Rejoice! A sporting giant who is actually a decent human being, too
ACTUAL SIZE! HOW DOES HIS FIST COMPARE WITH YOURS?
Joshua, Joshua — sweeter than lemon squash you are — yes by gosh you are — Joshua, Joshua! The old musical hall song catches the new national mood.
on saturday night, the potentially great anthony Joshua beat the indisputably great Wladimir Klitschko at Wembley stadium to claim the WBa world heavyweight title before 90,000 spectators and many more on pay-per view.
It was the sort of victory, the sort of fight and, above all, the sort of person that creates instant devotion. on saturday morning, Joshua was a name known mainly to followers of boxing, an increasingly marginalised sport. Just 48 hours later, Joshua is a serious aspirant for Living National Treasure.
It’s an astonishing turn-round, and it’s happened for a number of reasons, all of them telling us a good deal about ourselves as well as about Joshua. he brought us sporting drama at the highest level, and perhaps something still bigger — sporting excellence. We long to understand this as proof of Joshua’s greatness as a human being.
all sport can be understood as an opportunity to display or to witness courage.
We call golfers brave for holing a difficult putt; we call snooker players brave for potting a ball at the Crucible Theatre in sheffield at the world finals, and we’re right to do so. We rightly call jockeys and event-riders and racing drivers brave for putting their necks at risk. But boxing takes it to another level.
all sports are metaphors. a batsman doesn’t really die when he is out; it’s not really the end of the world when England are knocked out of the World Cup; and as Boris Becker famously said when he lost at Wimbledon: ‘Nobody died.’
Boxing is the only sport that is not a metaphor. It’s combat. Potentially lethal combat.
Fights tend to be won by the boxer who inflicts more permanent brain damage on his opponent than he himself sustains.
Which makes courage in boxing a pretty unambiguous matter. Joshua was struggling in the fifth round and was knocked down in the sixth — but came back with unquestioned courage to get his man in the 11th with a detonation of brilliance.
So,
yEs, this was a devastating evening of sport, showcasing courage in the most dramatic fashion. It was made still better by the curious incident of preliminary hate. Because there was no preliminary hate. That was the curious incident.
We’re used to insults: it’s part of boxing’s wearisome routine. a few years ago, David haye declared that his fight against audley harrison would be ‘a public execution’ and, fearing that remark might err on the side of good taste, added that it would be ‘as onesided as gang-rape’.
More recently, we had Tyson Fury, who also beat Klitschko. Fury has had his licence to box suspended after failing to make mandatory defences of the titles he won; and he’s made a series of deranged, sexist and homophobic pronouncements. But this is not Joshua’s way. The pre-fight stuff with Klitschko was conducted with mutual respect and intact dignity. No need to whip up hate to sell tickets: this was a fight that needed no selling.
It was like Rafael Nadal v Roger Federer: all handshakes and decency, bring it on and may the better man win.
old-school boxing people didn’t care for it and wondered loudly when the two would announce their engagement. others responded otherwise: well, yes, that’s the way sport should be conducted. and life.
above all, there is the transformational side of boxing. The sport has frequently attempted
to justify itself as ‘a way out of the ghetto’, as if there was a job of heavyweight champion waiting for anyone who cared to put a difficult start behind him.
But a few people really are changed by boxing, and Joshua is a classic example. His current virtuousness seems all the more pleasing in the context of his misdemeanours of the past.
He was born in Watford on October 15, 1989, and in his teens he went to the bad with immense effi- ciency. He was on remand for two weeks in Reading prison for ‘fighting and other crazy stuff’. He wore an electronic tag for 14 months.
In 2011, he was stopped for speeding and police found half a pound of cannabis in his car. He was the subject of a community order and had to do 100 hours of unpaid work. ‘That forced me to grow up. I would have been in drug gangs and prison but for boxing,’ he said.
It’s an old tale, but one that still gives much pleasure. Here is a fighting man who has fought many difficult and dangerous opponents — and much else besides.
As battling boxer, we see him fighting off his own past, fighting off his disadvantages, fighting off the worst parts of his own nature to become a sane, balanced, virtuous, decent, respected — and rich — human being.
He plays chess. He reads. He has an interest in religion, though follows none in particular. He posted a picture of himself on social media praying in a mosque in Dubai.
His mother lives in an ex-council flat in Golders Green, North London, and Joshua bought it for her . . . in fact, he lives there himself (she makes him packed lunches). He also bought a flat for Nicole Osbourne, who is the mother of his son, Joseph, born in 2015.
There are moments of great sport when a British champion emerges.
Such moments are infinitely richer when we can like the human being as well as admire the athlete: moments of rare fulfilment, when sporting and moral concerns seem to be all in a line, and the great gifts of sporting ability at the very highest level seem to spring from moral rightness.
So it was when Andy Murray won Wimbledon in 2013. It was the same when Joe Root took to Test cricket and, with a modest but deeply assured contribution, made certain that England had a series win in India in 2012.
And then there was Jonny Wilkinson — a man so deeply committed to the collective that when anyone else shows team-spirit he gets royalties — when he won the rugby World Cup for England in 2003.
Perhaps my favourite example of all is Jessica Ennis, when she won the heptathlon at the World Athletics Championship in 2009 and then Olympic gold in London three years later.
These are some of the most fabulous moments in sport, when the athlete and the decent human being seem to be in perfect harmony. Sometimes, this can prove to be illusion, of course. Sometimes the athlete is not as good — good in the sporting, good in the moral sense — as we hoped.
But no matter how many times we’ve been disappointed we always greet the emerging champion and all-round good egg with a special joy.
The idea that virtue should be rewarded touches us on a relatively deep level: we really do want good things to go to good people.
Right now, the nation has a new love-object called Anthony Joshua. Let’s see if he can live up to it. In sporting — and in moral terms.