Boxing: Trapped by their corners

BOXING can take a grim toll on a man. Sure, there are the punches inside the ring. Too many of those - sometimes just one too many - and the effects can be harrowing, humiliating, graphically public.

More insidiously, boxing has the capacity to exhaust its competitors from the outside, in its complex network of backroom relationships. Boxers, like all athletes, prefer to concentrate on their side of the job. To allow themselves space to do that, they must be able to trust those around them, whose job it is to turn what the boxer does in a ring into financial profit. Only so much can be done alone. If a boxer has faith in the team around him, inevitably he can perform at a higher level for longer. Once trust is broken, faith crumbles, turmoil creeps in: the team disintegrates.

In varying ways Naseem Hamed, Wayne McCullough and Mike Tyson are troubled men. Tyson because he always has been, Hamed and McCullough, who meet in Atlantic City next week, because of the fractures which have become apparent in their support teams.

Tyson, cleared to box again courtesy of a Nevada Commission last Monday, does not yet know when he will fight, nor when he will have a reliable back-up unit. Is Magic Johnson controlling his boxing future, or Shelly Finkel? Reports from America are conflicting. Finkel wants him back in the ring as soon as possible, Johnson says no. "He's been inactive a long time. We're going to bring him along very slowly."

Tyson, who is involved in lawsuits with his former promoter, Don King, and co-managers, John Horne and Rory Holloway, goes even further. "I don't know whether I'm prepared to fight. I've been going through a lot of things." And this after such a prolonged battle to regain his licence.

Hamed's relationship with his trainer Brendan Ingle is the focal point of his problems. After the publication of a book - The Paddy And The Prince, by Nick Pitt - Hamed has launched into furious criticism of Ingle, labelling him "Judas" and claiming the trainer's role in his life has been overplayed.

Ingle has been hurt and annoyed by Hamed's decision to rely on the financial judgement of his elder brother, Riath, which has meant a gradual withering of his own role as mentor. And, crucially, systematic cuts in pay.

Hamed has been Ingle's pride and joy: living, walking, fighting proof that his particular system of teaching works. Ingle, like the great, late American trainer Ray Arcel, sees his job to teach boxing as a part of life. Arcel used to abhor the label "trainer" because it suggested a boxer was no better than an animal. Ingle is proud of the job he has done on boys who have little natural skill, or are so messed up psychologically when they come to him that they find it hard to communicate or express themselves. He can teach young men with little talent, with nothing apparently going for them, to survive in a professional boxing ring long enough to establish some kind of security, moral as well as financial.

His code is inextricably bound up with behaviour outside the gym and demands extraordinary discipline. He reels off a mantra: "Don't drink, don't smoke, don't gamble, don't do drugs, don't chase women." Hamed sticks to those central beliefs - they fit his Muslim faith - but has grown to consider Ingle's approach too restrictive. He felt Ingle wanted to brainwash him, and as a reward take a higher financial percentage than was fair.

Ingle feels he is well worth the manager's cut of 25 per cent for the years of work he has put in. Hamed and his brother do not. They are barely on speaking terms. Although Ingle remains in what is euphemistically described as "an advisory capacity", the day-to-day training is carried out by his sons, John and Dominic. No doubt, once the McCullough fight is over, they will all sit down and iron things out once and for all.

While Hamed has been able to rise above these difficulties, the problems which beset his opponent have been festering for much longer. The signs are that the 28-year-old Irishman has been worn down by the business side of the sport. The bright-eyed freshness he carried with him a few years ago, when he won the World Boxing Council bantamweight title in Japan, has gone. In its place is a resigned acceptance of the way boxing works. Central to that is the disintegration of his relationship with the promoter Mat Tinley, for whom he signed before his debut in 1993.

Their troubles go back to McCullough's days as a world champion. In his second defence, against a Mexican named Jose Luis Bueno in Dublin in 1996, he said he could no longer make the 8st 6lb limit without weakening himself severely.

As a result, he took sustained punishment from a man he was expected to beat easily, and said he was hospitalised afterwards with serious after- effects of dehydration. Although he retained his world title on a split decision, the whole experience took something from him.

While he never fought as a bantamweight again, things gradually fell apart. In Boston in January 1997 he was expected to win the WBC super- bantamweight title against the 39-year-old champion Daniel Zaragoza. He did not. Zaragoza outwitted him over 12 rounds.

His octogenarian trainer, Eddie Futch, eventually retired. Futch's understudy Thell Torrence has since been replaced by Kenny Croom, whom McCullough says did all the day-to-day work anyway.

Crucially, he attempted to leave Tinley, a thirtysomething Denver-based TV executive. Contractually, he found he was bound to Tinley, but insisted on installing his wife Cheryl as his boxing manager. He now says he and Tinley communicate through lawyers.

Three years ago Futch said McCullough had the style to beat Hamed. Maybe he was right. I suspect not. Now, whatever we see as turmoil in the Hamed camp, McCullough's problems have apparently developed to the point where there is no way out.

He has lost confidence in boxing's ability to reward him for what he has put into it. In short, it has broken his heart.