‘A fighter should feel fear – if not, they’re a psychopath’: Inside the minds of pro boxers

I think we all struggle with confusing our emotions,” says Greg Meehan, clad in a grey tracksuit and reclining in a sofa chair in a Monte Carlo hotel. “Anxiety and excitement are very similar in what they do to the body, so [excitement] doesn’t always feel nice! Half the time, people tell me they have really bad anxiety about something. ‘I’ve got a promotion at work, and I’ve got to present to 100 people.’ I may say, ‘How long have you worked to get to this position? Ten years? Okay, so this is exactly where you should be.’

“They may say, ‘I’m not very good at public speaking,’ and that could be anxiety, but the new role itself has to be excitement. It’s the same for an athlete: ‘You’re gonna go and fight for a world title on Saturday, and that’s what you’ve always wanted to do, so why would you have a negative thought about it? Remember, there’s nothing bad happening here.’”

Meehan is a mindset performance coach who has worked with Premier League footballers, professional golfers, and pro boxers. The east Londoner, 46, previously spent 20 years as a financial broker in the city, before his curiosity about the brain, the body, and how they work together led him through “hundreds” of books, numerous exams and multiple diplomas, and ultimately to his current career.

“A football club might say, ‘Go and speak to this sports psychologist, this doctor,’” Meehan says. “Players don’t always like being classed as having something wrong with them.” Meehan differs somewhat, as a mindset coach; “I help with what’s going on right now, in regards to what’s holding someone back from performing at their highest level,” he clarifies, while a sports psychologist “would maybe go into the past and help to overcome long-lasting issues.”

Although he collaborates with fighters from other stables, much of Meehan’s time is spent at the Matchroom gym with the likes of John Ryder, Maisey Rose Courtney and Conor Benn, the latter of whom Meehan predominantly aids with breath work. Some of Meehan’s anecdotes are provided on the condition of athletes’ anonymity, but over the course of our hour-long conversation, he opens up on various elements from Ryder’s camp earlier this year, which led to his title challenge against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in the superstar’s native Mexico, as well as his preparation with boxer, activist and model Ramla Ali.

One day after Meehan and I speak, Ali will be victorious against Julissa Guzman, just five months after suffering a knockout loss to the Mexican. It is a pertinent result, after Meehan and I discuss that very scenario. “I think even undefeated fighters worry about being knocked out, at the back of their mind,” Meehan says. “Maybe some think they can’t be knocked out, but generally, everyone suffers a knockout in their career. And you don’t just get straight back on the horse; you have to build your confidence back up and go through a process of believing you can go again.”

Within 36 hours, Ali will go again and avenge her first loss. Then there is Ryder, who is set to return to the ring in January, having come up short against Canelo despite a valiant performance. Undisputed super-middleweight gold was the prize on offer in Guadalajara, and Ryder would fight through a broken nose and a knockdown to reach the final bell, but without obtaining the titles he craved. Even so, there were victories for the Londoner before he even touched down in Mexico.

“Me and John are Canelo fans, so we had to eliminate that,” Meehan says. “I never mentioned his name, I just called him The Opponent. In my office, I had a Canelo vs [Gennady] Golovkin poster, and after my first session with John, I took it down! I replaced it with a picture of John. The moment Canelo got in the ring, it could have been like, ‘F***,’ but we got John to a place where he just saw him as another opponent. I only told John all this after the fight.”

In my own conversation with Ryder in October, it was clear that the ex-interim champion had a healthy and rare perspective on his loss to Canelo. “It’s human nature to do other people’s thinking for them, and if we don’t accomplish something, we may assume they’re thinking, ‘He’s let me down,’” Meehan says. “If you’ve got the right people around you, they’re not gonna think that, but if I work with a fighter and they don’t win, I want them to be able to say: ‘I did everything I could.’ It takes away that feeling of, ‘Oh, I let people down.’ That’s why a catchphrase for John’s camp with Canelo was: ‘No stone unturned.’ He was a massive underdog, but I really believed John could beat him – and so did John.”

