham cynics watched his subsequent up-and-downer against Kevin Kelley and pronounced that Hamed boxed like Presley and sang like Ali.
Hamed’s boxing had fallen to pieces. Luckily for him, his heart and chin held out and his fists did the rest against a shot challenger. But the Yorkshireman knew how close he had come to losing it all. He will discover against Soto, the World Boxing Council champion, whether he has the hunger left to grace the Joe Louis Arena with a performance to match the setting.
Hamed says after four years as a world champion he is still “so willing to learn. You know you’re going to become a better fighter and you know you’re going to fight better opposition and prove yourself. So that’s a big motivator in itself.”
So are US perceptions of him. He claims to have won over the fans, but the ratings in US boxing magazines have seen Hamed slide consistently south in the past year or so. They have new heroes of their own now.
“I rate [the super-featherweight champion] Floyd Mayweather as a very good fighter … but there are other great fighters out there too, Erik Morales [who meets McCullough on the undercard at super- bantam], people like that, who are undefeated, who can come up to featherweight. I ain’t got a problem with Mayweather, but he is a division higher than me, and I prefer to be as strong as my opponent. When it’s time to move up, then it’s time to move up.”
This is the man who once harboured absurd ambitions of fighting Oscar de la Hoya, 6,5kg bigger; now he has doubts about Mayweather, just 2kg up. That’s no bad thing, but soon the money-makers will clamour for that fight. Only then will we be made aware of the full extent of Hamed’s ability.
He admits he needed to calm down. After the Kelley and McCullough fiasco, he was forced to take a serious look at his behaviour. Then Hamed met someone who was to have a more significant impact on his attitudes. “I met Buster in the same hospital in Mansfield that my wife gave birth,” Hamed says. “He had leukemia, so I went up to see him … It was just so sad.”
His name is Buster Brown and his father Stirling remembers the meeting between Hamed and his son as a particularly moving one. Father and 20-year-old son will fly out to Detroit for the fight, courtesy of the champ.
Coming face to face with something as real as impending death moved him, as it should. “It feels like they ain’t had no life whatsoever. And here’s me and a lot of other people so lucky in life and not realising what they’ve got – and not even thinkin’ about them or wanna even help them. Just wanna think about themselves and get on with their lives. It’s unbelievable to see what these people are going through. If I can make them a little bit happier, or their lives a little bit more pleasant …
“How can kids be at such an age and they’re just dying? And they don’t look like they’re dying, but they’re ill. I don’t want to be talking like this, but that’s the way I’m talking, that’s the way I’m feeling, you know? I’m just really happy that he’s gonna get to watch me fight before his time comes, before God gives him that time.”
With that, Hamed told us again how much he missed us and went to belt a bit of bark off some poor sucker in the gym. Spare a thought for Cesar Soto.
SuperSport will broadcast the fight between Naseem Hamed and Cesar Soto live at 1am on SuperSport2, and again at 3am on M-Net Super-Sport1. Mike Tyson versus Orlin Norris will be shown on Sunday at 4am on M- Net/SuperSport1