Pugilism’s paradise too damn real

London’s East End is the epicentre of boxing even though the sport has been Americanised to within an inch of its proper place in the public consciousness.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

PARADISE, they called it. What the hell were they thinking? Paradise Row is a short, narrow cobbled lane fronting a parade of unusually grand old houses in too damn real Bethnal Green in the depths of London’s East End. It is bordered by Paradise Gardens, a small, treed, flowery green patch that has been a public space since 1678. 

Bethnal Green Road runs along one side, Cambridge Heath Road along the other. Two busier, gnarlier streets more hostile to everyone accept motorists in one of the busiest, gnarliest, most hostile cities on earth to everyone accept motorists would be difficult to find.  

Thousands bustle through and past the scene every day, many to or from the adjacent underground station. Commuters stream into and out of the station’s multiple maws, ignoring the homeless and the hopeless strewn among them as they stride on layers of filth on the pavements, streets and steps. This is not a happy place, particularly when winter bites through every layer of protection you put in its way.

Welcome, pilgrim, to paradise. If you’re a boxing person, that is: you are bang in the middle of a district that has a greater claim to the title of the historical epicentre of the global fight game than Madison Square Garden, the MGM Grand, the Orient Theatre or anywhere else. That remains true even though boxing has been Americanised to within an inch of its proper place in the public consciousness. Blame, among others, Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather junior, “Rocky”, Bert Sugar, Michael Buffer, and the cruel plastic trench of pay-per-view television.

But before all that came the bare-knuckle era, in which the first English champion, James Figg, died 76 years before the first American king of the ring, Tom Molineaux, was crowned. By then the English title had changed hands 23 times. Molineaux was born into slavery in Virginia in 1784 and, having won his freedom, moved to New York and then to England, where in September 1811 his challenge for Tom Cribb’s England heavyweight championship played out on a raised platform in front of a crowd of 20 000. Cribb prevailed, but it took him 35 rounds.

That’s not the only American nod to the grandaddyhood of British boxing. For instance, in 1813 Pierce Egan, born in England of Irish parents, published the first of the five volumes of Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism. He called boxing “the sweet science of bruising”. If that sounds familiar it’s because unarguably the finest book on any sport yet written is titled The Sweet Science. It was published in 1956 by A.J. Liebling, who wrote magnificently on war, the press, food and boxing for the most highbrow of all magazines, The New Yorker. Liebling had the good manners to pay tribute to Egan, whom he idolised, as “the greatest writer about the ring who ever lived”. 

Among those Egan chronicled was a man who lived at No. 3 Paradise Row, and who perhaps thought his address would bring him contentment. In his day he was the best fighter in the business. He burned with such anger even after he retired that he would get into fights on his way to watch other people fight. A circular blue plaque now hangs above what was, for more than 30 years, his front door. The inscription: “Daniel Mendoza. Pugilist. 1764-1836. English Champion who proudly billed himself as ‘Mendoza the Jew’, lived here when writing The Art of Boxing. He invented the jab and was the first boxer to move sideways in the ring and to duck and block punches. Until then it was considered cowardly not to stand still and let fly until one fighter went down. And stayed down. These innovations helped Mendoza win the heavyweight title despite standing only 1.7 metres tall and weighing just 73 kilogrammes. He became a sensation, a subject for poets, portrait painters and songwriters. His celebrity grew to the point where he was heralded as “the first jew to talk to King George III”. He originally met his majesty when he was merely his highness, the prince of Wales — a firm fan who arranged at least one of Mendoza’s fights, bet vast sums on him, paid him bonuses after lucrative winnings, and shook his hand in public; unheard of for so prominent a personage in those archly anti-semitic times. You could call him the royal promoter.    

If you stand on Mendoza’s doorstep and look left you might, skyline permitting in a city where buildings go up almost as fast as they come down, catch a glimpse of York Hall just more than 250 metres away down Old Ford Road. Opened in 1929, it offered impoverished East Enders unimagined amenities: two public swimming pools, Russian and Turkish baths, and a laundry for all. But it has long been better known as the home of British boxing, which was first staged there in the 1950s.

