AIMING HIGH
Natasha Jonas reveals the one reason behind her march to the top
Natasha Jonas had plenty of reasons not to start boxing in the first place and plenty to give it up back in 2015. But today, as her professional career gathers pace, Jonas explains to Elliot Worsell that there is now one reason behind her march to the top
LOOKING back, Natasha Jonas suspects she was probably depressed. At 20, she was injured, out of work, using her uncle’s karate gym to “get moving again” following a year of not playing football, training on her own, and whacking a punch bag in frustration. She’d put weight on. She wanted to get it off. She also wanted to be left alone.
“What are you doing here?” asked a mystery woman who frequented the gym.
“It’s my uncle’s gym,” Natasha explained. “He gives me the keys.” “Why are you training on your own?” “I just want to keep moving.” “Don’t you want to try boxing?” said the woman, before revealing she’d just started women-only boxing sessions in the local gym, the Rotunda ABC.
Jonas scrunched up her face at the very thought. She’d previously done karate and kickboxing as a child but no longer had the desire for competitive combat. She responded, however, the way most would. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll come next week. See you there.”
Jonas, of course, never showed up. She didn’t show up the first week, the second week, nor the third. And each time she bumped into Sylvia Singleton thereafter, typically while hitting a heavy bag, she fed her another excuse.
“I was putting it off and putting it off,” Jonas says. “Eventually, after a couple of months, I felt ashamed whenever I saw her and ran out of
excuses. I thought, just to shut her up, I’m going to go. At least then I could say, ‘Sorry, I didn’t like it.’ But I went, and it was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done. I woke up the next day and my body was in agony.” If football was the passion, boxing was the accident. An inconvenience at first, something she didn’t necessarily want to do, it would, in time, offer perks football lacked – the agony, the responsibility – and fill the void created by her first love’s cutthroat nature. “I was probably a bit depressed because of the football and not making it professional there,” says Jonas, whose younger sister, Nikita Parris, currently plays for Manchester City and England. “At the time, I was pretty good. I had call-ups for England under-18s. I played for Liverpool. “I would watch USA win the World Cup and think, I’m well better than them. That was me being naïve. That was my mindset. I was going to go to America (she did on a football scholarship) and become this millionaire footballer and have a house like they do on MTV Cribs and drive a Bentley and have my own pool. I’d spent the million pounds before I’d even got it.” That version of The Natasha Jonas Story never materialised. Instead, just shy of her 21st birthday she was bashing up an opponent on a Rotunda club show in what would represent her first ever boxing bout. Triumphant in round two, Jonas then begged her Rotunda coach, Singleton, the woman with admirable ³
powers of persuasion, for another bout as soon as possible. The ease with which she took to boxing surprised few. Boisterous, keen to get her hands dirty, Jonas had knocked around in Toxteth with her cousins and could always be seen playing out in the streets, kicking a ball around, and behaving like “one of the lads”.
“We were encouraged to get out and do stuff,” she says. “We were never allowed to just sit around the house and do nothing. Also, my mum and dad are really competitive. My dad will beat you and then let you win the next game, but my mum’s not like that. You have to beat my mum. I’d beat my dad and gloat and then he’d beat me the next time and say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be so big-headed.’ They grounded me in that way.
“I grew up in a house with my nan and cousins. My mum and dad lived in my nan’s house and I had two older boy cousins who aren’t my brothers – not by blood – but they were like that to me growing up. I kind of just did the things they did. We all went to school together and played out together.
“I could go anywhere so long as I was with them. They had their boy mates and we’d all play footy together. I didn’t know it wasn’t a girly thing until I was a bit older. I hate to say it, but I was just one of the lads. To be fair, I used to get picked for footy before a lot of the lads.”
Growing up in Toxteth around the time of the eighties riots, Jonas was aware of the unrest and negativity that engulfed Liverpool but was immersed in sport and used ‘play time’ as a diversion, both from the reality of her situation and from education.
“In primary school, if I’m deadly honest, our education wasn’t really that highly thought of,” she says. “That was never the goal. My cousin had gone to a local senior school and got expelled and the next year my other cousin went and he was suspended and in a unit.
“So, when it was my turn to go to that same school, my mum was like, ‘There’s not a chance you’re going there to do what they’ve done.’ It was becoming a bit of a habit. That’s when I moved over the water.”
She calls the move a “shock to the system” and says drifting away from her large family unit – “There’s two people in our family born every year,” she explains – suddenly left her isolated in a part of the city less tolerant and out of her depth in a senior school with a greater emphasis placed on grades. A struggle. That’s how Jonas, stripped of her comfort blanket, remembers it.
