His beginnings as a fighter were like those of many – weeknights and weekends,
outside a bar or in the back room of some seedy club, fuelled by booze and
by the emptiness of his life. “I never seemed to start the trouble I got
myself into,” Clinton Woods recalls in his thick Sheffield brogue, straight
out of The Full Monty, “but trouble had a habit of following me.”
Scotch Andy, one of his mates, was killed breaking up a fight, “got his head
battered with a stick”. Another friend, “Japanese sniper, everybody called
him, because he looked like one”, took an overdose of pills and died in his
sleep, rather than face prison. Woods was headed for jail, too, after a
“run-in with several bouncers” at a club in Chesterfield. “They’d taken me
inside a room the week before and gave me a right pasting, pinned me down,
put fag burns on me, everything,” he explains. “So what do I do the next
night? I go back. I end up having a scrap with one of them again and,
eventually, helped by the other bouncers, he got me outside, a copper got
hold of me, pulled my arms around my back and handcuffed me, laid me on the
ground on my belly and shouted over to the bouncer, ‘Come on, then.’ I can
remember looking up and saying, ‘Aw God,’ just before the bouncer drove his
boot into my right eye. Then he picked my head up by grabbing my hair and
shoved his thumb in my eye - a swelling the size of an orange came up right
away. ‘I’m going to have you,’ he said. I’d knocked his teeth out, it ended
up in court and I thought I’d go down for it.”
However, the judge ordered Woods to do community service to a maximum of 240
hours - “I did gardening around Sheffield, though I had no green fingers on
me, mind” - and a letter from his mother, Andrea, proved to be the turning
point in his life. “She said she was frightened to death because every time
I went out something bad was happening,” he reveals. “ ‘You’re ruining your
life,’ she told me. I was plastering, one day off, one day on and life was a
bit shit, which is why I went out drinking a lot. I had my flat in
Westfield, a rough area of Sheffield, with a bed in it, a telly and a coffee
machine and that’s all I had. The first time I brought my wife, Natalia,
home with me she couldn’t believe it. I had nowt. Anyway, my mum had a lot
of trouble with my brothers and she wanted me to change my ways. I still
have my mum’s letter because everything changed from that point. I found a
gym not far from where I was living [run by Dennis Hobson, who is now his
manager and promoter] and I started boxing.”
As he retells his story by the poolside of a rented house in a quiet,
residential area on the outskirts of Orlando, the 35-year-old is preparing
for the fight of his life. He is relaxed and confident that he can wear down
the 39-year-old challenger for his International Boxing Federation (IBF)
light-heavyweight title, Antonio Tarver - who appeared alongside Sylvester
Stallone in the movie Rocky Balboa - and is comfortable in his surroundings
and new-found status. In a trilogy of light-heavyweight bouts over the next
fortnight, the 12st 7lb division will be brought sharply into focus.
Woods-Tarver will share top billing on April 12 at the St Pete Times Forum
in Tampa alongside a World Boxing Council (WBC) title bout featuring Chad
Dawson, the American champion, and Glen Johnson, whom Woods defeated on
points in September 2006 when he won the IBF belt. Bernard Hopkins, who beat
Tarver in June 2006 to win The Ring light-heavyweight championship, will
defend against Britain’s Joe Calzaghe on April 19 at the Thomas and Mack
Center in Las Vegas and lucrative unification bouts will be on offer to the
winners.
For a boxer whose first purse in 1994 was for a meagre £240, while the highest
purse he received in any of his first 10 contests was for £350, the
opportunity to fight for million-dollar purses against the most formidable
competition is exhilarating.
“I got a grand for my 12th fight [when Woods faced Ernie Loveridge, a
journeyman from Wolverhampton, at Pinegrove Country Club in Sheffield] and I
thought that was mega-money,” he remembers with a chuckle. “When I first
started boxing my only aim was to lose weight. I had a beer gut and ‘man
tits’ hangin’ down to the floor. A friend of mine called Neil Port, God rest
his soul, became my trainer and he treated me like a son, telling me,
‘You’re going to be British champion one day’, and he’d tell other people
the same and it used to embarrass me no end.
“Then I won the Commonwealth super-middleweight title in 1997 and two years
later I became British, Commonwealth and European light-heavyweight
champion. I kept winning, beat Yawe Davis in a WBC title elimi-nator and,
suddenly [in 2002], I was in the ring with Roy Jones when he was the best
pound-for-pound fighter in the world. When I came back to my corner after
the first round I thought I was going to win it and all, but I wasn’t strong
enough to cope and my cornermen threw in the towel in the sixth round.
“When I look back and see what I’ve achieved in boxing it’s unbelievable. I
could have ended up in prison when my life was on a downward spiral but now
I have the chance to show that I’m the best light-heavy-weight in the world.”
This distinction belonged to Tarver when he knocked out a diminished Jones in
their rematch in May 2004. Having stepped up to heavyweight to win the World
Boxing Association (WBA) belt against paper titleholder John Ruiz in March
2003, Jones’s punch resistance was shot by the debilitating effort to make
12st 7lb again. A brilliant amateur who won a gold medal at the 1995 world
championships and bronze at the 1996 Olympic Games, Tarver’s shortcomings
were exposed by Hopkins two years ago. The Magic Man from Orlando appeared
intimidated by the Executioner from Philadel-phia and his punch output was
negligible against the former world middleweight champion.
Like Woods, Tarver experienced tough times growing up in the inner city, where
his mother, Gwendolyn, raised an only son and three daughters on her own. In
his teenage years he succumbed to a cocaine addiction and it was only when
he saw Jones, to whom he had lost as an amateur, win the best boxer award at
the Seoul Olympics in 1988 that he began to dedicate himself to his sport
again. His victories over Jones as a pro provided the springboard to his
role as world heavyweight champion Mason Dixon in Rocky Balboa,a venture
that contributed to his defeat by Hopkins, he insists.
“For me, it was a job and I stepped up to the plate because I’m a natural
performer, I’m an entertainer, whatever I’m doing,” he declares, his brash
personality epitomised by the diamond-studded earrings he wears throughout a
light work-out in Calta’s Fitness Club in Tampa. “I had to bulk up to play
the role and I didn’t take the weight off right before I fought Hopkins, but
that was just a bad day at the office. I can come back from a setback
because I got what you call swagger, baby. Can’t you feel it?”
It feels nauseating, so the sight of Woods’s Sheffield steel transforming
Tarver’s swagger into stagger would be refreshing.
Woods v Tarver, Saturday, Setanta Sports 2, 11.30pm
