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When I was a boy, living in South Africa, I fell for Muhammad Ali. As graceful as he was provocative, Ali amazed me with his uncanny ability, despite apartheid, to entrance black and white South Africans. He made us laugh and dazzled us with his outrageous skill and courage. I have followed boxing ever since, often obsessively, for more than 50 years.
In 1996, after I spent five years tracking Mike Tyson, James Toney, Roy Jones Jr, Chris Eubank Sr and Naseem Hamed, my book Dark Trade allowed me to become a full-time writer. I owe this gift to boxing but our relationship is not easy. Boxing is as crooked and destructive as it is magnificent and transformative.
I have given so much of my life to thinking and writing about giants of the ring, and thousands of lesser fighters who are often as interesting. But even zealots grow weary. For a while my family and work, as well as books, movies and Arsenal, filled my head as much as boxing. There was fleeting freedom from the ring.
Then, in September 2018, my sister, Heather, died shockingly soon after my mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. My father would endure the same diagnosis less than a year later. I lost all three of them – and then my mother-in-law died on the first anniversary of my mother’s death.
I have spent the past six years working on my fifth and probably final book about boxing. More than just a prop amid the grief, I wanted to remember how boxing made me feel so alive. It has always been a bleak and dirty business but, at its best, boxing is like nothing else. It can be as beautiful as it is brutal, as glorious as it is painful.
The Last Bell begins with Tyson Fury because he reminded me that boxing can offer light in the darkest stories. He was a primary reason why I turned back to it at one of the worst times of my life.
It helped that I had history with Fury. In 2011, when he was only 23, Fury gave me one of the most disturbing interviews I have ever done. He spoke about wanting to smash up the room in which we sat, and how he lived with his then undiagnosed bipolar disorder. “There is a name for what I have,” Fury said, “where one minute I’m over the moon and the next minute I feel like getting in my car and running it into a wall at a hundred miles an hour.”
After becoming the world heavyweight champion, Fury sank into a drink and drug-fuelled depression that saw him balloon to almost 400lb. He made his comeback in the summer of 2018 and, that December, he fought a ferocious Deontay Wilder for the world title. Fury boxed brilliantly before being poleaxed in the last round. He looked unconscious – only to, miraculously, rise from the canvas and dominate Wilder.
I was consumed again because boxing has a perverse way of turning every significant bout I see into something deeply personal. I fell for the gory drama once more.
But, during a calamitous four months in 2019, five boxers lost their lives after devastating fights. In December 2019 I flew to New York to meet some of those closest to Patrick Day, the 27-year-old fighter who died six weeks earlier. Pat Day did not look or talk like an ordinary boxer. His father was a doctor and his mother an administrator for the UN.
Pat was intelligent, good-looking, eloquent and charming. He could have done so much in life but his brother Jean recalled that, “my uncle Ronald asked Patrick if he would stop boxing if he offered him $1m. Patrick looked him in the eye and told him that if he offered him $20m he wouldn’t stop … boxing was one of Patrick’s true loves and yet, as faithful as he was, it betrayed him by claiming his life.”
I also became close to Isaac Chamberlain who had been an 11-year-old drug runner in Brixton, ferrying cocaine, crack and heroin. He told me how boxing saved him. Chamberlain, who dreamed of becoming a world champion, was also a secret writer. He wrote to me about his doubts and fears. “I’ve been through so much trauma that it’s a constant battle to convince myself I deserve the smallest success. I’m just a little peanut-head boy from Brixton who was never meant to be anything. Bullied at school, no father-figure, no real direction. But when dark times come I smile and think: ‘I’ve lived here many times.’”
Regis Prograis was already a world champion from New Orleans who had fled with his family to Texas after Hurricane Katrina. We bonded over our shared love of books as we railed against the misery of boxing. Prograis believed it was rife with doping. “This business is so dirty and corrupt that, if I didn’t love the sport as much as I do, I would walk away.”
I also wanted to turn away from boxing. It was riddled with gangsterism – exemplified by the close association Fury and many other fighters and promoters had with Daniel Kinahan. In April 2022 the United States government stressed that bringing the Kinahan cartel to justice had become a priority. Drew Harris, the Irish police commissioner, said anyone in boxing who worked with Kinahan was “dealing with criminals engaged in drug trafficking. They will resort to vicious actions, including murder.”
Conor Benn then tested positive twice for clomiphene but he and his promoter, Eddie Hearn, and many others, tried to proceed with his fight against Chris Eubank Jr in October 2022. That depressing scrap will finally take place in April – and this week they traded tedious insults before Eubank Jr cracked an egg against Benn’s face.
More seriously, boxing is now controlled by Saudi Arabia. I have travelled three times to Riyadh and the interviews I have done about Saudi people jailed or on death row for mild criticism of the state affected me more than the fights I saw – even when they were as stunning as the first of two victories for Oleksandr Usyk over Fury last year.
I have been fortunate to talk often to Usyk and his significance in Ukraine, since the Russian invasion, restored my battered belief in the power of boxing. I feel the same about Katie Taylor who has quietly led the battle for recognition of female fighters. Her first bout against Amanda Serrano, at Madison Square Garden, was an unforgettable night of glory and valour.
Such moments sustained me – as did the fact I was with Chamberlain before and after all his fights. I will never forget everything I witnessed in the privacy of different dressing rooms when Prograis won his second world title in California and Chamberlain became the British and Commonwealth cruiserweight champion at York Hall.
I know what it is like to see joy pour out of a boxer after a great victory – and to remember how it had been so sombre an hour earlier when he walked to the ring. I know what it is like to hold a fighter’s hand while he is crying and being wheeled away on a stretcher to an ambulance after a brutal bout. I know that, at its finest, boxing transcends sport to become epic and electrifying.
But I also know that the ring is darker than it has ever been. I will keep reporting about boxing for the Guardian but, when it comes to writing books about the fight business, I think I am done. It is finally over for me.
Donald McRae’s The Last Bell: Life, Death and Boxing is published by Simon and Schuster on 13 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