It was at York Hall in January 1990 that Lennox Lewis earned a second-round technical knockout over Noel Quarless in the seventh fight of a professional career then barely seven months old. Joe Calzaghe needed only 85 seconds to dispense with Frank Minton there on Valentine’s Day 1995. David Haye made his debut at York Hall in December 2002 and fought there four more times. Carl Froch reeled off consecutive victories in his first four pro bouts there, all in 2002, and returned three times after that. All are British and all became world champions. 

Rightward from Mendoza’s doorstep not 200 metres down Bethnal Green Road is W. English and Son Funeral Directors, known locally as “the undertakers of the underworld”. The firm presided over the internments of Charles, Reggie and Ronnie Kray between 1995 and 2000. The Kray brothers, in particular twins Reggie and Ronnie, were vicious 1960s gangsters who have been undeservedly mythologised as local heroes far beyond the streets of the neighbourhood that spawned them. In March 1969 they were jailed for at least 30 years for the murder of two other gangsters. That was a far cry from December 11, 1951, less than two months after their 18th birthdays, when the twins appeared on the same bill in lightweight six-rounders at no less a venue than the Royal Albert Hall.

The Krays learnt part of their rough trade a kilometre away from Mendoza’s place at Repton Boys Club on Cheshire Street, which has been around since 1884 and is still considered the best producer of amateur champions in Europe. One of the Repton’s more recent graduates, 2000 Olympic gold medallist Audley Harrison, lost a heavyweight world title bid against Haye in November 2010.

The gritty red-brick, white tiled clubhouse — which was a bathhouse in the Victorian era — featured in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In The Repton, a 2013 short film by Alasdair McLellan, former member and hardman actor Ray Winstone tears up when he says: “You got to meet people that you wouldn’t necessarily meet in the street, because everyone kept their self to their self. So you learnt something about morality, about respect, and about discipline. And that will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life. I learnt my basics and my thoughts on life in this gym; in this gaff here. And that’s why I can never forget about this club. It’s in me.” 

You can’t fail to notice British boxers currently, what with Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury holding all five versions of the heavyweight title between them. The most keenly anticipated confirmed bouts in that division in the world so far this year were Daniel Dubois’ showdown with Joe Joyce, Dillian Whyte taking on Alexander Povetkin, Oleksandr Usyk versus Dereck Chisora and Joshua’s fight against Kubrat Pulev. Dubois, Whyte, Chisora and Joshua are all British, and all of those clashes are scheduled for London or Manchester. That’s if the Coronavirus doesn’t knock them out of the ring, as has happened with the postponement of Dubois-Joyce from April 11 to July 11.

The third act of the gripping Fury-Deontay Wilder drama was tentatively scheduled for Las Vegas on July 18 before it too was moved by the virus, possibly to October, and the one, the only, the super fight — Fury versus Joshua — is quietly on the cards for December. Not so fast. Fury is in the ESPN camp and Joshua is with DAZN. Another obstacle is that Fury is promoted by American Bob Arum, who has formed a firm partnership with British veteran Frank Warren. Joshua’s promoter is Barry Hearn, a brash young Brit whose stable features 14 other world champions — among them Cecilia Braekhus and Katie Taylor, the undisputed welterweight and lightweight queens.

But the unprecedented riches offered by the prospect of the two most marketable boxers in the world — both of them British — touching gloves in the centre of the ring, in front of 90 000 at Wembley Stadium, say, will force compromise. You could call that paradise.

First published by New Frame.

How football explains the Brexit-backing English

They feel more authentically represented by the clubs they support than by the team who call themselves England, and even though two thirds of Premier League players are foreign.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

WEMBLEY was sold out on Saturday, welcoming 85 201 people to take a seat under the vast arch that swoons over the famous steel and concrete edifice.

They weren’t there to watch a Premier League game or Gareth Southgate’s team. Nonetheless they were on a peculiarly English quest.

