Ingle was architect who had the ring world in total awe
BRENDAN INGLE, who has died aged 77, was the most influential British boxing trainer of the past 30 years, producing a steady stream of British, Commonwealth, European and world champions from his gym in the Wincobank area of Sheffield.
What set the loquacious Irishman apart from his peers was the revolutionary hands-down, elusive technique that he taught his fighters, based on speed, athleticism and reflexes.
Its most famous exponent was the colourful Naseem Hamed, whose brash – and somewhat arrogant demeanour – established him as one of world boxing’s biggest draws in the late 1990s.
The talented and precocious youngster was only 11 when Ingle predicted that he would be a world champion, a prophecy fulfilled when Hamed stopped the Welshman Steve Robinson at Cardiff Arms Park to capture the World Boxing Organisation featherweight crown on September 30 1995.
For the next three years British boxing’s “odd couple” could seemingly do no wrong – their partnership being the subject of Nick Pitt’s acclaimed book The Paddy
and the Prince in 1998.
Yet, as Pitt discovered, cracks began to show as Hamed increasingly sought more control over his career; his eventual split with Ingle was bitter and irrevocable.
Although Hamed claimed to have tried to heal the wounds in recent years, the pair were never reconciled.
Ingle, however, reckoned that his greatest success was Johnny Nelson. Having been a mediocre and nervous amateur spending most of his time hoping that his opponent would not show up, Nelson turned professional and became a longreigning world cruiserweight champion. Ingle was born in Dublin on June 19 1940, one of a dockworker’s 15 children, and took up boxing as a schoolboy.
Having moved to Sheffield to work in the booming steel industry in 1958, he won 19 out of 33 contests in an unremarkable professional ring career that ended in 1973.
Having been approached by a local vicar to help run the youth club, Ingle proceeded to transform an old church hall into the highly successful St Thomas’ Boys and Girls Club boxing gym, helped by an enviable ability to communicate and relate with the type of youngsters whom most people would cross the street to avoid.
Ingle did not suffer fools, however, and explaining his decision to stop accepting young offenders referred to his gym by the Manpower Services Commission rehabilitation scheme, he said: “They called them ‘hyperactive under-achievers’, but I called them absolute nutters.”
His first major success was the mercurial Herol “Bomber” Graham who, despite his nickname, provided the blueprint for the unorthodox and highly defensive style – based on the footwork and balance of Muhammad Ali.
Graham was good enough to secure British and European middleweight crowns and provided the template on which Hamed’s style would be based.
In fact, Graham’s defensive qualities were so extraordinary that Ingle enjoyed parading his protégé around the pubs and clubs of Sheffield, inviting inebriated patrons to land a punch on the young fighter while Ingle stood beaming, hands behind his back.
Although Graham seemed destined for the top, he ultimately failed to win a world title.
By the time of his first defeat, against the veteran Italian Sumbu Kalambay in May 1987, he and Ingle had parted company.
Undeterred, Ingle was soon honing the skills of the young Hamed, who the Irishman rather fancifully claimed to have spied from the top deck of a passing bus flattening a number of playground bullies.
Yet Hamed ultimately proved to be his biggest disappointment.
Ingle had expected Hamed to win multiple world titles, but the pair split acrimoniously in 1998 and the career of “the Prince” faded dramatically after a heavy points loss to Marco Antonio Barrera of Mexico in April 2001.
Appointed MBE in 1998 for services to boxing and work with young people, Ingle listed his prime interests as “Christianity, socialism and training boxers”.
Brendan Ingle is survived by his wife Alma (née Chaloner), whom he married in 1961, and by their three sons and two daughters. —