‘I couldn’t

One of New Zealand’s leading heavyweight boxers, Junior Fa, is leaving the ring in his prime for a new, more peaceful life. He tells Steve Kilgallon why he’s traded pugilism for philosophy, peace and veganism.

“Ilooked down at my fists,” says Junior Fa, probably New Zealand’s second-best heavyweight boxer, “and said to myself, ‘Why am I doing this? I don’t want to hurt people any more’.”

At first, he thought the sudden reluctance he felt last month to step inside a boxing ring could be ascribed to anxiety.

He’d suffered that before. But he also knew from experience that one good sparring session would dissipate those nerves. And this time, Fa felt apprehensive every time he even contemplated training.

So, despite a looming, potentially lucrative fight, for a fortnight he did nothing. Running the Maraetai half-marathon had earned him some downtime, but by the end of a third week of inactivity, with his coaches and manager calling him, it was time to make a decision.

Fa spent a day with his manager, Mark Keddell, sparring, mountain-biking in Woodhill Forest, eating lunch at Keddell’s place in Dairy Flat. It felt good. He took a day off, then went to a local gym that Monday morning to train alone, working the punch bag.

A rush of emotions came upon him, and Fa moved onto a treadmill to try and process those feelings. “The question that popped into my mind was, ‘Why am I training so hard to hurt people’?”

Fa’s next fight still remains on the official boxing schedule. In May, he’s due in Shawinigan, Quebec, to fight a Russian boxer called Arslanbek Makhumdov. It was a fight Fa wanted; a fight that could earn him another big fight; a fight he believed he would win. But he won’t be there. At 34, and with perhaps his best years ahead of him, you can call this story his retirement announcement.

But it’s more than that. “I’m still on the journey of trying to figure things out,” he says, eating kūmara hotcakes at a vegan restaurant in Ponsonby. But so far, that journey has involved a loss of faith, quitting his job, adopting a vegan diet and a deep dive into Stoic philosophy.

It all began, thinks Fa, about a year ago, when he made the decision to walk away from both the Mormon church in which he was raised, and then from all religion.

He’d begun asking questions about the origins of Mormonism and what young people in the church were taught, in particular around the church’s origin story, in which founder Joseph Smith used a “seer” stone placed in a stovepipe hat to translate the newly-discovered Book of Mormon.

Conflicted, he began reading a lot of philosophy, and found some answers in The Denial of Death, a 1974 work by American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, which in part discusses the impact of a loss of religious belief.

Both Fa and his wife Tayla left the church around the same time. It caused some ripples, especially when Fa wrote a Facebook post explaining his exit.

He’s now, he says, “almost an anti-theist, definitely agnostic to atheist”, and his worldview is that if there is a god, he would be a strange one if he only rewarded those who were churchgoers, rather than those who lived a good, just life.