The initial request for this interview prompted a measure of concern at the
Amateur Boxing Association (ABA). It was understandable: it is not often
that a Romany Gypsy qualifies for the Olympic Games. In fact, Billy Joe
Saunders is the first from Great Britain. And because he is also 18 and has
burst like a shooting star to the top of his métier, his media training has
been minimal.
The concern is that the teenager from a Hertfordshire travellers' site is
going to steal headlines because of where he lives rather than the way he
boxes. The concern is that Saunders's background has associations that are
sometimes negative.
If not misplaced, such anxiety is unnecessary. Saunders's background is not a
subject on which he feels the remotest desire to remain reticent. Indeed, he
is as proud of his roots as he is of his boxing. And if his progress in the
ring were to continue on such an astonishingly upward curve, he would make a
poster boy for both.
If he does continue to track so closely the footsteps of Amir Khan, there will
soon be few who do not know that he is boxing in the name of the travellers'
community, to kill off some of the prejudice and give his people a good
name. “Every traveller knows me now,” he says and he rolls his eyes as if to
suggest that he cannot quite believe the path his career is following.
Yet this is the life of Billy Joe Saunders, a young man so thrilled to be so
high on the crest of his wave. In the future, maybe, when he has come down
the other side and authority figures have smoothed off some of the edges, he
may not, for instance, take his son, who is seven months old, into his
interviews (the boy's mother, he tells us, lives on the travellers' site in
the lot next to his), and neither may he offer so gleefully the fact that he
is still, contrary to his coach's wishes, playing striker for his
travellers' football team (they lost 21-9 to the Sandy travellers recently.
“We have goalkeepers,” he explains. “But they're not very good”).
But for now he is fresh, genuine and exciting. We met nine days after he had
won bronze in a tournament in Pescara, Italy, and thus booked his place in
the Beijing Games. He had just popped back from his local supermarket, where
strangers in the aisles were still stopping and congratulating him.
“To be an Olympian? I couldn't tell you how it feels,” he says. “It doesn't
seem right. Like, am I going there or not? The first morning after I got
back, when I woke up, I really thought I was dreaming. Then I was eating my
breakfast and it came up on Sky News, a big picture of me.”
His success is a story, whatever the quirks of his background. At the age of
16 he was selected for “hothousing” by the ABA - four days a week with the
elite in Sheffield - but only on the feeder programme that was aimed at the
2012 London Olympics. At the time, Neil Perkins, a former England captain,
was the established welterweight lined up for Beijing. But when Saunders
turned 17 and was allowed to compete at senior level, he embarked on a
winning streak that became impossible to ignore.
When he reels off the scalps he took en route to Pescara, he can hardly talk
fast enough. At a prestigious tournament in Bulgaria he beat Carlos Bantuer,
the Cuban who had been voted his nation's No1 pound-for-pound boxer. He then
beat Rirko Alexander, the Serb who had beaten Perkins in the previous World
Championships (“I took that Serb apart”).
When he reached the final he had to take on Evgeni Birisov, a Bulgarian with
home advantage. “They tried to rob me,” Saunders says, “until I put him down
three times and he didn't get up. They couldn't rob me then.”
Victory there made it impossible not to select Saunders for the Pescara
qualifier ahead of Perkins and by the time he was in the semi-finals, his
record at senior level was unblemished: 29 wins in 29 bouts.
At this stage there was a feeling that the Great Britain team, with all seven
boxers unbeaten after three days, were on the rough edge of some judging
decisions. When Saunders lost his semi-final - and his unbeaten streak - the
decision was booed. More significant was the fact that he had straightened
his mind out the next day to control the bronze-medal bout, on which hung
that Olympic qualification.
When he arrived back in Britain, his mobile phone clicked into action and
showed 30 texts and 47 missed calls. As proud as any was his
great-grandfather, Absolom Beeney, who, in his day, boxed bare-knuckle in
the gypsy fairground booths and who, as he likes to remind people, never
lost a contest. “When you hear it 100 times over and over, you know what
he's going to say,” Saunders says, affectionately. Beeney is 94 and lives on
the same travellers' site. “Everybody knows him. He's probably in the pub
right now,” Saunders says. “That's how he survives - loves his beer.”
Thus has boxing been in the family. Saunders's father had 18 amateur bouts and
has a set of trophies that, when Billy Joe and his elder brother, Tom, were
young children, they gave a white - and exceedingly unpopular - lick of
paint. They have since repaid him. Tom has a short, unbeaten record as a
professional. At one stage their father kept a Portakabin purely as a trophy
room, “but it started to sag so we had to get rid of it”.
When Billy Joe was 11 he stopped school. “It was getting too much in the way
of training,” he says. He took some home tuition thereafter, but “my head
was full of boxing, I didn't really have time for anything else”. To many,
that might have seemed a colossal gamble, but on this occasion it appears to
have paid off.
He is determined to cash in on behalf of the people he has grown up around. “I
am a Romany, that's my background,” he says. “I don't actually know what
Romany means. But you can't be p***ed off with what you are. I feel proud
and happy and that I am doing it for my sort of people - not the travellers
that do the illegal things, but for my own people. I'd like to get the point
over that we are all different, that we are doing proper things with our
lives.
“When you see in the news that a few of the travellers won't move or whatever,
that's just out of order. That's not us. My dad doesn't like travelling the
roads anyway. We'd just go to the once-a-year fairs, the horse fairs in
Appleby [in Cumbria], for instance, for a few days' break. There are [those]
who leave rubbish and we get the blame. That's why we never like moving,
because my dad thinks that people think it's us.” But on his priorities,
above the travellers, he puts Billy Joe, his baby boy.
“When I go away, it's mostly him that motivates me,” he says. “I do it for
him. I don't really want him boxing when he's older. I'm only doing it
because hopefully it's going to be my living. But I want to help him through
life, I don't want him to have a hard life.” At this rate, he will not.
“If I'm boxing someone and he looks like Muhammad Ali, it just doesn't bother
me,” he says. “It's confidence, mainly.” Which leaves this shooting star
well placed to keep on soaring.
Qualified success
With one tournament left, seven men have qualified for the Beijing Olympics
from Great Britain, two more than the total of British boxers at the past
three Games.
— Tony Jeffries, light-heavyweight, 23, Sunderland ABC
— James DeGale, middleweight, 22, Dale Youth ABC, London
— Billy Joe Saunders, welterweight, 18, Hoddesdon ABC, Hertfordshire
— Bradley Saunders, light-welterweight, 21, South Durham ABC
— Frankie Gavin, lightweight, 21, Hall Green ABC, Birmingham
— Joe Murray, bantamweight, 21, Boarshaw ABC, Manchester
— Khalid Yafai, flyweight, 18, Birmingham City ABC
