There are no winners in this story. It has a victor in name alone, but two
boxers who were both, effectively, defeated. They live on opposite sides of
the world and are for ever linked by 12 hard rounds that left one man, Paul
Ingle, fighting for his life and another, Mbulelo Botile, with a win so
empty that he, too, would never recover.
Tuesday will mark the eighth anniversary of the bout, although for both men
there are haunting reminders every day. Ingle - the Yorkshire Hunter, as he
was known - was a world champion featherweight, the hero of Scarborough, his
home town, an uncomplicated boxer who threw punches at an astonishing rate.
Botile was a precious success story in the industrial city of East London,
South Africa, who had fought his way out of the slums of his sprawling,
local township, a symbol of hope, a shanty town star.
Ingle now lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house with his mother and
gets by on £56 a week of disability pension. His nine-stone fighting weight
has become twice that, his speech is slow and his memory shot.
At the end of the bout, Botile still had his health - and Ingle's world title.
But his comparative wealth would soon drain, along with his sense of pride.
He is known in East London for his drinking as much as his achievements in
the ring. Both men are 36, neither has a job and they could do with one.
December 16, 2000. This is the date that their story starts, in a ring in the
Sheffield Arena, although the similarities stretch way back. When the first
bell rang, Ingle was the champion and favourite, yet both men had risen to
be the poster-boys of their communities.
In East London, where boxing has a rich history, Botile's achievements earned
him a house in the white suburbs, won him popularity alongside another local
world champion, Vuyani Bungu, and they learnt the relationship between
success, friends and hangers-on.
Likewise Ingle in Scarborough. In the late 1990s he was the town's big news,
the man everyone wanted to know, an honest alternative to Naseem Hamed, the
flash, bragging rival from the other side of Yorkshire.
Ingle fought and lost to Hamed, but the courageous manner of his defeat only
fanned his popularity. In Scarborough, they loved him and, because of his
innate humility, he never left them, never scoured the horizon for a
brighter set of lights.
Indeed, this may have been Ingle's downfall. People in Scarborough wanted to
drink with him and he found it hard to say no, so hard that as the Botile
bout approached, he had to shed an unfeasible amount of weight, one observer
claiming that it was three stone in seven weeks. Conditioning in such
circumstances is so tough that at least two members of his camp threatened
to walk out on him.
So to December 16: Botile controls the bout, puts Ingle down in the eleventh
round and knocks him down again with a left uppercut in the twelfth. Here
the nightmare unfolds: Botile had an uncle, a fabulous bantamweight who died
in the ring, and his thoughts flashed to him when he saw Ingle lying prone,
then being taken away on a stretcher.
For Ingle, another fight was just beginning. He survived the removal of a
blood clot from his brain, then battled against his speech impediment and
memory loss and had to teach himself to walk again.
Within a few months his relationship with his fiancée had broken down. Perhaps
his biggest challenge was wrestling with his identity: if no longer the
champion of Scarborough and the world, then who?
Down a phone line from his house in East London, Botile starts to bring his
story up to date. “For two weeks after the fight I could hardly sleep at
all,” he says. Three months later, he would have to turn his mind to his
first defence, against Frank Toledo, an American infinitely inferior to
Ingle, but Botile barely won a round. “I was not myself against Toledo,” he
says. “Because Paul was still in hospital and I was thinking about him. I
just wanted him to wake up.”
The next year, when he boxed and lost again, he was still a haunted man. “I
was so upset in that fight,” he says. “I was getting a headache in the ring
and I was scared to die.”
That seemed a reasonable point to end his career, until 2 years later, when
his bank balance told him that he needed another payday. He was so out of
condition by then that Mzi Mnguni, his manager, refused to work with him. It
was his last bout and a third consecutive defeat.
“In that last one he was terrible,” Mnguni says. “He was fat. He was no longer
a serious fighter. My expectations of Botile were very high, but after the
Ingle fight he was never the same again.
“I don't know whether it got to him mentally, but I had a problem getting him
right. And he decided to live a life that was not complementary to his
profession.”
As with Ingle, popularity and wealth did Botile few favours. “It is easy to
have friends when the money is there,” Mnguni says. “But when it isn't there
any more, you have few.”
Botile claims that he was underpaid for the Ingle contest. “I went to fight
Paul Ingle for $95,000,” he says. He says that he received less than a
quarter of that.
Even so, his career brought him comparative riches. He bought a taxi company,
which failed. His drinking increased. “I made lots of money,” he says. “But
at this time I am surviving. I don't have the boxing money any more.”
His old friend Bungu says: “When you used to be a champion and you are not any
more, that is the problem. Botile - he cannot take it. He's frustrated. He's
spent all his money. He stays in his house, drinking too much. He is not OK.”
Where Botile and Ingle are so intertwined is in their search for an inner
peace. If every night could be like the benefit night organised in Ingle's
honour last year in Scarborough, he might be a happy man. He entered the
room that night flanked by Nigel Benn and Steve Collins, both former
middleweight world champions, with Collins holding the Ingle's arms aloft as
if he were king of the world.
However, an interview on Radio 5 Live last year is a better insight. Ingle
said that he “absolutely detests” boxing and has “washed my hands of it”.
His rage and four-letter tirades were such that the interview had to be
restarted two or three times.
“When I was fighting I was 100 miles an hour on the go all the time,” he says.
“Now it's just come to a brick wall and I can't climb over it. It's stuck in
your face all the time. I think, ‘Get back in training and do this and do
that.' Then you realise you can't do it no more. It's just an absolute
eye-filler.
“I can't work, I do nothing, living on the money I've got and the disability
money I receive. That ain't enough to scratch your arse.”
During Ingle's career, his earnings went well past £650,000 and add to that
the £50,000 compensation insurance he received from the British Boxing Board
of Control (BBBC). He would not be the first to ignore the financial advice
received in his heyday because he never envisaged his big earning period
coming to an end.
He still lives in Scarborough, although he is no longer quite the toast of the
town. “Everyone's just shut the book and forgotten about me,” he says. Which
is not entirely true. For example, although the BBBC invited him to its 75th
anniversary over and over again, he never replied. Clearly he feels the
victim. “He is a lost soul,” Steve Pollard, his former trainer, says. “It's
tragic for the kid.”
Tom Shillaw, his friend and nutritionist at the time, says: “What people
forget is Paul is very bright, articulate and witty. And his faculties are
all there. But he's had a very hard fall and how do you come back from that?”
Neil Featherby, his fitness coach at the time, says: “It's all very sad. For a
5ft 4in featherweight, he was a giant of a man.” Featherby believes that
Ingle would benefit from a lifestyle coach, someone to help to reignite a
spark of motivation. Pollard got him a licence to work as a second
cornerman, but Ingle never took it up.
“For me, it would be great if Paul could have a role, saying to young
boxers, ‘This is what you do in this sport and this is what you don't do,' ”
Featherby says. “That is what Paul should be doing now.”
This story could have had a convenient ending, at Ingle's benefit night, but
Botile did not make it. His passport had run out and he also harboured a
concern - surely misplaced - that he would receive a negative reception.
Instead, they are fighting their own lonely battles. Botile is talking about
becoming a trainer but gets by selling liquor from his house. For Ingle, the
horizon holds very little. “I still think about him big time,” Botile says.
“Because he is my kind. But I never meant to hurt him. Boxing is just a
game.” On December 16, 2000, boxing was more than just a game.
