‘The Cobra’ looked up to me Sport
BUT IT TOOK YEARS FOR CITY BOXING COACH TO FORGIVE THE SPORT AFTER MISSING OUT
ASKED to name his earliest boxing ambitions, Carl Froch replied: “I just wanted to be as good as Chris Slatcher.”
Froch, nicknamed The Cobra, went on to become one of British boxing’s all-time greats, while Slatcher quit fighting and has become a successful coach.
The Leicester Lightning gym on Slater Street has produced national champions Eishay Parmar and Vinny Huczmann in the past few weeks and this weekend Mohammad Hamad will be aiming to book his place in the final of the Elite Championship at 64kgs.
Hamad heads to Cannock tomorrow for the quarter-finals, with the semi finals on Sunday.
“Whoever wins the title at 64kgs is going to have to work hard,” said Slatcher.
“It’s a tough group, but Mohammad is tricky and on his day he has the skills to upset anyone.”
The Elite title – then known as the ABA title – eluded Slatcher and it took him years to forgive boxing.
Slatcher was an accomplished amateur boxer when Froch first walked into the Phoenix gym in Nottingham.
“Carl looked up to me when he was a kid,” said the 48-year-old father of daughters Molly and Poppy.
“I was the England boxer in the gym, I was the benchmark.
“But Carl’s mentality was always that he wanted to be better than me.
“He didn’t want to do what I was doing, he wanted to do better.
“He wanted to be the best in the gym. Carl wanted people talking about him – not me.
“We used to go in each other’s corner, handing up, and we sparred hundreds of rounds.
“I was a bit older, so to start with we just moved around. We didn’t spar properly until he was older.
“Carl was a good schoolboy, but he really started to show how good he was when he was a junior.
“He showed he had the ability to turn a fight around. He could come from behind to win and was always like that.
“When it was do-or-die and his back was against the wall, Carl would always come through. “He always had that self-belief.” Slatcher found the hurt of missing out on the ABA championship hard to take.
“I dreamed of winning the ABAs a million times and then I got what I thought was a bad decision and it really hurt,” he said. “I never forgave boxing for that.”
Slatcher walked away from boxing after qualifying to box for England in the United States.
“I just decided not to go,” he said. “I was still hurt.
“I regret it now, but I got into coaching because I felt I wasn’t finished with boxing.
“I knew it was too late to box again, so I started coaching.”
As well as his thriving amateur stable, Slatcher trains unbeaten professionals Kenan WingfieldBrown and Benn Norman. Both are in action at the Morningside Arena a week on Sunday and Slatcher said: “They all capable of going places if they are brought along at the right speed and tick all the boxes along the way.
“I remember Carl Froch going down to London every week and taking beatings off Howard Eastman.
“He had to scrimp and save just to stay down there and he would come with nothing to show for it – apart from a few bruises.
“He made the decision that boxing was going to be his Plan A and there would be no Plan
B and it paid off for him.”
ON ABA TITLE