UNEXPECTED GLORY
Gary him British champion. Not bad for a fighter with 'no defence and not a lot of skill' De’roux looks back with Matt Bozeat on a hobby that suddenly made
Gary De’roux reminisces about his unlikely British title success
EVERY TIME HE LANDED HIS BOLO PUNCH IT FELT LIKE HE WAS SCOOPING MY EYEBALL OUT”
MY mate Gavin couldn’t believe his luck… His friend found a video cassette at the refuse tip where he worked with the word ‘Boxing’ scrawled across it and knowing Gavin was a fan, he handed it over to him. On it was a recording of Sean Murphy defending his British featherweight championship against Gary De’roux in March, 1991 – and it turned out to be one of the best fights Gavin has ever seen…
“I had no defence,” laughed De’roux. “They just used to get me fit, wind me up and when the bell went, they let me go!
“We were both that type of fighter. It was two ex-skinheads against each other, so it was always going to be fireworks. It wasn’t one for the purists. There wasn’t a lot of skill. It was just a fight.”
It was a fight so exciting that even Harry Mullan struggled to put into words what he had seen at the London Arena in the following week’s Boxing News.
Put simply, it was two tough, honest pros standing in front of each other fighting their hearts out for the British title. Both were hurt in each of the opening four rounds and the fifth followed a similar to-and-fro pattern. Murphy appeared to be getting on top and then De’roux slammed back with left hooks to have the champion on the brink.
De’roux dug in a left hook to Murphy’s ribs – and he sank to his knees.
Blood dripping from a mouth wound, Murphy was counted out in the act of rising.
“I haven’t been on the telly,” gushed the emotional new champion in a television interview afterwards, “but they all know who De’roux is now.”
Nearly three decades on from that career highlight, De’roux is probably best known for training Curtis Woodhouse at the start of his pro career.
“A few of the Peterborough players used to train at my gym,” remembered De’roux, “but Curtis kept coming back on his own.
“He said he wanted to box and I didn’t believe him. I said: ‘What do you want to do that for?’ and told him to get lost. I told Curtis boxing is a hard, brutal sport and it takes a lot of dedication, determination and discipline. showed him videos of brutal knock outs and did everything I could to put him off.
“But he kept coming back and I thought: ‘This kid really wants to do it.’ He had a boxer’s frame with broad shoulders, long arms and slender legs and he was a quick learner. I think that wherever his football career took him, Curtis found a boxing gym. He seemed to have good knowledge of how a boxing gym works and was professional in absolutely everything he did. “He showed me he had a fighter’s heart, good technical ability and a quick brain. I didn’t start boxing until I was 21 years old and that convinced me Curtis had a chance. I knew it could be done because I did okay, but I knew it would be tough.” Woodhouse’s sporting switch was headline news. “I wasn’t really a football fan,” said Deroux, “so I didn’t realise what a big deal it was.
“But his debut [against Dean Marcantonio in September, 2006] was treated like a worldtitle fight! The Times, The Guardian and TV cameras turned up at the gym.” ³
For the media, Woodhouse was a novelty, but De’roux saw things differently.
“I don’t think people realise what a tough sport football is,” he said. “I’ve played charity matches, and even they were tough. You have to be tough to get as far as Curtis did in football.” The Deroux-woodhouse partnership didn’t last. “As a trainer I always wanted what’s best for my fighter,” said Deroux. “I wanted to be with Curtis all the way and I think he wanted to train in Peterborough, but he had a young family and needed to be closer to home.
“Because of the circumstances, I don’t think he would have been a British champion if he had carried on training with me.
“He joined Dave Coldwell, and he was the right man for the job. Curtis got the right people around him and they helped him achieve what he wanted. I can only take credit for getting him out of the traps. We had a lot of laughs together, a lot of fun.”
With Coldwell in his corner, Woodhouse took the British super-lightweight title from Darren Hamilton in February, 2014, earning De’roux a few quid.
“There’s a myth that when Curtis turned pro I bet thousands that he would win the British title,” said De’roux. “I didn’t bet that much. It was a few hundred pounds. I wanted to show Curtis I had faith in him.
“I remember when he was in Peterborough, he used to read about ‘the former British featherweight champion Gary De’roux’ and he said he wanted to be remembered as a British champion. Curtis didn’t prove people wrong, he proved himself right.” De’roux, though, did prove people wrong. “I was written off at the age of 12,” he remembered. “My upbringing was care homes and borstal.
“At 18, I was hanging around Norwich nick with ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser. Nobody had a lot of hope for me.”
De’roux grew up scrapping on the Westwood estate in Peterborough.
