Can boxing ‘addiction’ ever be cured? Pain of retiring explored in new Sky documentary

Sky Sports’s new documentary is stacked with sobering soundbites. In one scene, boxing coach Joe Gallagher recalls hearing a mother ask her son: “Are all the lows worth that one high?” The answer, of course, was “yes”. As Gallagher puts it: “Everyone wants their own Rocky story.”

But as Sky explores, that doesn’t always mean a rousing underdog story. Rocky‘s sequels showed Sylvester Stallone’s character struggling with retirement, and this is the premise of The Final Round.

Releasing on Friday, the film features interviews with former world champions like Johnny Nelson and Josh Warrington, while Gallagher and Dominic Ingle are among the coaches to speak, promoter Eddie Hearn features, and commentator Andy Clarke weaves together themes of “addiction”, sacrifice, and ego.

Former world champion Johnny Nelson (Getty)

The documentary even includes one of the final interviews with the late, great Ricky Hatton, whose internal fights after retiring matched any that he had in the ring.

Many boxers tell themselves, “‘I’ve got one more good fight in me,'” Hatton says. “Nine times out of 10, you haven’t. That was the case with me.”

Indeed, in 2022, a 42-year-old Hatton boxed Marco Antonio Barrera in an exhibition, and he was even due for another before his untimely death last September.

“Ego never leaves a fighter, and that’s the problem,” Nelson says. It outlasts the “fire”, he adds, shrewdly touching on an unfair fight between the two emotions.

Yet it’s not just about fire and ego; a question of identity arises, as does a fear of life post-boxing. Retirement is “frightening”, says heavyweight veteran Dave Allen, who reversed his own exit from the sport. “Apart from ‘Dad’, I’m just a boxer. I’m not even David, the normal human being.”

Warrington, whose boxing future is up in the air at the time of writing, explains: “I wake up on fight day and it’s like everything’s brighter, everything smells better, I’m more alert… that’s an unreal feeling.” And then the kicker: “Once that stops, you’ll never feel it again.”

Does this explain Tyson Fury’s five false retirements? Perhaps. They get their own spotlight in the documentary, as do comebacks that occur decades after retirement: for example, a 58-year-old Mike Tyson facing a 27-year-old YouTuber, Jake Paul, in 2024.

The film touches on how boxers don’t just miss the buzz of fight night, but also the camaraderie of their gyms, while the financial turmoil that has afflicted many fighters gets significant screen time.

Josh Warrington was expected to retire after losing to Leigh Wood in February, but he is yet to make up his mind (Getty)

Most boxers need a second job, and promoter and manager Steve Wood explains: “Ninety per cent of the fighters I look after are not earning enough to pay tax. I’ve had a couple of world champions; they’re the only two likely to be able to retire comfortably.”

In an interview with the Independent, Nelson touches on all of these topics, as well as his plans to create a proper pension scheme for boxers – something his own promoter, Eddie’s father Barry Hearn, attempted unsuccessfully.

Barry tried putting a small percentage of boxer’s purses towards a pension, but fighters’ distrust and/or short-term thinking thwarted the plan. Nelson, who toyed with his own comeback nine years after retiring, reflects on receiving a £97,000 pension from Hearn several years ago, inspiring the 59-year-old.

Nelson wants to create a scheme that would pay £2,000 into a pension for each boxer every year, as long as the fighter competes two-to-three times annually and puts 5 per cent of their purse into the same pension – with the money coming from a combination of TV companies, government grants, and private sponsorship. Nelson has spoken to the British Boxing Board of Control, figures in parliament, Scottish Widows, and potential financiers while trying to get the scheme off the ground.

“If I was a parent and my son wanted to box, I wouldn’t want him to box for a career, because they’ve got nothing to show for it,” Nelson says. “There’s no aftercare. Everybody’s running for the trees, nobody wants to take responsibility for the fighters creating the entertainment.

A 42-year-old Ricky Hatton (left) boxing in an exhibition match, four years before his death (PA)

“The amount of household names I could tell you that are absolutely on their ass, they’ve got nothing, and that financial pressure on top of the other effects of boxing has accumulated over the years. How can your mental health be stable? How can it be?”

In general, Nelson articulates the existence of a boxer with ease.

“That animalistic instinct we have, there’s nothing you can adapt it to in everyday life – not an office or anything like that, because it’s barbaric,” he says. “It’s a very lonely existence. Your wife, brother, mother, sister don’t get it. The aches and pains are lonely, the thought processes are lonely.

“You do it first for the love of it, then money comes into it, then ups and downs, so we still do it – but resentfully. You’ve not got time to have a full-time job, so [you may think]: ‘People see me on a dizzy high, and then I’ve got to go and work on a building site. God, I’ve got to deal with the shame of that.’

“You’re resentful of how human nature can change: when you retire, people no longer look up to you as an amazing fighter. ‘He’s overweight, he’s not who he was.’ They talk to you like they talk to anybody, whereas when you’re a fighter, they talk to you with respect.”

Nelson (pictured in 2001) retired from boxing in 2005 but flirted with a comeback nine years later (Getty)

Nelson is now one of the most-thoughtful and respected pundits in boxing, but he could not have foreseen this future while immersed in his past.

“I thought boxing was the only option I had,” he reflects. “I left school with the reading and writing ability of a 10-year-old. I wasn’t thick – I just wasn’t academically astute – but I thought I was. I’d got nothing on paper to say, ‘Johnny is really good with people,’ so that wisdom doesn’t get you a job. What gets you a job is a diploma, work experience. So, panic set in. I could have easily ended up in prison.”

As The Final Round shows, boxing can be its own kind of prison, but a champion who escaped relatively early and safely was Anthony Crolla, who retired on a win just before turning 33.

“You can’t let boxing take more from you than you take from boxing,” he says astutely in the film. If only it were that simple.

Watch ‘The Final Round’ on Sky Sports Main Event at 10.30pm on Friday 31 July, or on demand, and on Sky Sports’sYouTube channel from Saturday 1 August.

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