At stake was the Football League Trophy, which involves 48 clubs from the country’s third and fourth tiers of professionals along with 16 under-21 sides from the Premier League and the level below that.

Portsmouth were one of the teams in Saturday’s final, Sunderland t’other, and a grand old game ensued. Pompey led 2-1 at the end of regulation time, the Black Cats equalised with 75 seconds of the six minutes of additional time left on the clock, and Portsmouth won 5-4 on penalties.

It was all quite different from any match that could be played at Fratton Park, Portsmouth’s bleak railway shed of a home ground, which holds 21 100 and opened for business in 1898. Sunderland’s Stadium of Light is a younger, much better looking venue — it’s been around since 1997 and can accommodate 49 000 — but it isn’t Wembley, stage of the great and the good and the place where football dreams come to die and live.

If something looks odd about those numbers, that’s because it is. Add a full house at Fratton Park to how many you could get into the Stadium of Light and the answer is 70 100. Or 14 921 fewer than there were at Wembley on Saturday. 

Weirder yet, there were more fans at the home of English football at the weekend than there were at England’s last home game — 82 575 saw the Czech Republic hammered 5-0 in a Euro 2020 qualifier on March 22.

Not everyone from Portsmouth or Sunderland who wants to watch those teams play could fit into the teams’ grounds. Fair enough. But how come 2 446 more people, presumably mostly from those places, not only bought tickets for Saturday’s game but made journeys, of 120 kilometres from Portsmouth and 456 from Sunderland, to London compared to those who came to see the national team?

The answer looms loudly from the front page of every major newspaper in the United Kingdom every day of every week, and is almost always the first topic of conversation whenever you turn on the BBC.

It’s Brexit, and football explains it better than a parliament filled with politicians whose braying, bumptious, bellicose behaviour makes what happens in the stands look civilised by comparison. Simply, the English feel more authentically represented by the clubs they shout for than by the team who call themselves England.

In the case of clubs like Portsmouth and Sunderland that support is defined geographically, and therefore politically.

Portsmouth voted 58.1% in favour of leaving the European Union (EU) in the 2016 referendum. In Sunderland the majority, also wanting to leave, was 61.3%. In London, 750 287 opted to remain. That’s more than three times the number of total votes, on both sides of the equation, in Portsmouth and Sunderland combined.

According to the 2011 census 84% of Portsmouth’s population identified as white British, a figure that rose to 93.6% in Sunderland. London? Only 44.9%.

The way the referendum vote unfolded was, then, no accident. Just as there is no co-incidence in the fact that most immigrants are black or brown, and neither that a country that went from controlling the world’s slave trade to presiding over the planet’s biggest and most powerful colonial empire wants to blame other people for problems it created; problems that are now washing up on its own shores.

Some people in these parts seem to think they still rule the world and do not at all consider themselves part of a society that stole millions of bodies and souls from other places, along with the places themselves.

The brutal truth of the overall referendum result — that 51.9% voted to leave the EU — is that white people in the United Kingdom would prefer their country to be paler than it has become thanks to the EU’s immigration policies. We know this because much of the leave campaign’s focus was on “ending freedom of movement”, the Orwellian phrase that gets anti-immigrant right wingers excited about the whiter shade of pale their pubs might be in a future in which they “take back control”.

  “I have never been more proud of the city of Portsmouth as I am today,” Donna Jones, the leader of the city council, said. “Portsmouth roared like a lion on June 23 in one of the most historic votes the city has ever seen.”

There are three lions on the England team’s shirts, but Jones probably wasn’t talking about them: Raheem Sterling, who claimed a hattrick against the Czechs, is from Jamaica.

Another lion stares out from the crest of the English Premier League even though the competition isn’t even halfway English. Only 165 of the 498 players on the books of the 20 clubs are home grown. That means 333 — or 66.9% of the total — are from corners of fields far from England. Twenty-one players are Scottish or Welsh and two are from Northern Ireland, so 312 aren’t even from the United Kingdom.

Maybe Wembley being sold out on Saturday was a delusion. Closer to the truth is that it was filled with deluded sellouts.

