I’ve just turned 47 and I’m at a crossroads. But this is no mid-life crisis. There’s no sportscar on the driveway, no tight jeans, no modern-day music playlists.
This is me reaching a clarity as to what is important to me professionally. This is me realising that to be the most free and expressive I can be (and want to be, as a cursed introvert) I need to do my own thing.
I’ve embraced challenge and change through my career and it has, fortunately, taken me into the British Boxing Hall of Fame, given me formal recognition by the British Boxing Board of Control and the Boxing Writers Association of America on multiple occasions.
I’m proud of the Boxing Life Stories catalogue of podcasts, and of my books, particularly Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing, The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxing’s Wastelands and Warrior: A Champion’s Search for his Identity.
They have all been important parts of my journey.
So why Substack and why now?
There is a fork in the road in combat sports journalism, both in terms of the freedom to say what you really think and the appetite for thoughtful, insightful content.
One look at the comments section for a profile piece told me recently that the reader was delighted that I’d introduced them to a young, upcoming fighter, but that the story should have been far shorter. It was around 750 words!
I want to be writing things that mean something to me but are also appreciated; by both the audience and the platform. I want to have the time and space to create work that I am proud of.
I’ve spent so much time churning the last few years, I want to take a step back and really fucking write. Like I know I can. I want to give my mind the space to be excited, to be challenged and to think differently.
Yes, I’m writing a book about performance enhancing drugs in boxing. That is due out next year. I want to keep writing books, too, and this Substack is part of that. I will share findings, perhaps some early chapters and interviews as I go along.
Join me
I will be writing contemporary and historical pieces, columns, reports, interviews and I will get my feet wet with multimedia.
If you’re enjoying what you read, and would like to support me with a paid subscription, there will be plenty of subscriber-only material.
The set weekly format will be pieces on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays as a minimum. One will be paywalled. One will be free. One will be available to preview before the paywall kicks in.
There could be more to come than that, but that will be my baseline.
My Love of the Sport
I should have given up on this sport years ago. In 2015 I walked away. Or, at least, I tried to. I opened a CrossFit gym, but offers of work kept coming in and although I cancelled my subscriptions to BT Sport and Sky Sports to try and put distance between myself and boxing, in my first year ‘away’ from the sport I was a researcher for Sky Sports Boxing, a pundit on BT Sport and a columnist for BoxingScene. Oh, and I wrote a book about Floyd Mayweather and took out a professional trainer’s licence with the Board. But, alas, I had hated the politics. The backstabbing. The false promises, fights not being made and, yes, the increasingly rampant use of PEDs and the ridiculous excuses that subsequently followed.
But, like a retired fighter, I had ‘the itch.’
It was there, in the back of my mind, like a relationship you’re not quite over.
What if I put on Saturday Fight Night and watch?
Well, the truth be told, I started writing Damage and felt I could make a difference. My reinvolvement with boxing snowballed, to hosting No Filter Boxing on TNT Sports and launching the Boxing Life Stories podcast, which hit the dizzying heights of No. 2 in the iTunes Sport category even before I’d created the artwork.
And I couldn’t leave the fighters or the trainers I knew and liked. We were part of the same dysfunctional family. I remembered how boxing made me feel when I was younger. I remember walking into my first club, Salisbury City ABC, and having never felt respected before, instantly feeling something new, a camaraderie that linked all of us. I’m still friends with most of those guys 30 years on.
That community, by the way, is one that has welcomed me into dozens of gyms around the world. When I was boxing, I would go to the gyms in the Atlantic City ghettoes, impoverished areas in New York and Philadelphia, and it was the same thing. United by respect. Didn’t matter if you were good, bad, indifferent, Black, white, Hispanic, you were welcomed and you were part of ‘it.’
That is why boxing is my home.
This is why Substack is my home.
What would you like to read about in my posts moving forward? Please comment below to let me know.
Great to see you on here Tris!
Have followed your work for years and even tried to create my own rip off Boxing Life Stories in my own world of rugby league, believe it or not!
Looking forward to reading it all 👍🏻
Enjoyed BN when u were editor Tris.
Gimme stuff about boxers training regimes... I can't get enough of that !