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If there are little victories to be secured in the lead-up to a fight, there are more to achieve within a fight itself. It is in those moments that Meehan’s emphasis on breath work becomes important. “Being able to balance their oxygen flow and keep their heart rate low, these things also help fighters mentally – to keep their nervous system regulated,” he says, adding that proper breathing techniques can enable athletes to release 20-30 per cent more oxygen. Meehan references the book “Born To Run”, about an enigmatic, canyon-dwelling tribe of Mexican Indians, the Tarahumara, who are deemed the best long-distance runners on the planet. In 1993, a 57-year-old member of the tribe won a prestigious, 100-mile race while wearing a toga and sandals. A unique approach to nasal breathing was seemingly vital.

“You’re gonna hit a fight-or-flight state, but you don’t want to stay in it; you’ve got about 30 seconds to get your heart rate to the right area where you can take on instructions and go into the next round in a rested mind state. Other fighters will constantly be in fight-or-flight, and that’s why they’ll flag late in a fight; they’re all super fit, but it could be emotional drainage affecting them.”

Emotional drainage can start before a bout, thus a common practice for Meehan is talking to his athletes on a fight-day walk. “Generally, I’ll try to talk about anything but the fight!” he says. “Fighters generally don’t like to be asked how they feel on the morning of a fight, or, ‘Did you sleep well?’ Not a lot of fighters sleep well on fight week. Some fighters do like to talk about the fight. Sometimes they do the other fighter’s thinking for them: ‘They didn’t look great at the weigh-in, I don’t think they’re up for it.’ But you can’t read into any of that.”

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Does a fighter’s ego ever get in the way of them coming to terms with their emotions? “Usually what they’ll say is, ‘I feel funny...’ It’s a mixture of them not being sure what the emotion is, and not wanting to admit they’re worried. One fighter I worked with, I’d come in to help them control their nerves. On one walk, they said: ‘I feel quite relaxed... That’s not normal, there might be something wrong.’ I said, ‘Don’t forget, I came in to stop the nerves.’ It’s a new emotion, and they don’t know what it is.

“All the work I’ve done in camp comes together on fight day, in terms of understanding how a fighter thinks and actions that might signal that something is good or bad. I can tell if someone’s alright or not. They can tell the world, ‘I’m gonna knock them out, you watch me,’ and I’ll be thinking: ‘They’re not alright.’ But we all put masks on in our own lives.”

For Meehan, removing the mask is key to helping a fighter understand their emotions, which can often be confused. None, though, are off-limits. “I like fighters to feel a bit nervous, to feel a bit of fear, as long as there’s no action on it and we can let it flow out of our body quickly. I don’t even dislike anger; there’s a passion associated with it. It’s about understanding what might trigger these feelings, and making sure fighters recognise these triggers.”

The process, importantly, starts with Meehan understanding his own feelings. “I have a routine to keep my own nervous system regulated!” he admits. “We’ve all got our own mental blocks, I’ve just learnt how to limit the amount of time that I stress. I don’t want to lose these emotions, and I wouldn’t want anyone else to. We should feel fear, nerves, excitement; these tell us something. If we don’t feel these things, we’re probably psychopaths!”

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Earlier, Meehan mentioned manifestation, an almost controversial idea in that some feel it suggests a person has imagined and willed an outcome into existence. Meehan is keen to add nuance to the definition, though. “People have different versions of it. There are people who say they imagined themselves getting loads of money, then they got a cheque in the post; that sounds a bit crazy, a bit hocus-pocus. It’s got to be broken down without a sales-y spin on it: It’s about having an idea of what you want, maybe writing it down, then taking action towards it.

“I help athletes with imagining they’re in the place they want to be, then attaching an emotion to that. ‘What would it feel like, winning a world title?’ They may say, ‘Oh, I got butterflies then...’ That’s what I’m looking for: a driver. They start to believe they can do it. But you need to take action to do it.”

Perhaps Meehan’s own journey, out of the city and into the minds of pro athletes, is a sign that manifestation works after all.