PAIN PUSHES ME ON
Jamie’s mission with Carl
JAMIE MOORE was considering quitting training fighters just six months ago – but now he is hoping to take Carl Frampton back to the top.
And the former British and European light-middleweight champion is being driven on by the pain of his shooting in Marbella three years ago.
Moore had become a coach by accident rather than design and the lack of enthusiasm from young prospects that came to his gym on the outskirts of Manchester had left him frustrated.
It was only the dedicated Tommy Coyle who kept him going.
But tomorrow in Belfast he will be in the corner taking charge of former two-weight world champion Frampton for the first time when he faces Mexican Horacio Garcia.
Just over three years ago, Moore was lying in a hospital bed after being shot in Marbella in a case of mistaken identity when he travelled to Spain to train old rival Matthew Macklin.
“A couple of months after it happened I was in bed in my living room, as I couldn’t get around much, and I was getting Tommy Coyle to pick me up and take me to the gym,” Moore said.
“I was still able to get to the gym to oversee the training. It was my way of forgetting about what happened. I’ll have a memory of what happened forever because I’ll never be the same again.” At one point it looked like an almost impossible task for him to ever be able to properly work on the pads with fighters again as, for a year after the shooting, there was no recovery in his left leg. He said: “I’m a stubborn b ***** d. I refuse to be beaten by anything. This won’t beat me. It will affect me for the rest of my life, but it won’t beat me. “I went back to see the surgeon who fixed the nerve a year later and my foot was not moving from the calf down, it was just basically like jelly. “He said, ‘Usually by now there is some reaction to the surgery, so I don’t anticipate you getting any recovery’. I said, ‘I will’. “I asked him if I would ever run again and he said, ‘No’. He said I’d have to wear a foot support forever, but I told him that wasn’t going to happen either.” Not only did he run again, he ran 13.1 miles in the Great Manchester Run last year for the Niamh’s Next Step Charity and even the pain of the bullet still lodged in his hip could not stop him. “I don’t think you’d have known how difficult it was because I never let on,” he said. “Part of my recovery mechanism was to cover it up and nobody really knew how much pain I was in. “I’ve been through some horrible things and now these are the rewards for it.”