The future of boxing is an articulate, intelligent, empathetic kid from Watford

Either Jeremy Corbyn or Anthony Joshua would make a more impressive prime minister than the badly taxidermied pigeon known as Theresa May. Less certain is, if the contest was between Corbyn and Joshua, who would win.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

SATURDAY night’s alright for fighting, and sure enough just after 10pm five young guns in hoodies and trainers cut across Bethnal Green Road.

Their reflections fleeted daggerishly in the pocks and puddles of what the Observer would call, the next morning, “a foul and fetid north London evening”. Here in the east, where the Kray brothers once made offers no-one dared refuse, people don’t flinch at wicked wind that brings the cold needling of autumn rain.

Through the promising door of Charrington’s Noted Ales and Stouts the five ducked, one after the other, a train looking for pain. Seconds later they re-emerged into the night: no fight here.

The same sad thing was true at the Shakespeare — despite a sign on the wall outside advertising “Real Ales, Live Entertainment, Sky Sports, Free Wifi” — and back across the street at the Sun, where hipsters hunched, some of them no doubt over a drink the blackboard heralded as, indeed, Paine — “Bourbon, Rock N Rye, Cassis, Lemon, Chocolate Peanut Butter Doughnut Syrup”.

There were two televisions at the Bethnal Green Tavern, neither of them turned on. A bloke billed as “DJ Monkey Stomp Blues”, but who looked too much like someone’s drunk uncle for that not to be true, was croaking and creaking through the worst version of “Lady in Red” this side of Chris de Burgh’s already awful original.

A barman looked up from drying pint glasses to offer, “Try the Salmon and Ball. They’re the only place around here showing it.”

But that meant a trudge of maybe 15 minutes through the foul fetidness. And they were probably into the third round by now.

At Wembley in north London, that is, where Anthony Joshua and Alexander Povetkin were dancing in the dazzle of their heavyweight world title bout.

The fast, furious five, the spell of their urgency snapped by too many dead ends, disappeared into the darkness, dejected.

I knew how they felt. For weeks I had been trying to be accredited to cover the fight, without success. Boxing isn’t a sport. It is slick, skillful supervised suffering, and just as slick and skillful avoidance of that suffering, presented for our entertainment; a thing that would have no place in a more civilised world. Happily, our world is not that civilised.

It follows that attending a big fight as a reporter is not a matter, as it is with more banal pursuits like football, rugby and cricket, of telling the authorities you’ll be there.

In this case the authorities were the British Boxing Board of Control. Contact the promoter, they said. Fine. But the promoter’s website didn’t offer a way of cracking the accreditation nod.

So I ended up banging on the inbox of someone I had had no contact with but had read, with admiration and respect, for years: Kevin Mitchell of the Guardian and the Observer. He kindly passed on an email address, which yielded the fact that fight night accreditation was no longer possible but that fight week accreditation might yet be if I tried another email address.

Suits me, I thought. Pre-fight press conferences are three-penny operas, and covering them is often far more fun than writing about the fight itself. Alas, it turned out I was also late for those.

So there I was, standing on Bethnal Green Road somewhere past 10 o’clock on a snarling Saturday night, looking for somewhere to do the next best thing than be at the fight. And failing.

As a member of an older, simpler, perhaps less easily dissuaded vintage than the not so famous five, I went back to my flat a little further up Bethnal Green Road and did something that, in this era of anything analogue anathema, is radical: I turned on the radio. Digital, of course.

There they were, finally — Joshua and Povetkin in all their aural glory, commentators jabbing verbally and uppercutting their exclamations, and the rollercoasting primal growl of 75 000 spectators, some of whom had paid the equivalent of R37 000 for a plastic poncho. And a ringside seat.

We were in round four, and soon learned that Povetkin had bloodied Joshua’s nose in the second and that the Russian, to the chagrin of all present, was giving rather a better account of himself than had been hoped.

But he was out of there in the seventh, first felled by the precision bombing of Joshua’s left and right hooks, then by the kind of hacking you might see from a gimp armed with a meat cleaver. Only some of it was pretty but all of it was effective.

