I’ve got wee man’s syndrome... mess with me and you’ll get a nasty surprise
JOSH TAYLOR on how his tough upbringing in Prestonpans made him a street-fighter
The spark which ignited the world championship fire in Josh Taylor arrived when the bullying of him as a small boy came to a menacing climax as an older gang tried to tie him by the neck to a wire fence.
‘That was the first time I snapped,’ he says. ‘My dad kept telling me the day would come when I’d have to fight back. This was it. I broke free and instead of running, I turned on the chief culprit who was older than me and the biggest of them. Battered him to the ground. Then I went after two more and they were scared. In shock.
‘They’d been picking on me and my pals for weeks, when we played football on a rough pitch at the site of the old closed pits. Taking our ball off us. Threatening. Pushing me round individually. The little one. After that, they stayed clear of me.
‘Still under ten, I’d learned first hand the lesson dad had been teaching me. That unless you stand your ground the bullies will keep going after you. What I didn’t know then was that finding out you must never back down would stand me in good stead for the rest of my life, particularly in boxing.
‘I discovered way back then that you must defend yourself, even in a little home town like mine.’
Prestonpans, population 10,460, is not only a thousand miles away but brightlight-years distant from Manhattan, where he will defend his WBO and Ring magazine light-welterweight belts tonight against the dangerous native New Yorker of honduran origin Teofimo Lopez.
YeT the task for Taylor remains much the same as when he was a schoolboy. The historic Madison Square Garden can be a daunting place to box a local boy wonder but the flame which burned through his formative battles will be blazing again.
‘Prestonpans was a tough old place to grow up,’ says Taylor. ‘The mines which employed so many had shut, with Thatcher and all that. The brickworks, soap factories and salt works followed them. All gone. hard times. Not much for people to do. except there was always fighting.
‘I was never the one looking for trouble. Not when I was tiny with friends who were all bigger than me and had hair on their chests. Not me.
‘Nor did I have any big brothers to help me out. But I was outgoing. Always having a laugh when not being drawn into fights by people who saw me as an easy target they could beat up. That wasn’t fun but this was a good place for me growing up. We had the beach right in front of us. Golf courses all around us, with east Lothian being the birthplace of the Scottish game.
‘The countryside on our doorstep. We would go out in the fields on our bikes. Make hay bales and dive into them when not jumping into the sea. Steal golf balls. Play soldiers and make gang huts in the woods. Set fires. Just boys being boys, having fun. Not stuck indoors in cities. I had a great childhood in the great outdoors.
‘And I developed wee man’s syndrome. Mess with me and you’ll get a nasty surprise. Like every opponent I’ve faced in the ring. Like Teofimo will this weekend.’
So was it an angry young man who did get into trouble, with the police, when he hurled ugly insults at a stranger in a bar?
‘No,’ he explains. ‘That was out of character for me. I was drunk. Got in an argument and said some bad things I shouldn’t say to another person and was sorry about that. But I’m not angry by nature. That is the one and only incident like that on my record.’
Prestonpans was also where he learned to defy excruciating, potentially life-threatening agony. he is torn between nostalgia and emotion when explaining such dramatic incidents in his boyhood: ‘The Royal Musselburgh links were just up the road. We were proud that for many years it was recorded as the oldest course in the world. (Until the Royal and Ancient over-ruled that designation, somewhat conveniently, to St Andrews).
‘My grandfather was a member. he sometimes took me and my cousin to learn how to play. One day, when I was ten, my cousin demonstrated the correct way of swinging the club but didn’t see me standing behind him. he caught me. Not with the downswing but with his follow through and struck me with full power on the side of the head.
‘It smashed my face to smithereens. Multiple fractures to the cheek bone. One of the surgeons told me I was lucky it didn’t connect an inch or two higher, when the bleeding on the brain would have killed me. A little lower and I would have been paralysed for life by damage to the nerves in my neck. I was covered in blood and the sound in the ear was more deafening than the buzzing fighters get when we’re slapped on the side of the head.
‘It was horrific but I was still upright and conscious. I was in hospital for weeks. Lots of operations. The surgeon did a fantastic job. The cosmetic surgery actually made the cheek stronger. Not until I started boxing a few years later did it occur to me that I’d proved I could take a punch! No opponent is ever going to hit me as hard as that, and I’ve never felt a twinge from it in the ring.
‘It was tested quite soon in the street fights. There was a massive scar right across my face from the surgery. You can still see it here on the left cheek and behind the ear. Some guys who saw it as a sign of weakness tried to take advantage by humiliating me in front of girls.’ he repeats, with emphasis: ‘Yes, in front of girls. At a time when I was very self-conscious about my appearance.
‘They soon realised their mistake. That I was their nightmare. The worst fight they could have picked. And, yes, I’m still undefeated, inside and outside the ring.’
British rival Jack Catterall, his supporters and a quorum of commentators question that, convinced that the split decision given to Taylor 16 months ago constituted a mugging in Glasgow.
The Tartan Tornado has no qualms about addressing that issue as he prepares to top the bill in the Big Apple. In so doing he affirms ‘absolutely’ his commitment to taking the rematch, which Catterall has accused him of avoiding, saying: ‘We’ll fight again. he shouldn’t doubt that for a moment.’
There was an ugly ringside confrontation between them at an ensuing promotion. Taylor, who was criticised for insisting he won their fight, says now: ‘I was watching a gym mate’s fight when Jack came over and accused me of faking the injury which postponed our rematch. I jumped up and told him, if you want to fight that badly let’s do it here and now. Well, nothing happened.