“I messed around at school to try and rebel against my mum because I didn’t want to be there, but also to hide the shame that I couldn’t do the work,” she says, before recalling memories of the day she got into a fight, during her first week no less, with a girl she’d later consider a friend. “It was just immaturity, a bit of pulling hair and swinging each other round,” she explains. “Maybe I wanted to establish myself in a new school, a place where
I MESSED AROUND AT SCHOOL TO HIDE THE SHAME THAT I COULDN’T DO THE WORK”
I didn’t know anyone.”
There were more fights for Jonas along the way. Before the ones in Great Britain vests and a headguard, before the ones for which she was paid, the scrappy Scouser with her mum’s competitive streak engaged in fights for free, if only to prove she wouldn’t be pushed around, wouldn’t be disrespected, and wouldn’t be discriminated against.
“Toxteth is highly multicultural and at that time it was predominantly black, West Indian and African, with a few Muslim families,” she says. “Every black family had someone related who was white. There was never an issue.
“When I went over the water it was the first time I felt uncomfortable. All of a sudden I was the only black face. But I only ever had two incidents of racism. One was from a dad at a football match and one was from a girl I’d argued with at school. We ended up fighting. I definitely won that one but almost got a criminal record for it as well. I was hurt. I was older by that time and knew what the word she said meant.”
Upon calling Rotunda ABC her second home, the fights dried up. At least the ones outside the ring. Moreover, Jonas was a natural, gaining plaudits from spectators after her debut, and soon winning ABA titles.
Years later, in 2012, with football a forgotten dream of the past, Jonas rose to prominence when becoming the first ever British female to compete in a boxing ring at an Olympic Games. Then, three years after that, Jonas, only 30, called time on her amateur career, claiming a lack of motivation.
With that, she was free, back in the civilian world. She started her own company. She gave birth to Mela, her daughter.
“I was finished with boxing,” she says. “I was never going to box again. Unless I wanted to move to Germany or America, there was no women’s professional boxing.
“People always ask, ‘Was it hard to make the decision to come back?’ No. The hardest decision was leaving the amateur game. I was risking everything. All of a sudden I wouldn’t get my money every month and I’d have to look for a job.
“The decision to come back as a professional was just a case of asking myself whether my body could do it again. And it could.”
Jonas announced her return to the ring – as a professional – in 2017 and made her professional debut, under the guidance of coach Joe Gallagher, in June of that year. By this time women’s boxing was not only a thing, it was deemed marketable, of interest to promoters, and Jonas, as classy outside the ring as she is inside the ring, was quickly earmarked as an ideal torchbearer.
“Suddenly, because of the Olympics, people were interested in our progression,” Jonas, 6-0 (5), says. “Before it was an Olympic sport, we weren’t getting paid. We were doing it for the love of it. I got sacked from two jobs because I needed time off to go to tournaments. Those were the things I was willing to do because I wanted to box for England. Whenever I go to boxing gyms now, I tell kids I wish I was their age, just starting out at 14 or 15.
“It wasn’t until I left the 2012 Olympics that I looked back and thought, yeah, we did something amazing there. When I leave boxing, after being a professional, I’ll appreciate the fact we were the first ones to do that.
“But, of course, there’s Jane Couch and others who came before us. I admire Jane Couch for what she did. Without her, we wouldn’t be where we are today. She gave us all the option.”
With a WBA international super-featherweight title to her name, southpaw Jonas, 33, now has more than one option. She has, for example, a natural rivalry with Olympic nemesis Katie Taylor – despite the fact the pair currently roam separate weight classes – and will no doubt receive the kind of exposure never afforded to the likes of Couch, the ‘Fleetwood Assassin’.
However, that’s not to say Jonas and the likes of Taylor, Nicola Adams, Chantelle Cameron and Savannah Marshall, other women driving this movement in 2018, have it easy. Jonas, in particular, certainly has her hands full.
“It isn’t too bad,” she responds when asked how she juggles boxing with motherhood. “Most working mums go to work for nine o’clock and come home after five. That’s exactly what I do. In fact, I’m home by four most days. It’s just my job’s a bit different. I feel like I don’t spend enough time with her, but I suppose any working mum feels like that. Unfortunately, that’s just the way it is. She’s got her own routine now anyway. She’s in nursery most days. I’m just fitting around her now.”
Even when Natasha and Mela are away from each other, they’re not really away from each other.
Take fight night, for instance, the one time you’d expect a doting mother to scrub away all thoughts pertaining to her child and the love they share. This, in Jonas’ case, couldn’t be further from the truth.
I FELT UNCOMFORTABLE. ALL OF A SUDDEN I WAS THE ONLY BLACK FACE”
“Run the World (Girls) by Beyoncé is her favourite song and that’s the reason it’s my walkout music,” says Natasha. “She’s always on my mind. I’m focused when I go in the ring, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a little part of me that always thinks, ‘yeah, it’s my little girl I’m doing it for’.”