Gavin Evans BOXING
It was on a Sunday night, during a dinner party, that Brendan Ingle finally managed to reach me on my cellphone. He’d been leaving messages for me all over London, asking me to contact him as a matter of urgency.
Ingle – the Irishman who created “Prince” Naseem Hamed, serving as a father-figure, mentor, trainer, manager and bum-wiper for 17 years – is in the habit of phoning me for a gossip every few weeks, but this time he had a mission that required unusual brevity. After rapidly dispensing with the usual courtesies, he got down to business: “Can you pass a message from me to [Vuyani] Bungu’s trainer?” he asked. I told him this would be no problem – I was seeing Mzi Mnguni the next day.
“Tell him that if his lad is any good I know how he can beat Naz,” he announced before racing through his plan. “First, there’s his nose. It’s never been broken but it is unusually rigid and has no pliability. Naz goes to pieces when you catch him in the nose. Second, he has a bit of scar tissue above his left eye which we used to cover up with make-up. He should go for that. Does Bungu have a decent jab then?”
“One of the best. Accurate and invariably well-timed,” I replied.
“Well then, he should forget Naz’s body and just go for the nose and the eye. And also he should watch very carefully when they wrap Naz’s hands because he always uses extra tape and bandage because he’s so frightened of breaking them. And another thing, he cuts the join between the thumb and fingers of the glove to help him grip the ropes when he makes his entrance. If you can stop him doing this and getting his way with the wraps, he’ll be flustered.”
And so, dispensing with journalistic objectivity and putting patriotism before profit (from my past biographies of Hamed), I dutifully passed on the advice of Hamed’s estranged former trainer. Naturally, Bungu’s well-entrenched mentor was extremely interested and took careful note.
Not that they were without a high level of confidence before receiving this unsolicited fillip.
For those not familiar with his work, “Zee” is without any doubt Africa’s most successful trainer of professional boxing champions. Over the past decade he has produced from scratch six world champions of one alphabetic description or another, four of them holding substantial versions of this honour, and more South African trainers than any other trainer.
Perhaps his finest talent is for reading opponents and styles. Six years ago, for example, when we were returning from Texas after watching Kennedy McKinney beat Welcome Ncita for the second time, Mnguni called me over. “You know, Gavin, I saw enough tonight to know that Vuyani Bungu will beat McKinney.” At that point Bungu’s lowly status was that of Ncita’s chief sparring partner, and I told Mzi that the idea the understudy could succeed where the master had failed seemed absurd. The trainer shook his head. “You see, boxing is about styles and Vuyani has that high-pressure style that Kennedy can’t cope with. We’ll keep him on his back foot.”
I rolled my eyes, and Mzi smiled his knowing smile. “I’ll remind you of this conversation afterwards,” he said. Four months later Bungu pulled off one of 1994’s major upsets by dominating McKinney to win the International Boxing Federation world junior featherweight title on a wide decision, and went on to repeat the trick along the way to making 13 title defences.
The point of this tale is that I’ve learnt to treat Mnguni’s prognoses as something other than the hubris usually thrown my way by boxing trainers – and for five years now Mzi, and Bungu himself, have been going on about how “they” have the style to upset Hamed.
Information on Hamed’s nasal and occular vulnerabilities may help, but their strategy rests on rather less ephemeral foundations. Its essence involves controlling the middle distance and providing an accumulation of low-risk pressure.
Despite being 5cm shorter than Bungu, the 1,6m Hamed prefers to work at long range, throwing single power punches from unexpected angles, before pulling away again. His extraordinary strength, speed and reflexes, and his ability to hit harder than any featherweight who has ever lived, have allowed him to overcome a variety of styles with this apparently simplistic approach.
The boxer with the best hope of beating him may well be one with the technical knowledge, speed and particularly defensive prowess to nullify most of Hamed’s long-distance strikes without running.
Despite his lack of serious artillery, Bungu is extremely well equipped in each of these departments. With his subtle head movement and high guard he is extremely adept at slipping and parrying punches, and yet he is also an aggressive boxer who presses opponents by constantly moving forward behind a stiff, persistant and accurate jab.
To add to Bungu’s chances is the fact that Hamed is undoubtedly a boxer in decline. He has started to struggle with opponents he would have played with in his brilliant youth. The main reason is that he has lost a fraction of a second in terms of reaction time, which means he is far easier to hit than before. It’s probably all a consequence of fighting only twice a year, rather than six times a year, and of only training for fights rather than all year round.
The Hamed of old – the one perfected by Ingle – relied on reflexes alone to get out of trouble, but to maintain that facility you can’t afford to take months off from work. The contemporary version – trained by the American maestro Emmanuel Steward – is more conventional, using a higher guard and fewer lunging shots, but despite these modifications one senses a vulnerability that was never evident five years ago. Old habits, like holding his head too high, dropping his guard when within range and throwing leather when off balance, re-emerge at inconvenient moments and his internal radar no longer functions at a speed which allows him to get away with such elementary mistakes.
Make no mistake, Hamed has trained hard for this fight. If nothing else, his battle to get down from his walk-around weight of 70kg to the 57,2kg he needs to reach by the time of the weigh-in, 28 hours before the fight, requires intense effort. But he has also worked harder than usual on studying the style of his opponent – surveying videos of Bungu’s battles, and retaining the services of three South Africans familiar with Bungu’s style, including his one-time stablemate Jackie Gunguluza, a former South African featherweight champion.
With unaccustomed modesty, he admitted he was not quite up to speed, while nevertheless insisting the 2000 version of The Prince was the best yet: “It’s hard to adapt after 18 years of training in a certain gym and then going to another trainer,” he said. “But before I was only training at 50% and now I am close to 87% and I believe 100% will come after a period of time.”
That may sound upbeat, but behind such prognoses one senses a man at odds with the rigours of the spartan life – one with an eye on the way out. “All I’ve had in my life since the age of seven is boxing,” he said. “I’ve got a family now. I didn’t see time flying when I was young. I have to do what I have to do now. There won’t be many years left.”
I’d like to think that a dent on the nasal bridge, a slit of the eye, a crack of his left hand could shift the odds, but even such fortuitous circumstance may not be enough.
Hamed’s lateral vision, his crippling power, unnatural strength and ability to turn a fight with a single deft manoeuvre are probably still too much for any other featherweight in the world.
Bungu may give Hamed some extremely uncomfortable moments, he may even last the distance, but when it’s over I do not believe he will be crowned the new champion.