BORN TO FIGHT
Nathan Gorman comes from bareknuckle fighting stock and is related to boxing superstar Tyson Fury
‘A gang hit my great uncle with iron bars, crushed his gullet and sawed halfway through his leg with a bottle... but still he fronted them up’
GETTING praise from Nathan Gorman’s great uncle was no easy thing. He was a serious man, the late Bartley Gorman, so what he once said about a foreign sparring partner carried a bit of weight.
‘The guy was over here from America, in the mid-Eighties or something,’ says the younger Gorman. ‘This man has come across and done a few rounds with Bartley, three or four I heard. Apparently Bartley never gave many details about how it went but he did say it was the hardest he had been hit in his life.
‘ Now that’s something. He would give a man credit where due, but he wouldn’t often throw around comments like that. I suppose what you have to remember is that the other fella in the ring that day was Muhammad Ali.’
Gorman loves that tale and all the others like it. He has been raised on the pictures and the history, spanning the years 1972 to 1992 when Bartley reigned undefeated as the gipsy bare-knuckle champion, and all the other stories of a hard man’s life.
They include the day he was ambushed by a gang at Doncaster racecourse. There were anywhere between 20 and 80 assailants depending who you ask and on what day. ‘They were hitting him with iron bars and crushed his gullet,’ Gorman says. ‘One fella a sawed halfway through his leg with a broken bottle but still he fronted them up.’
All conversations with this giant and jolly 23-year-old tend to lead to the late Bartley and a family tree that is really quite astonishing, taking in his gloved cousins Tyson, Hughie and Tommy Fury before you work back to the bareknuckle traveller crew.
‘It goes about 300 years deep,’ says Gorman, a man from traveller stock who grew up in houses in Nantwich.
‘When I have looked at it I can trace it back to my great great great grandad, who was a bare-knuckle boxer in Ireland.
‘My great great grandad and my great grandad were bare-knuckle fighters and then it skipped two generations with my grandad and dad, then stuck with me again. Not being funny, but with a name like Gorman and a family like this, there’s a bit to live up to.’
It’s a fine understatement. But the wheels are in motion and a week today he will become British heavyweight champion if he beats Daniel Dubois at The O2.
It is an excellent match-up, one of those increasingly rare occasions when unbeaten, hyped fighters face off early in their careers. For Gorman, it will be his 17th professional fight and for Dubois the 12th, yet it has felt as though this collision has been a long time coming, not least because they have a feud dating back to their time as silent roommates in the British squad.
Now that they have reached this point, where either man could soon become a figure on the world scene, it is interesting to consider Gorman might not have been a boxer at all. For all the coding in his blood, he is not a naturally violent person, and his father, John, was not at all keen for him to take up the family hobby.
‘My dad wasn’t having it at all,’ says Gorman. ‘I remember when I was five, my grandad got me a punch bag and I fell in love with it, but when I said I wanted to go to a boxing club my dad said no straight away.
‘Then one night three years later I snuck off and went. I will never forget walking in and the smell of sweat and blood and the music, it was amazing. I got back and told dad and you couldn’t print what he said. But eventually he said, “If you are 100 per cent serious, I will back you 100 per cent. Your hundred for my hundred”. He has been with me every session since.
‘But I tell you what, if I suddenly didn’t want to do it anymore, if I just quit, he would be the happiest man in Britain.
‘But I can’t see that happening. It’s funny how the bug skipped a couple of generations and then found me. I just love the sport even though I wasn’t a natural fighter as a kid.
‘I would love boxing in the gym but I wasn’t one of those kids picking fights in school.
‘I was never in trouble with the police, the only trouble I had was with bullies. They would mistake my kindness for weakness and at one point they were starting on me about once a month. The last time was when I was about 11.
‘This big fella walked up to me and for no reason whipped me with a skipping rope. I cracked him with a hook and he had to go to hospital. I never got bullied again after that and since then all my fighting has been in the ring.’ More than a decade on, it has proven a successful venture, though it has not been a garlanded journey. Dubois has been promoted louder and longer, helped in part by a rumour he once dropped Anthony Joshua in sparring.
Gorman has walked a harder route, taking in small halls from Walsall to Blackpool and Stoke.
‘I have done the nitty gritty,’ he says. ‘The money I had for my first few fights was enough to keep my head above water and that was about it. I know what it is like to fight at 5pm when they are putting the chairs out and I know what it is to appreciate a chance like this at The O2. It makes you hungry.
‘Daniel has obviously had a slightly different path.’
The animosity between the pair is real. They were once in the same weight division in the British Olympic programme. ‘They paired us as room-mates once and it was clear we couldn’t get on,’ Gorman says.
‘I might as well have been in there with a mute. I tried to make conversation and in the end I just thought he was ignorant. We were in together for two or three weeks and we never had a conversation of more than 10 seconds.
‘But I guess we were rivals — same weight, same team — so maybe it would never work.
‘Whatever he tries to say in the build- up, he knows that we sparred at least 300 rounds over more than two years and I was always on top.’
In disputing the accepted tale that Dubois once decked Joshua, Gorman says: ‘There is a popular story out there about a very famous heavyweight getting knocked down in that room and unless it happened when my back was turned for a split second, I don’t believe it. That was a bit of good marketing.’
Time will tell which of these talented fighters is more closely aligned with their hype. Certainly Gorman is paying precious little attention to those predicting the result based on body shape.
‘Look at Andy Ruiz against Joshua,’ he says. ‘And as Tyson ( Fury) says, “A bulldog isn’t pretty but most of them can fight pretty well”.’ Evidently, so can most Gormans.