By Terence Dooley
Everyone who has been to a British boxing show or two knows who David Coldwell is. His ubiquitously quiet presence can be seen in any number of corners. Coldwell also holds the ‘Head of Boxing’ role in the Hayemaker set-up. Dave, himself a former fighter, spoke with a clear passion for boxing when reminiscing over his first memories of the sport.
He said: “Well I used to get battered at school basically. I was a bit of a wimp – well a lot of a wimp. I never used to take notice of boxing at first, and did football training instead. Then I saw a boxing match on ITV one day. I caught the middle of it and it was this flashy guy flailing away and throwing millions of combinations. I thought, ‘What’s this?’. Turned out the fight I had flicked on was Sugar Ray Leonard against Marvin Hagler. That was my first memory of boxing.”
“One of the saddest things I saw (in boxing) was when Sugar Ray Leonard cameback against Terry Norris. Leonard is one of my all-time heroes, but my boxing heroes were Naz, Johnny and Ryan,” he revealed.
“I also trained alongside Naz (Naseem Hamed) and Johnny Nelson, and funnily enough Ryan Rhodes [who Dave now trains] as well. They were the three main heroes for me at the time because I trained with them day in and day out. I saw through them how fantastic boxing could be. I was part of the team with Naz and was going around staying in hotels and watching boxing with him.
“The first time I saw the flipside of boxing was when Chris Saunders was boxing Kevin Lueshing [for Chris’s British Welterweight title]. Chris was a really good friend of mine, plus Paul ‘Scrap Iron’ Ryan [undefeated at the time] was boxing Jon Thaxton, another good friend of mine,” recalled Coldwell.
“Before the fights all the emphasis in these parts was on Saunders, no one was really giving Thaxton the time-of-day at that point. Jon was there on the undercard as fodder for Ryan. Saunders lost [in three rounds] and Thaxton spectacularly launched his career by knocking out Paul Ryan [in a single round]. After the fight everyone around ringside thought Jon had arrived. He became the man-of-the-moment. I looked through the ropes and right at the back of the hall, stood on his own, was Chris Saunders.
“That memory stayed with me and keeps me level-headed because one-minute you are on the top of the world and the next minute you are forgotten about. Everyone is patting your back one-minute, then you have a quick loss and everyone has gone their separate ways.”
Coldwell’s own career never went beyond the central area level, where he won the flyweight title by knocking out Terrace Gaskin. His proudest moment came in a WBA International title fight against Jose Lopez Bueno, who went onto win, and defend, the WBO title. Dave dropped the Spaniard before losing by a narrow margin. However, Dave told me that he lacked a little bit of confidence as a boxer. “I was a little naive in my boxing career,” he admitted.
“I was in the gym all the time and loved it. I boxed as a flyweight and the running joke in the gym was that I was never above my fighting weight. The person in the gym who lived that life completely was Johnny Nelson. He is the reason why to this day I am still doing press-ups, pull-ups and dips and the rest. A fighter can sometimes make a mistake when they have a big opportunity coming up. They won’t sacrifice a couple of weeks even though the rewards can be quite high. Johnny used to stay at the end of training and do extra work, and that stuck with me all the way through my life.
“I was always in the gym but I just didn’t have the confidence there as a fighter. Funnily enough, I don’t think I got the confidence as a man until I was about twenty-five. By then I’m finished with fighting and had gone into something else. I probably didn’t get my man confidence until it was too late, unfortunately. Although it does mean that I went into managing and training with that confidence in place.”
Boxers tend to live within the present context of their boxing career; everything else is far beyond the current horizon. Coldwell, like many trainers, came into the vocation almost by accident, treating it as an addendum to his boxing career.
He said: “I never had it in my head to be a trainer but when I was still boxing I was running another gym for Brendan [Ingle]. That got me into training kids. I later fell out with Brendan and left the gym and was left with a decision - do I give up training the kids, to bring through good prospects with talent, or do I be selfish and go back to my own career? I thought that my calling was training boxers rather than being a fighter myself.
“I am a lot more nervous as a trainer than I was as a boxer, and I used to get really nervous as a boxer. You can train a kid day in and day out. You can see him really develop. You can see him change as a man really, whether he is a journeyman or a champion.
