GOLDEN FISTS
Joshua was the bad boy from a Watford council estate. Now he’s got...
JOHN OLIVER knew the giant could punch when he heard a scream one evening. Sean Murphy was bent double, swearing at the canvas as he tried to pull the pad off his hand.
It was swelling rapidly and the novice responsible was apologising over and over as he followed his trainer out of the ring at Finchley Amateur Boxing Club.
The big teenager had just joined and was a couple of sessions in. Murphy and Oliver, two respected trainers, had taken him in when he rocked up to their corner of Barnet in 2007, a tearaway with a difficult past and a promise that he would commit to it. A few days later, Murphy gave in to the nagging and took the 18-year-old on the pads for the first time.
‘The thing with pad work is you do get problems with new boys,’ Oliver tells Sportsmail. ‘ They might hit on the edge of the pad and it bends your fingers. But not this boy — he hit the pad perfectly with one of his first shots, bang.
‘Sean starts yelling and this big lad is following him, saying “sorry, sorry”. We were all laughing but then Sean has to go to hospital.
‘It turns out he hasn’t broken his hand — he’s shattered it. Every single metacarpal was smashed, maybe broken in 10 places.
‘I’m 72, and I’ve been in rooms with Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson — I don’t think I’ve ever heard something like that. Even now, Sean has problems with that hand.’ DAVID GHANSA isn’t entirely sure of his official title in Anthony Joshua’s vast empire, but he generally co-ordinates his training camps and keeps the operation ticking over.
He and Joshua go back years, to when they were kids, and Ghansa is the fighter’s right-hand man and close friend. Except he doesn’t call him Anthony or Josh or AJ. ‘He is Fem or Femi to most of us who know him from back then,’ Ghansa says.
It’s a play on the second name in Anthony Oluwafemi Olaseni Joshua. Femi and AJ are two sides of the same complex story, with Femi the teenage bruiser in Watford who was on a road to prison, and AJ the multi-million pound brand, a 27-year-old billed as the greatest heavyweight for a generation.
The journey from one persona to the other, told to Sportsmail by members of Joshua’s inner circle, takes in brutal beatings in Nigeria, a set of Argos weights and courtrooms. Then there was the electronic tag, the stash of cannabis in his holdall and a vow to Ghansa that it was all going to change. THE Femi tale dates back to Watford in 1989 and his birth to a pair of Nigerian immigrants. Joshua says his mother, Yeta Odusanya, a social worker, and his father, Robert, a Nigerian with Irish heritage, arrived in Britain in their early twenties and split when he was four or five.
He lived with his mother on the Meriden Estate in Watford, staying in a flat in a rough area with his two sisters and brother. ‘He was always active,’ says cousin Ben Ileyemi, a former amateur boxing champion who introduced Joshua to the sport.
‘We used to scrap and I would get the better of him. Things have changed. We were messing around a couple of years ago and he hit me in the ribs. I was in pain for about four days. Imagine taking a scaffolding pole and wrapping a pillow case on the end, then getting whacked with it. That’s what it was like.’
When Joshua was 11, his mother briefly returned to Nigeria and took her son with her, enrolling him in a boarding school where he would wake at 5.30am each morning to fetch water.
‘Sometimes the whole block would just get punished,’ Joshua said recently. ‘It might be the cane, or you would have to squat and hold it for 30 minutes. We got beaten, but that’s my culture culture, beating.’ He returned to Britain after two terms and started at Kings Langley School, where his best performances came in PE. ‘The fact he has become a boxer is still a bit of a surprise because I was convinced he could become a footballer,’ says his PE teacher, John Annett.
‘He wasn’t a bad lad as such,’ Annett adds. ‘ He was disruptive and got lectured by the head a bit towards the end but that was about the limit of it.’
He left school at 16 and his problems escalated quickly when his mother moved to Golders Green and Joshua briefly stayed in hostels in Watford. He was drinking, smoking, partying and, in his words, ‘causing creative mischief’ as part of a gang of 40.
It is commonly reported that in 2009, when he was 20, he was placed on remand in a Reading prison for two weeks for ‘fighting and other crazy stuff’, but in actual fact it was around 2007.
The fear of serious jail time prompted him to buy weights from Argos to bulk up in readiness. His reprieve from a custodial sentence led him to move in with his mother again and from there he turned up at Finchley ABC, complete with an ankle tag. His cousin, Ileyemi, was training there and brought him along. ‘His main coach was Sean Murphy and we would all just watch this great big lad,’ Oliver says. ‘After one of those first sessions I told my partner, Carol, that I had just seen a future world champion.’
Ileyemi, who loaned Joshua £25 for his first pair of boxing boots, adds: ‘He took to it so naturally. But I’ll always remember one of his first sessions. He was so knackered he had to wait 15 minutes before getting in the car. Then he threw up as soon as he got home.’ David Ghansa remembers receiving a message on Facebook one night. ‘It was Fem telling me he wanted make a go of boxing.’
Joshua made rapid progress in the amateur ranks. He won the national ABA championship in 2010, turned down an offer of £50,000 to go pro, and then joined Team GB. There would be another ABA title and a world championship silver in the space of four years up to London 2012.
He moved at unprecedented speed, despite his most publicised clash with the law in 2010, when he was arrested in possession of 8oz of cannabis, while wearing his Team GB tracksuit.
Joshua was given 100 hours’ community service and suspended by Team GB. ‘Sean and I took him aside so many times to tell him to give up whatever he was doing out there,’ Oliver says. ‘That last one, though, was the real wake-up call.
‘He was doing his community service in north Finchley, on an allotment next to my house. I used to sit with him in my car and talk about what he was doing with his life. I couldn’t be prouder of the way he responded’
Within two years Joshua was the Olympic champion. THE AJ tale is one of a man and brand travelling at blinding pace.
In less time than it took for him to rule the world amateur scene, he is a world heavyweight champion, winning the IBF portion of
‘His first punch broke trainer’s hand in 10 places!’
the crown in less than three years. He is worth north of £10million, courtesy of endorsements that don’t typically exist in boxing.
‘As a guy he hasn’t changed,’ says Ghansa. ‘But once he found the discipline in his life there has been no stopping him. But he’ll still find an excuse if he loses at FIFA on the console, it will be the controller’s fault. He still watches all sorts of stuff on the telly. He once spent the weekend watching documentaries about the independence of Congo and telling me all about it.’
Joshua still lives with his mother. ‘African mums are the boss and Fem doesn’t argue with her,’ Ghansa says.
Klitschko is so much better than anyone Joshua has faced in a perfect professional career of 18 knockouts. Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn wanted to go slower than this, but sometimes an opportunity comes along that cannot be ignored. And sometimes a fighter comes along that goes against conventional wisdom. Is Joshua that guy?
As Oliver put it: ‘If he punches Klitschko like he punched Sean’s hand, you’ll have the answer.’