“Oh, Anthony Joshua,” the crowd warbled to the same tune that Brits have been singing Jeremy Corbyn’s name for more than a year.

Either of them would make a more impressive prime minister than the badly taxidermied pigeon known as Theresa May. Less certain is, if the contest was between Corbyn and Joshua, who would win.

Joshua has drawn close to 400 000 paying customers to his last five fights, and he has given them what they want in the shape of victories — the first of them over the unlovely, unloved and unlovable Wladimir Klitschko.

If the Ukrainian is worth remembering at all it’s for how close to the brink of disaster he took boxing’s relevance and credibility; heavyweight boxing in particular. That Joshua has been able to rebuild those ruins in just less than 17 months is an unmitigated triumph.

Writing in the Guardian on Friday, Mitchell described him as “the No. 1 individual box-office draw in the history of British sport. Nobody comes close”.

Damn straight. Watford-born of Nigerian heritage, Joshua is a vision of what Britain could be if it gets its act together — which is by no means certain in the wake of the Brexit bullet the country is poised to put through its own head.

Articulate, intelligent and blessed with an uncommon empathy, among the marks of Joshua’s success is that lesser, nastier rivals don’t have a good word to say about him.

Some of them don’t want to hear a word from him, either: Tyson Fury, not half the fighter Joshua is and less than half the man, has blocked him on Twitter.

Now that would earn the respect of young guns spoiling for a place to watch Anthony Joshua fight.

Joshua v Povetkin knocks football off British back pages

Amid all the hype over Anthony Joshua in the British papers it’s easy to forget that Saturday’s fight is a contest, not a coronation.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in London

CHELSEA and Liverpool are unbeaten after five rounds of this year’s Premier League and Liverpool pipped Paris Saint-Germain in a five-goal, 90-minute highlights package of a Champions League game on Tuesday.

But Wednesday’s sport sections in some of the most football focused newspapers in the world saved a big chunk of space for an even bigger bloke.

He’ll be in action at Wembley on Saturday, but there won’t be a football in sight. There also won’t be any diving to try and con the referee. Quite the contrary, unless the fix is in.

“Anthony Joshua slackens timekeeping after 200 rounds of boxing,” was Wednesday’s headline in the Guardian.

“How Joshua creates his knockout power,” quoth the Times.

But you aren’t going to keep football out of the picture for long in this country, as the Daily Telegraph reminded us: “Anthony Joshua studies Cristiano Ronaldo training regime to try and extend his career.”

The tabloids trained their long lenses and short sentences on what Joshua eats — “five eggs in the morning, among other food … two chicken breasts at lunch and two fillet steaks at dinner” along with a “morning and bedtime snack”  — the fact that he has “shared snaps of first and current trainers”, and a warning that he will concentrate on “winning rather than being entertaining”.

You had to pick fairly carefully through all that to discover Joshua would not be trying to live up to Alex Ferguson’s view on Dennis Wise: “He could start a row in an empty house.”

For one thing, the house will be anything but empty, what with a crowd of 80 000 expected.

For another, the row will be about nothing less than the International Boxing Federation, International Boxing Organisation (IBO), World Boxing Association and World Boxing Organisation versions of the heavyweight championship …

“ … of the wooooorld!”

Thank you, Michael Buffer. Who will, of course, be in attendance. The presence of outrageously tanned, silver-haired, jut-jawed ring announcer who might have happened freshly off the set of a soap opera is the seal of authenticity for any fight that hopes to pass itself off as a big deal.

For still another thing, there’ll be someone else in the ring. And we don’t mean the ref. Alexander Povetkin, who is 10 centimetres shorter than Joshua, loses out by 17 centimetres in terms of reach, and has knocked out 26% fewer of his opponents, will also turn up.

Amid all the hype over Joshua, a Watford lad, in the British papers it’s easy to forget that Saturday’s shindig is a contest, not a coronation.

And that Povetkin won’t come to the ring as fodder for Joshua’s booming punches but as the IBO champion and a boxer who has lost only one of his 35 bouts.