“Then you go to the venue and the bell goes and you can’t really do anything, the fact that you are powerless is horrible. I always find it nerve-racking because you are responsible for whether they do good or not. It is a weird feeling. A different type of nerves to when you fought yourself, but it is a lot worse.”
“I get on with all the kids I train, be it Ryan Rhodes, Paul Royston or Curtis Woodhouse and they are all my mates, so I do worry about them. The most important thing is that the boxers appreciate you and what you are doing,” confided Coldwell.
“People can whisper about you to a fighter but as long as the fighter appreciates that, ‘Yeah, my trainer is putting a lot of work into me’, then things are great. If the fighter thinks that you have not done the work and they have done it all themselves then it does hurt a little bit. I always tell my lads that I cannot do what I am doing without them, they can be boxers without me but it is all about teamwork in the end. It is not a case of one or the other doing it all when you are a team. You both have to put in the same amount of work to get the right results.”
Coldwell’s faith in his fighters has been bolstered by the success of Ryan Rhodes during the past four-and-a-half years. Rhodes took things to the next level during 2009, defeating Jamie Moore in seven thrilling rounds to win the EBU light-middleweight title and a possible WBC title shot.
“My proudest moment has been Ryan Rhodes’ comeback,” beamed Coldwell. “When he came to me he was fourteen-and-a-half stone and everyone thought he had retired. Nothing was happening for him. We have brought him back and, thank god, it has been a success. No matter what happens it is a fantastic success story.”
Rhodes took Moore on at his own game, standing toe-to-toe with Jamie for most of the contest, and had done this just to let people know that he could excel in the trenches. “Ryan is a kid who goes off public perception,” explained Coldwell. “Ryan does not want to be seen as a dull fighter. If it gets dull he will think, ‘I’ve got to please the public’ so he will try to make things exciting.”
In 2005, versus Craig Lynch, Ryan had seemed, to me, to be leadenly trying to rediscover something that had long since gone. Three years on and he looked composed and sharp when defeating Gary Woolcombe for the British title, he then out-boxed Vincent Vuma for the WBC International title and the win over Moore brought further success. What had Coldwell seen in Ryan?
“When someone comes to me I’ll have a look at them for the first couple of days and see if they have got much rust or what sort of style they have got. With Ryan, I just made a few minor adjustments, the kid could box anyway, but I think I made them adjustments quite well and for a guy aged 32 to be able to go in and bash up his body everyday sparring with young kids shows the commitment and trust that Ryan put into me.
“When Ryan came to me people said, ‘What is he going to do with him?’ and that Ryan was too old, or that it was all for a quick payday before he finished. I remember all the stuff people said but to me it does not matter what people think at the start of a job. It is about how the job finishes. No matter what happens now, and please god Ryan gets his shot at the light middleweight world title, Ryan Rhodes is a story three years on after coming with me and he is better off than when he came to me.”
Coldwell’s first charge was Pinky Burton, once the excitement of starting on a new road in boxing had passed the grim reality set in, forcing Coldwell to acknowledge that he needed to take hold of his own destiny in boxing. “The first kid that I had was Pinky Burton and I kind of got railroaded with him,” he sighed.
“I wasn’t a manager or promoter at the time, I was a trainer, and you kind of have to go cap-in-hand to people. Your ideas are in other people’s hands and if they don’t agree with those ideas you can’t push your man on. You end up stuck in the wilderness. That is what happened to me. I had no pull and no influence. When I got other kids coming through I realised that I needed to turn over to promoting. At least then me and my fighters are in control of our own destiny. I started off in 2003 with the promoting.”
Coldwell’s Koncrete Promotions provided the type of small hall boxing that helps keep the sport alive in the UK. When David Haye set-up his independent Hayemaker promotional organisation he sought out like-minded individuals. Coldwell was brought in to work on the boxing side of things, and was immediately given a bit of a culture shock.
He said: “It was unbelievable. I had done about twenty-two shows before Hayemaker came along. Within a couple of days of signing to work with Hayemaker I am sat having a business meeting with Oscar De La Hoya and Adam Booth. It is a big thing.
