Читать книгу Hard Road to Glory - How I Became Champion of the World - Johnny Nelson - Страница 7
ОглавлениеEven as I lay sobbing on the canvas, my brain was telling me this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This wasn’t the way winners reacted. I’d visualised the moment so many times in the build-up to fighting Carl Thompson for the WBO world cruiserweight title but it had never looked like this.
In my mind I’d seen my mentor Brendan Ingle, his sons John and Dominic, and the other guys from the gym hugging each other and going crazy. Outside the ring, the crowd were always on their feet cheering and chanting my name. But, whenever I pictured it, I was just standing there, Mr Cool, looking at them as if to say, ‘What’s the fuss about? I always knew this would happen.’
Some hope.
One minute and forty-two seconds into the fifth round, referee Paul Thomas stepped in to stop Carl taking any more punishment and I knew I was finally world champion. That’s when I lost it. I dropped to my knees and rolled over on to my back as though I had been shot. I heard myself scream. It felt as though a spirit was released from somewhere deep inside me, taking with it all the pain of the last few years, the humiliation of being called a coward and the stigma of being tagged the worst boxer ever to fight for a world championship belt.
It had been a hard road. There had been many times I didn’t know if I would make it, times when only my stubborn streak and the persistent encouragement of Brendan kept me going. My own family had laughed at me and told me I was wasting my time. Two of my best friends, Herol Graham and Naseem Hamed, had in turn fallen out with me. Even that night, my third and last chance to be a world champion, my ‘brother’ Naz seemed to stare back at me, his image all over the T-shirts worn by the men in my opponent’s corner. I could only guess at Naz’s motivation but he had underestimated me. Nothing could intimidate me any more. I was a different person from the guy who froze like a terrified animal when the spotlight above the ring first burned down on me.
Brendan had always said I’d never get anywhere in boxing until I was 30 and he’d been right. He and his family had stuck by me throughout and I was also lucky to have the backing of my wife, Debbie. Usually she didn’t watch me work but she was at ringside for the first time for the Thompson fight because I wanted to pile the pressure on myself as never before.
Later that night, when she and I went into our favourite Sheffield club to celebrate, people stood and applauded. It was nice but it didn’t mean much because I knew some of them had been among the crowd who had turned their back when I bottled my first chance of becoming a champion. I didn’t blame them but I had learned an important lesson about fame and wasn’t going to be sucked back into that unforgiving world where people can make you feel like a king but just as quickly try to brush you out of their lives like shit off a shoe. I was no longer interested in fame. I just wanted the cheque to clear in my bank and to get back to real life with the handful of people who mattered to me.
It took a couple of days for it to sink in that I had won and I spent some time going back over the years. I still couldn’t really believe that the tall skinny kid from Sidney Road, Crookes, in the wrong part of Sheffield, the kid who went to a girls’ school and never really wanted to fight, had at last become the best cruiserweight in the world. I must have been the most unlikely champion of all time. I wasn’t even the best fighter in my family – my brother Allan was better than me, and so was my sister Theresa. But then, mine was no ordinary family.
