‘IF IT WEREN’T FOR BOXING, I’D PROBABLY BE IN PRISON’
Trainer tells of life in the fight game, and how the world’s gone soft
IF HE hadn’t gone into boxing, Tony Borg reckons he would have been a lawyer. “If I could go back now and you took the boxing away, I’d have done criminal law. I’m fascinated by it,” he tells me as we walk around St Joseph’s Boxing Gym in Pill, Newport, where he has trained the likes of former world champion Lee Selby as well as former British champion Gary Buckland and Olympic silver medallist Fred Evans.
“But if it weren’t for boxing, I’d be on the wrong side of it,” he chuckles. “I’d be paying ’em. If it weren’t for boxing, I’d probably be in prison.”
The little brick-walled building we’re in has all the hallmarks of a Rocky movie; the stale smell of perspiration, conversation punctuated by loud, violent thwacks of a punching bag, ambient noise made up of loud grunts and echoed laughter.
Tacked to the walls are numerous dog-eared posters and framed photos of Tony’s boxing protegees and some of the most iconic fights in boxing history. For 30 years St Joseph’s has been an outlet not only for young kids in the community, but for Tony himself.
His road to success as a boxing trainer coaching Welsh, British, Commonwealth, European and World champions has been paved with personal struggles and a lot of hard graft.
Originally based on George Street in Butetown, Cardiff, Tony, 56, grew up with his mother Megan and three sisters, later moving to Splott.
“I didn’t have a dad, so my mum brought me up. My grandfather was a very imposing figure and would say I had to come to his house on the weekend,” he said. “I spent a lot of time with my grandfather and because I had sisters, he kind of made me tough. He was that sort of guy.
“It was easier to have a fight and give someone a slap than go home and tell your grandfather you bottled it.
Tony moved around different schools after continuously getting in trouble for fighting.
His mum’s friends recommended he try out boxing and he started training in his local gym aged just seven: “I just loved it – the smell of the gym, everything. It was great,” he remembered.
Tony found he was gifted in the ring, and by 15 years of age he had won Welsh and British titles.
The discipline required was a battle for him though, and he admitted he struggled with the demands.
“I had a really torrid time – starving, dehydrating for every fight. That’s how it was in those days. They’d say ‘ go home, nothing to eat, nothing to drink’.”
Tony soon abandoned boxing, choosing to go and play table tennis with his friends in the youth club instead, but his mum was far from pleased having seen his potential.
“She said, ‘If you aren’t going boxing you’re not going to no youth club – you can come in, sit there every night and do your homework or something. So I stayed in and maybe the second week I said, ‘All right, all right, I’ll go back to boxing.’ I was made to go back. She knew it was the route for me.”
Continuing to fight, Tony entered the Welsh Senior Championships when he was 17 and won, later losing in the British final and reaching number two in Great Britain as a senior, despite only being a teenager.
Around the same time, his mother Megan died suddenly. With little guidance or direction, he opted to turn professional in boxing.
“My mum went into hospital and I thought, ‘She’ll be out tomorrow or maybe next week.’ All of a sudden she died,” he said. “I was only 17, my younger sister was about 13. We were just kids, on our own. So I just turned pro, to earn some money.”
Tony said his own pro career was blighted by various issues, including his own ego, and he retired in 1992 with a 13-11 record.
As well as boxing, Tony had also begun working as a doorman in pubs and clubs around Cardiff and South Wales aged 20, something he would do for many years until a number of incidents convinced him to dedicate himself fully to boxing. In the early 1990s, just as his professional career was coming to an end, he was sent to prison for three months following a fracas while on a night out.
“I was fighting probably every weekend,” he remembers. While he was inside, Tony started reading about the effects of alcohol.
“I just realised it was making me into a troublemaker, so I changed my attitude. I only drink sensibly now and advise others to do the same.”
Tony even refused to go to hospital to have his plaster removed during his stint inside (“I said no way, no one’s seeing me in handcuffs. I wouldn’t go”) and once he was free he was back in the gym again. And while he admitted he “loved the job” as a doorman and that it was “good money”, it brought too much trouble.
In 2008 he got into a bad fight in Chepstow and was charged with GBH with intent after the person he fought with ended up in a coma in hospital.
He was found not guilty at a trial, but he says the experience was an eyeopener and convinced him to stop door work for good.
“At the time if I’d been found guilty, I’d probably have got seven to ten years. I thought, ‘This isn’t for me, it’s too risky.’ I thought, ‘I don’t want to be going to prison.’ So I got stuck in and put everything I had into boxing.”
Based in the Gaer and living in Newport for the past 30 years, Tony initially had modest success as a trainer, but his profile skyrocketed when his boxer Lee Selby claimed the British and Commonwealth titles with a win over then champion Stephen Smith via an eighth-round stoppage at the Olympia in Liverpool. That same week, boxer Gary Buckland won the British title in a close 12-round win. Suddenly Tony had two massive wins over his belt.
Since then Tony has coached British, Commonwealth, European and World champions at various levels.
He’s had two books written about his success – Megan’s Boy, published in 2018, and Borg Boxing: Greatest Hits, released the following year.
Last year saw the release of This Is Our Family, a TV documentary which followed Tony and his wife Emma for three years. Initially focused on Tony’s career, the documentary quickly adapted as he and Emma tried to cope with the grief of losing Emma’s daughter Xana Doyle, who was tragically killed in January 2015 when a stolen car in which she was a passenger flipped over at 60mph on Usk Way.
The driver of the car, Sakhawat Ali, was jailed for eight years and three months after pleading guilty to dangerous driving, aggravated vehicle taking and driving with excess alcohol. His cousin, Shabaz Ali, was jailed for seven years and three months after pleading guilty to aggravated allowing to be carried involving a fatal accident. Both men were released after less than five years.
Tony, who has nine children, married Emma in 2018 and they celebrated their third anniversary this week.
Tony has around 18 pro boxers on his roster, and luckily he has been able to keep the gym open for them throughout the pandemic.
In an area like Pill which has had its fair share of negative attention over the years, the gym is somewhere Tony says young people can come where everyone is equal.
“You might have young kids who are introverted, maybe getting bullied in school, have never mixed with anyone. Maybe if they’re from a predominantly white area and have never been around black kids before, or vice versa. Or a black kid who might think all white people are racist.
“Then they come in here and realise everyone is fine. All of a sudden, on a Friday you’ve got people who might’ve never met coming to training together, or meeting someone, or going to play football. It brings people together, massively. You get kids talking about knife crime who come here and realise there’s more to life.”
He added that the amount of “idiots” involved in knife crime and drugs today makes him “sick” and that boxing has been a positive outlet for many young amateurs and pros.
“We’ve had situations where people on the streets have had issues and we’ve actually had them come into the gym and have a proper fight there, shake hands and go.
“They should be doing it in schools. But now with all this politically correct nonsense, people worried about getting hurt, they’ve banned boxing in schools. It’s just too soft out there now, it’s shocking. They took away the discipline from the schools. I had the cane so many times – I felt I’d missed out if I hadn’t had it.
“I told a teacher to p**s off in school and he just grabbed me – I was about 14 – and put me up against the wall and said, ‘Do it and I’ll stick this [his fist] right down your throat.’ He’d let me go and it taught me a lesson. He’d get locked up now if he did that. Now you don’t dare have a fight in school, but they’re bringing knives in and stabbing each other.”