‘The truth was that I’ve developed a painful foot condition called plantar fasciitis. It was made worse by me tearing a tendon so badly that it was only attached to my heel by a thread. It needed months of specialised treatment to rebuild the strength of the
tendon and ankle, which is why I’ve been out of the ring so long.
‘I’m still in pain from the foot condition but I can live — and fight — with it. Jack will have his day in court. No problem for me because although I’ve repeatedly accepted that the first fight was close, I know I’m on a different level from him. I got the backlash but that wasn’t the robbery they were screaming. There have been much more controversial decisions than that before and since our fight.
‘What this really was, was the biggest mistake of my career. For the first time in my life I looked past an opponent. I was complacent. I told myself I only had to be physically ready and turn up to win.
‘I still think I did win, narrowly. But I will never take any opponent lightly again. No matter how inferior I think he is. Jack included. I want that fight at least as much as he does. I want to prove I’m better. I want to shut the critics up to say I told you so.’
Taylor also confirms he will give American Regis Prograis a rematch after their close fight in the O2 a couple of years ago, saying: ‘I’ve never ducked a challenge and never will. I love boxing too much to do that. Every big fight, including the one this weekend, gives me butterflies in the stomach.’
As did the thrill when his father let him ride his motor-bikes through the fields behind their home when he was only five years old.
‘That was my first sporting love,’ he says. ‘I drove in mini-moto races. Loved it. I would have loved to be Valentino Rossi. It was my dream job to be a motor-bike racer. But that is a bottomless money pit and the one thing we didn’t have to spare in our family was money.’
As an alternative, an uncle introduced him to taekwondo. He was a black dan by the age of 12 and a grand master soon after but the combat element was not strong enough to satisfy him. A surprising source brought boxing across his radar.
‘For as many years as I could remember, my mother was a receptionist at the Meadowbank sports centre in Edinburgh. I went to visit her one day and she told me there was a boxing gym downstairs where Alex Arthur trained. I’d been glued to Arthur’s fights on TV, so I went to watch him in person. He told me to get busy and a coach there said I was a natural.
‘I loved the whole atmosphere, so for two years when I was 14 and 15 I would come out of school two nights a week, and straight onto the hour-long bus ride to Edinburgh.’
WHAT he didn’t quite say is that the rest is history. Which includes not only becoming the first undisputed world lightwelterweight champion of the four-belt era but his fascination with great battles from the past of an altogether different kind.
‘I was pretty average at pretty well everything at school,’ he says. ‘Except history. That subject, I buried myself in. I was never happier in school than when we studied the World Wars. Well, even happier when we looked into the battles of the Scottish uprising against British rule.’
Which brings him back to the village of his youth. He passes on that education by explaining: ‘The Battle of Prestonpans in 1745 was the last victory for the Jacobite forces over the British. One inflicted under the command of Bonnie Prince Charlie over the Hanoverian army of Sir John Cope. There were so many unionist Tartans in the British regiment that there were hundreds of Scots fighting Scots but it was still what we would call a huge upset in boxing.
‘It couldn’t last. The war went on to Culloden where we were slaughtered.’
Very little of that sentiment transfers into today’s argument about Scottish separatism. He says: ‘I did vote for independence in the 2014 referendum. But I am not political.’
Then he is at pains to declare: ‘I love where I come from, Prestonpans. I’m proud of my roots, as everyone should be whether that background is rich or poor. My wife and I (he married Danielle last June) go back there all the time as we now live only six miles away in another village, Haddington.
‘I love hearing the ring announcer say that I’m fighting out of Prestonpans. I’m proud to fight for Scotland. But I’m also proud to box for the UK. And I have an army of fans in England who like the way I fight.’
There is far more to this man than meets a punch in the eye. As there usually is with great champions in sport. A quest for more culture is playing into his and Danielle’s choice of location for a honeymoon delayed for a year by Covid and injury.
‘We’re going to Mexico,’ he says. ‘Not only for the sunshine and beaches. To the Yucatan peninsula where we can also take in the ancient civilisation of the Mayans, with all its pyramids and temples. Another love of mine is studying great architecture.’
There is humanity within one of the ring’s iron men. Never more so than when the two align in his memory of the recently deceased Ken Buchanan, Scotland’s greatest ring legend and his idol.
Taylor will pay tribute early tomorrow by wearing trunks in the identical no-frills design as Buchanan’s. He says: ‘The only difference is the shorts will be in my clan’s tartan instead of Ken’s Buchanan tartan.’
As will the replica robe he wears to enter the building in which Buchanan enjoyed massive New York popularity through a series of Garden fights of his own.
The pair became close as Buchanan took Taylor under his wing. The 32-year-old younger man says: ‘The last time I saw him was not long after I beat Jose Ramirez in Las Vegas two years ago (pictured left). The dementia before he died was sad and I wasn’t allowed to visit his care home because of Covid. But his carers persuaded them to let him come out for one last visit to my house. He remembered who I was. That I’m following in his footsteps. He gave me a cuddle but in the next breath he was having to ask where he was. Then he settled down and we told old boxing stories. Talked a lot and laughed a lot. It was a fond goodbye.’
Compassion runs through one of the toughest men in the hardest game.
Not that Teofimo Lopez is likely to be a recipient here. Not after threatening to kill the pride of Scotland. Not when Josh Taylor warns him: ‘There’s a lot of that fire still inside me. Be sure of that.’