According to the promoter, Eddie Hearn, the Russian represents plenty more than that: “Povetkin has got not just his team but the country and, dare I say, [Vladimir Putin’s] government behind him. They are all involved.

“This is like a mission from them to beat Britain and for a Russian to become the world heavyweight champion.

“He and his team know how important this is for them and for Povetkin nationally. This is not just about him personally winning a title; this is a major, major thing if he could stick one on a Brit.

“You know that level of government is involved in Povetkin so there will be plenty of instruction, well wishes and calls of intent from them saying: ‘Come on, this is important for our country.’”

All that said — way too much by Hearn — Povetkin is not expected to win. Instead, he is placeholder for a far more eagerly anticipated, as yet uncertain showdown between Joshua and Deontay Wilder. 

Wilder, and American, holds the World Boxing Council title and negotiations for a fight with another Brit, Tyson Fury, which is tentatively set for November or December, will start next week.

So a lot needs to happen before the posters for “Joshua versus Fury” go up around London. But what a prospect that would be; the “Battle of Britain”, and all that. And this time at least 90 000 bums will be on Wembley’s seats.

We’ll all be ready to rumble, won’t we, Mr Buffer.

Boxing needs Joshua vs Wilder like vampires need blood

Fans deserve a better candidate for “Fight of the Century” than the vegan feast that was Floyd Mayweather vs Manny Pacquiao

Times SELECT

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

BETWEEN them they’ve stepped through the ropes as professionals 61 times and gone the distance only twice. Neither has yet lost.

One stands 1.98 metres tall and calls Watford in Hertfordshire home. The other tops out at 2.01 metres and hails from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

They own an Olympic medal each, having won gold in London in 2012 and bronze in Beijing in 2008.

“AJ” is the unimaginative nickname of one. The other calls himself “The Bronze Bomber” with reference to his Olympic gong. And Joe Louis, of course.

One is the best active heavyweight in the world according to The Ring magazine, the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board and Boxrec.com. The other is No. 2 on the same lists.

They are Anthony Oluwafemi Olaseni Joshua and Deontay Leshun Wilder, and they are the closest thing heavyweight boxing has to the glory days when giants like Louis — “The Brown Bomber” — Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Larry Holmes roamed the ring.

So fight fans have something special to savour in the shape of Joshua vs Wilder, coming soonish to a sold-out, pay-per-viewed to the hilt arena not near you, fellow South Africans.

It’s early days yet in what will become a soap opera of bluff and bluster long before a glove is laced, but on April 10 Joshua said he would make Wilder “a very good offer” that included the option of a rematch. Yank or not, Joshua favoured Wembley or Cardiff as the venue for the initial clash.

Boxing needs this fight like a vampire needs blood. For one thing, it’s high time the heavyweight division stopped being a sad, slobbish joke. For another, the fans deserve a better candidate for “Fight of the Century” than the vegan feast that was Floyd “Unhittable, Unlikeable, Uncredible” Mayweather vs Manny “Overrated, Overblown, Over the Hill” Pacquiao in Las Vegas on May 2, 2015. For still another, when last has a high-profile boxer enthusiastically wanted to mix it with someone who could actually beat him? Michael Buffer is getting ready to rumble as we speak.

Joshua first became what is these days unseriously called a world champion by knocking out the previously unbeaten Charles Martin in the second round in London on April 9, 2016 to earn the International Boxing Federation title.

He has since added to his mantlepiece the versions of the same party hat — let’s not call it a crown — proffered by the International Boxing Organisation, the World Boxing Association and the World Boxing Organisation.

After laying out Martin, Joshua has reeled off five victories — four of them inside the distance, and one of those easily 2017’s fight of the year. And for every year since 1989 and Sugar Ray Leonard vs Thomas Hearns.