“The boss himself, David Haye, is the most laidback guy you will ever meet. He is a really nice guy who knows where he wants to go and who knows what he has got to do to get there. When you talk to him one-on-one he just is one of the lads.”
Haye can fight a bit also, always a help when you are relying on a fighter to bolster the brand name. “Haye’s hand speed is phenomenal for such a big man”, enthused Coldwell, “he is a breath of fresh air for the heavyweight division. The best thing about it is that he is absolutely focussed. People talk about when he was a young kid and his playboy lifestyle but all that has gone. David lives the life.
“They (Haye and Adam Booth) know exactly what they needed to do and you cannot knock them. At every stage of his career they have done what they needed to do with him in order to bring him on. He had a setback with Carl Thompson and then made a few adjustments. Off he went again. It has been success after success since.”
Lennox Lewis’s recent induction into the IBHOF meant that Lewis the fighter had truly passed into heavyweight Valhalla, leaving a characterless void behind, an empty space for newly crowned WBA titleist Haye to fill.
“It is good because we can talk about heavyweights again,” declared Coldwell. “No one gave a shit about heavyweights for a while. Now they care about heavyweights again. Whether you like David Haye or not you have to love his attitude. When David lost to Thompson he got outside the ring and said, ‘Yeah, I got beat. I gave it my best but that is how boxing goes – I can knock people out but I might get knocked out’, people like that attitude.”
Coldwell had had to take an honest approach in his own boxing career. Notwithstanding the Area title triumph, Coldwell believes that his boxing career ended before he had a chance to mature fully as a man.
“I have always had a boxing brain. I just didn’t have the confidence,” he revealed. “I am older now and became a dad, that changed me quite a lot, it builds you up to another level. So I could start things from scratch in boxing. I had grown-up a lot but when I became a dad I thought, ‘This is it now, I’ve got to take things to another level’.”
Now, as the ‘Head of Boxing’ at Hayemaker promotions, Coldwell is definitely up a level, for Dave the whole experience is the culmination of years of hard work, as well as being a whole new learning curve. “I am soaking up the experience,” he enthused.
“I am listening to people with more experience than me and more education than me in the game. I am not one of these kids who think that they know it all. I am proud but I want to always push on in my career. I have never woken-up and thought, ‘Shit! I need to go to the gym’ or ‘Shit! I have got to set this show up’. I love it (boxing). I love every aspect of it.
“I enjoy putting a good fight on and reading the Internet write-ups and seeing people say, ‘It was a great show and they put great fights on’ and all that. As a promoter, in all my shows, I do not enjoy being the promoter on the night itself. I am also running back-and-forth as a trainer so my stress levels are high.
“After the night (is over) I read the fight write-ups online or in the papers and when I hear that it was a good fight or an entertaining show I feel happy. So far, I have not put on a show that has been slated as shit, thank God. I get a kick because the show has worked and we have sent the fans home happy. If a fan pays money to watch a show only to go home thinking it was a pile of shit then you have not done your job as a promoter.”
Coda:
Unlike other boxer-promotional enterprises Hayemaker will be able to benefit from a man, in Coldwell, who knows about the nuts-and bolts of putting a boxing show together, he has done it in the hardest arena of all, the small-hall, so he should be able to avoid the Grand Guignol events put on by boxer-promoters.
You know what I mean by Grand Guignol fights. They are huge, gaudy glorified non-title fights between aging superstars. Fights that see Michael Buffer engage in a post-fight hyperbole that is becoming almost Biblical (“And now, we sacrifice a small child and use it’s blood to write a new line in the boxing book of legends.”), only for the fights themselves to leave the viewer oddly flat and unmoved, very much like the feeling one gets after watching a Dario Argento movie. Coldwell wants to give us a bit more bite for our buck, and will strive to do so during his time in boxing.
The next few years will be anything but dull for Hayemaker’s Mr Fixit, and, as a result, for British boxing fans. Before he left us, Coldwell confirmed that Hayemaker promotions, which lost its TV deal when Setanta went down, is still going strong and still looking towards the future. “We don’t know what the future will hold without a TV deal but all that stuff is being worked on!” revealed Coldwell.
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