Traveller, who has been busy treading the boards, moved
From London to Ireland as a teenager but working with Emanuel Steward changed his outlook and put him on the path towards middleweight world title. By
Andy Lee hails from the same travelling communityasTyson Fury. Their grandmothers were sisters, he is fond of his distant relative... but there the similarities end. You will hear no foul outrage coming from the mouth of Lee, no boorish prejudice culled from a narrow appreciation of a sacred text. You might, however, hear a few lines of Chekhov.
Indeed, were you in Dublin in October last year, in the audience at a small theatre perchance, watching a production of Chekhov’s first play, Platonov, you would have seen the WBO middleweight champion treading the boards as the horse thief Ossip.
This, of course, makes him a kind of inverted Marlon Brando. Brando’s Terry Molloy famously “coulda been a contender” in the Fifties American classic, On the Waterfront. Lee is considerably more than that, and defends his crown in Manchester this coming weekend against Billy Joe Saunders.
The contest is framed by their shared travelling backgrounds, and thus fits easily into the “gypsy” fighting stereotype.
Lee, as you might imagine from his extra-curricular interests, is not that easy to pigeonhole. The acting story demands he tellsyou more but, in this context anyway, Lee is far too modest to explore a part of his life discovered via marriage to a musician with theatrical interests. So we stick to the noble art, which is itself a mighty tale.
Born in east London, Lee quit Bow and the itinerant life as a 13-year-old, moving to Limerick, where his parents built a permanent home on land they owned. He claims the change in circumstances, though unwelcome to a teenager coming to understand the world in broader, livelier terms, proved pivotal in his development as a boxer.
“If we hadn’t moved I’m not sure I would have stuck at it,” he tells me. “I was getting bold enough to go where I wanted, messing around on the streets and stuff. But in Limerick I didn’t know anybody. So boxing gave me a position, made me somebody. Even though I hated moving at the time, it was the best thing that could have happened.”
Lee was a graduate of the East End amateur boxing meccaof Repton, good enough to win a couple of schoolboy titles before relocating to Ireland, where he built a stellar amateur career at the Saint Francis ABC, yielding world junior silver and Olympic exposure in Athens.
Crucially, his march to the world junior final in 2002 brought him to the attention of the great Emanuel Steward at the Kronk Gym in Detroit. Though Lee lost in the final, he took down tournament favourite Jesus Gonzales of the United States en route, and in so doing lit a flare in the imagination of Steward that would have remarkable consequences.
“He heard about a tall, skinny, Irish kid who beat the No 1 in America, who