Wembley Stadium was crammed with 90 000 fans on April 29 last year, and Joshua’s opponent was the man whose presence in the ring proved how pathetic heavyweight boxing had become: Wladimir Klitschko, a fighter so robotically boring he spat not blood but 3-In-One oil between rounds, who knew he was too dull to live up to his sexier given name of Volodymyr Volodymyrovych Klychko, who at 41 was and had been a “world champ” of one flavour or other since 2000.

His brother, Vitali and equally indistinguishable as a fighter from a bowl of cold porridge, had won his first so-called “world title” the year before. He sullied a ring with his lack of presence for the last time in Moscow on September 8, 2012, when his ninth WBC title defence was stopped in the fourth because too much of the red stuff was leaking from Manuel Charr’s slashed eyebrow.

About the only interesting thing the Klitschko klutzes could have done was fight each other. They didn’t.

So the bad dream that was the Klitschko years seemed to be over on November 28, 2015 in Dusseldorf, where Tyson Fury — now there’s a sexy name — won a unanimous decision over the unloved and unlovable Ukrainian in a miserable drunk wedding dance of a fight.

Still, there was hope that Klitschko had, not a decade too soon, been knocked the hell out of boxing.

Except that Tyson agreed to a rematch before announcing, on October 3, 2016, a week after ESPN reported that he had tested positive for cocaine, “Boxing is the saddest thing I ever took part in, all a pile of shit, I’m the greatest, champ; I’m also retired …” This he said, like all the classy guys do, on Twitter.

But, unhappily, Tyson was right and we weren’t rid of Klitschko after all. There he was, reinstated as a champion and having his batteries checked and his nuts and bolts tightened and being hoisted by an invisible forklift into the ring at Wembley on April 29 to face Joshua, who had reeled off 18 straight KOs or TKOs, most of them against people who would have been fired on day one if boxing was a proper job.

Then a wonderful thing happened: Joshua flattened the robot with a furious flurry in the fifth. Only for the machine to come whirring back to life and deck Joshua in the sixth. But, in the 11th, Joshua flicked Klitschko’s off switch twice, putting him on the canvas both times. He was flailing away at this parked 4×4 on the ropes when the referee, David Fields, the gods bless him, intervened to end one of boxing’s most forgettable eras.

At 32 Wilder is four years older than Joshua and has had 40 fights, almost twice as many as the younger man’s 21.

He doesn’t have a Klitschko in his kitbag, but he does have a hard-fought 10th-round TKO win over Luis Ortiz in Brooklyn last month.

Ortiz, 12.5 kilogrammes heavier, seven years older and with — he says — 369 amateur fights behind him in his native Cuba to add to his 30 pro bouts, went down in the fifth.

But he rose to rock Wilder with a wicked left in the seventh, which he was lucky to escape on his feet what with the referee — that man Fields again — looking keen to call a halt.

Cunningly, Wilder used the eighth and ninth to recuperate, tagging Ortiz with a stinging right towards the end of the latter.

That set up the finalé, and Ortiz was floored twice in the 10th. The second time Fields jumped in and cried mercy.

We have, then, in Joshua and Wilder men who don’t just come to fight but come to fight watchable fights. Given that they are high calibre fighters besides, that makes them precious.

There is a suspicion among boxing’s denizens that Wilder may be the tougher of the two, and maybe only because he has gone 123 rounds to Joshua’s 77. And because Joshua has done more flashy talking than Wilder, who tends to shut up and fight. Or sound like he should when he doesn’t.

They are living different versions of what might be called the boxing life.

Joshua, a former bricklayer, has had brushes with the law for speeding, possession of marijuana and for what he called “fighting and other crazy stuff”.

Wilder has three children with his former wife, Jessica Scales-Wilder and is expecting a fourth with his fiancé, Telli Swift, a star of “WAGS Atlanta”.

That said, Joshua is a keen chess player and a part owner of an upmarket gym in larney Chiltern Street in Marylebone, London.

Wilder was all set to be a gridiron or basketball star at the University of Alabama when his daughter was diagnosed with spina bifida. Instead he went to a less prestigious but nearby community college, where sport was nowhere near as important.

Maybe boxing and boxers are changing: these days Vitali Klitschko is the mayor of Kiev.