AMATEURS
Jordan Reynolds has an inspirational story to tell
Jordan Reynolds’ inspirational story
I’M not where I want to be but I’m on a good path and I’m doing alright.” That perhaps is an understatement. Jordan Reynolds is now the number one middleweight in England. His ambitions extend further but it’s an achievement already; Jordan has come a very long way indeed. “I’d seen things I shouldn’t have seen, then being homeless, into a refuge. Living at my nan’s, then there are six or seven of us in her house. Literally have no money. Getting to the gym, I was selling my clothes and my mum was selling her jewellery for me to get money to go to the gym. That’s how bad it was. Luckily, within two or three months of doing boxing, I won my first national title and I got a little sponsor who said I’ll help you out here and there,” Jordan told Boxing News.
A GB boxer now, Reynolds is doing talks in schools. “You get a lot of troubled kids. I remember at school you have teachers telling you do this, do this, and I’m thinking to myself you’ve never
‘I WANT TO GIVE THEM HOPE AND SEE THAT IT IS POSSIBLE’
been through this, going through what I’m seeing, you don’t have a clue what I’m dealing with, you don’t have a clue. They’ve been brought up a different way,” he said. “I want to give them hope and see that it is possible. If he can do it, I can do it and they can kind of relate to me.”
He even made a charming appearance on Channel 4’s First Dates programme, and came across well on screen. “I was in camp sweating [before it was broadcast but] it was spot on,” he
said.
Jordan has had to endure a gruelling injury that’s lingered since November last year. “My back went, my whole left side, my leg, it was so painful. I came back, had scans and they said basically your disk’s come out. It’s bulging on the side of the nerve,” he said of a punishing few months. “It’s so hard mentally. Making weight, I couldn’t even go for a little run.”
But this has still been a key year for Reynolds, winning his first England Boxing Elite championship after reaching the final twice before. “I can’t take nothing away from Ben [Whittaker, who beat him before in the final], he’s a class lad, very athletic,” Jordan said. “It was just a relief. I think I might even be number one in England now Ben’s moved up.”
He even stepped in for Whittaker to box against Kazakh middleweight Abilkhan Amankul in the World Series of Boxing semi-final. “That was on two days’ notice as well,” Jordan noted. “A bit more time [to prepare he’d be] a bit sharper, a bit fitter. I only had a couple of gears in me. When it’s five rounds you need those gears.
“He was so relaxed, but as he was more relaxed, it made me more relaxed. My shots were coming off better. He’s good, a clever fighter. But I felt like he does the same thing all the time,” Reynolds continued. “He’d try and make you throw and counter… He was taking the centre and he probably looked a bit more dominant.”
Now he has the chance to become the country’s leading middleweight and potentially represent Britain in Olympic qualifiers. That makes him more determined than ever. “There’s so much fire burning in me,” Reynolds promised.