“It was a London overspill estate,” he said, “and when I opened my front door it was like a horror version of Lord of the Rings. Peterborough had been invaded by the London overspill and you had to fight. Every day, it was: ‘What are you looking at?’ “I went to the same school as [middleweight] Nigel Fairbairn and one day I bumped into him and he said I should come to the boxing gym, Focus ABC. I had just got married and thought I could do with a hobby, so I went along. I loved it from the first moment. I had never known such freedom. It was such a release.”
De’roux had “22 or 23” amateur fights before turning over in 1986, a two months before his 24th birthday. “I only really treated boxing as a hobby and always thought I wasn’t good enough,” he said. “That was where I got some of my drive from.”
De’roux says that coming from Peterborough, a city that had never before produced a British champion, he needed extra drive. “To succeed, you need talent, hard work – and opportunities,” he said. “I gave every ounce of everything I had to boxing, but when you’re a pro boxer from Peterborough, you don’t get many opportunities. Boxing isn’t the same as other sports where if you are good enough and put the work in, you will get opportunities.
“From day one, I did it the hard way. I wasn’t a ticket seller, but I would fight anyone, anywhere. I was always up against it, but I was fearless. I was old school.”
De’roux would travel around for sparring with the likes of Duke Mckenzie and current British Boxing Board of Control chief, Robert Smith, “who taught me about body punching” and for a while, Peterborough had a reputation as a fight city.
His stable mates in Ken Whitney’s pro gym included Dave Pierre, Ian Honeywood and Fairbairn and they could all fight.
“We were quite a feared gym for a while,” said De’roux. “I remember fighters coming up from London for sparring and going back saying: ‘Those Peterborough lads can fight.’”
The gym broke up and De’roux almost quit after a contract dispute with his manager.
“I met my brother and his mate came along,” he remembered. “He was a businessman and asked me: ‘What’s your story?’ and I said I was a fighter who was thinking of quitting. I said I was in a contractual dispute and couldn’t afford to pay my way out of it, so I might have to quit. He bought me out of my contract…”
Reunited with Whitney and now with Kevin Sanders on board, De’roux returned after 10 months out with a tough-looking match against Henry Armstrong in September 1989.
“I had been out for a year, just bumming around, and it was a hard fight to come back to,” he said.
“It was my most painful fight.”
PEOPLE SAY TO ME: ‘WHY DID YOU WALK AWAY FROM BOXING?’ BUT I DIDN’T. BOXING WALKED AWAY FROM ME”
De’roux remembers his points loss as a turning point.
“Things started to click,” he said. “I think Father Time had something to do with it. He was telling me: ‘If you don’t do it now, it will be too late.’”
Upset stoppages of James Hunter and John Green led to a rematch with Armstrong and on De’roux’s insistence, the fight was over eight-threes rather than eight-twos.
De’roux scored a first round knockdown, but after that, it was all Armstrong – until the dying seconds.
“He had this bolo punch,” said De’roux, wincing at the memory, “and every time he landed it, it felt like someone was scooping my eye ball out.
“He had the beating of me that night – until the last minute of the last round.
“He tried a bolo punch and followed in behind it. That gave me an idea. I dummied and when he tried the bolo punch again, I took a step back and boom! The right hand landed and it was fight over. I didn’t look back after that.”
De’roux’s reign as British champion only lasted 11 weeks and he puts the loss of his title down to Colin Mcmillan’s mastery and a lack of preparation.
“I only had five rounds of sparring for that fight,” said De’roux. “Kelton Mckenzie came over from Leicester to help out – and that was it. It was always hard being from Peterborough. The quality and quantity of fighters in other parts of the country is so much better.”
De’roux was reminded how important geography is when he dabbled in pro managing and training following his retirement in 1993.
“To succeed, you need a good fighter, a good manager, a good trainer, a good matchmaker and a good promoter,” he said. “It sounds straightforward enough, but it’s one of the hardest things to do.
“If you don’t live in the right area where you get the right sparring and there are regular shows, it makes it so much harder.
“Fighters get disillusioned, take risks, lose and then drift away. People say to me: ‘Why did you walk away from boxing?’ and I tell them: ‘I didn’t, boxing walked away from me.’
“I always said I would carry on as long as I had one fighter. I had JJ Bird in the gym, but after he lost a controversial decision he looked disillusioned. I said to him: ‘Go off and have a holiday’ – and he never came back to the gym.”
Now 56 and happily retired, De’roux says the sport of Wakeboarding, where riders are towed over water behind a speed boat, is his new obsession.
“I had more injuries in my first few months doing that than I did in my whole boxing career,” he laughed. “I bust my rib, split my lip and broke my ankle.
“I never thought I would get the same buzz I got from hearing that bell ring, but this has come along and given me a new focus.
“I’ve challenged Sean Murphy to come along, but boxers seem soft when it comes to water. I’m going to ask Sean to invite Anthony Joshua. It might be his kind of thing.”