That detail, if nothing else, may change later this month. If the Williams fight indeed goes ahead, and bucks the trend of cancelled Ibeabuchi comebacks, the Nigerian will officially return to the pool of active heavyweights despite having now entered his fifth decade. He can at that point expect his Wikipedia page to be altered and, in the context of his fighting career, see the past tense switched to the present. He will, in that sense at least, be back and feel somewhat relevant again. 

That there is even so much as a modicum of interest – read: sick fascination – in Ibeabuchi’s “comeback” is a testament to both the man’s fighting potential and the extent to which he wasted it. For anyone else gone for a quarter of a century, there would be no recollection of their name, much less an interest in seeing them pick up where they left off. Yet somehow, with Ibeabuchi, it is different, tantamount to seeing your favourite nineties slasher film get an unnecessary reboot in 2025. It comes with the same odd sense of intrigue and the same low expectations. It also plays all the same notes – the same jump scares, the same sense of dread, and the potential for it to go wrong at every turn. 

That, as much as his talent, was what had people hooked on Ibeabuchi’s rise back when he mattered. They watched him like Freddy, or Jason, or Michael Myers, and were safe so long as he was kept at a certain distance. It was then from this distance that they imagined what it was like to be confronted by a heavyweight that intense and ferocious; one who threw combinations, one who stood toe-to-toe with David Tua without blinking, one who appeared to have no “stop” button and refused to hear the word “no”.

In his last fight, all the way back in 1999, Ibeabuchi ran through the most elusive heavyweight of that era in Chris Byrd. He made hitting Byrd look easy at a time when plenty were making it look hard and he left Byrd convinced he had witnessed, and indeed felt, the future of the heavyweight division. 

“Had he not gone away, he would have ruled the division for a while,” Byrd told me. “Ike was a killer, a destroyer. He would go straight ahead like a young Mike Tyson. He didn’t have the big one-punch knockout power of Tyson but he could put them together and was a beast in the ring. He hit me with his best shot and I didn’t see it. It knocked my damn head off.”

While much of that is true and comes from first-hand experience, some of it is conjecture and based purely on the myth of Ike Ibeabuchi. This even Byrd himself admits. He knows as we all do that Ibeabuchi, like anyone cut down in their prime, has for 25 years benefitted from having his greatest successes “imagined” on account of his absence rather than tangible proof in the ring. He is, in that respect, the definitive fantasy fighter; someone whose entire career has played out in the minds of fans as opposed to where it counts. 

“When they talk about Ike being potentially great, he may have been, but he went away,” Byrd said, accepting the reality of Ibeabuchi. “We don’t know. But he can’t be great based on a win over me if you then decide to criticise me.”

In terms of building the Ibeabuchi myth, just as important as the fights he had were the stories, all of which added to it. There was, for instance, talk of him hearing “demons in the air-conditioning” and pulling out a knife when eating a meal with his promoter Cedric Kushner and an HBO exec with whom Kushner was trying to wangle a three-fight deal. Slamming the knife down into the table, Ibeabuchi apparently cried, “They knew it! They knew it! The belts belong to me! Why don’t they just give them back?”

Kushner described the dinner as “a peculiar experience” and described Ibeabuchi as “like a Viking”. Ibeabuchi, meanwhile, preferred to go by the nickname “The President” and would use this title to establish his own dominance in conversations, business deals, and the ring. “There were times when he thought he was really a president,” said Lou DiBella, promoter and a former HBO Sports executive. “He would get into these mental states where he insisted on people calling him ‘The President’. It was his alter ego. ‘I am The President – not of the United States, but maybe of the world.’”

He was both deluded and paranoid, in other words. He thought people – or worse, demons – were out to get him and because of this there were concerns that he was unravelling mentally and that everything that made him such a scary proposition for opponents – so intimidating, so hard to read and understand – would eventually be the thing that made him crack. He couldn’t have it both ways, after all. He couldn’t be as dark and as terrifying as he was in the ring and then not expect this disposition to leak into his personal life and pollute his mind. Talented though he was, no man possesses the ability to seamlessly transform and one might suggest the signs of overlap were always there with Ibeabuchi. One need only look at the way he fought and recall the relish with which he inflicted pain on opponents to start to join the dots. More than just dangerous, there was a cruelty to Ibeabuchi; something noteworthy even in boxing, which encourages cruelty and calls it sport. To cause chaos in the ring, and in gloves, was clearly never going to be enough for someone like “The President”. It didn’t satisfy him. He needed more. 

Now, having gone after more, he has been without that violence – regulated, lucrative, prize-based – for some 25 years. In that time, he will have softened, if only physically, and he has been punished for being violent rather than rewarded. Now, with this comeback on August 23, he is making up for lost time, it would seem. Either that or he is reverting to type; returned to his default factory setting. 

In Williams, his next opponent, he has chosen well, too. Because if Ike Ibeabuchi is a 52-year-old heavyweight who for decades could not fight, it could be said that Danny Williams is a 52-year-old heavyweight who cannot stop. Both men, in very different ways, have been unable to give up the dream, or the ghost, so it is perhaps only right and proper that they should now meet in the saddest and spookiest circumstances on August 23 in Lagos. By now, Williams, from England, has managed to lose 33 of 89 professional fights, whereas Ibeabuchi, unblemished in 20, still waits to find out how it feels to lose – in a boxing ring. 

He knows loss, of course, that goes without saying. He also knows what it means to be blemished and knows that perfection is something a boxer can only pretend to know when wearing gloves, trunks, and boots. It is outside the ring, in the case of Ibeabuchi, that his imperfections become clear, critical. It is outside the ring that his imperfections have helped to blemish both his life and the lives of others. 

In fact, that’s the one thing activity won’t change. No amount of comeback fights, and no amount of victories in the ring, will change the sections of Ibeabuchi’s Wikipedia page beneath the chapter headings “Troubles outside the ring” and “Imprisonment”. Those will remain exactly as they are, set in stone, and nothing he can do, as a “former professional boxer” or active one, will change either the things he has done or make up for the 25 years he lost as a result. 

In terms of the troubles, it was not long after beating David Tua in 1997 that Ibeabuchi abducted the 15-year-old son of his former girlfriend and slammed his car into a concrete pillar on Interstate 35 north of Austin, Texas. The boy, according to the criminal complaint, suffered “numerous injuries” from the crash and would “never walk normally again”. The courts then concluded that Ibeabuchi had been trying to commit suicide and sentenced him to 120 days in jail after pleading guilty to false imprisonment. He also paid a $500,000 civil settlement.

Two years later, in July 1999, Ibeabuchi was staying at The Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas when he phoned a local escort service and had a 21-year-old woman sent to his room. The woman, who said she was there just to strip, asked to be paid up front only to be attacked by Ibeabuchi in the walk-in closet. The fighter then barricaded himself in the bathroom and police discharged pepper spray under the door until he eventually got the message and surrendered.

For Ibeabuchi, released on bail and placed under house arrest, that was just the start – or the latest. For what followed the incident at The Mirage was the reopening of a similar sexual assault allegation at another Las Vegas hotel, Treasure Island, which had happened eight months prior. Ibeabuchi was then remanded in custody when two more allegations along the same lines surfaced from Arizona.

By that stage he was deemed incompetent to stand trial, sent to a state facility, and said to have exhibited bipolar disorder. It took some eight months, in fact, for Ibeabuchi to be ruled fit to plead, at which point he entered an Alford plea – pleading guilty while not admitting guilt to avoid going to trial – and was duly sentenced. He got to two-to-ten years for battery with intent to commit a crime (from which he was later paroled) and three-to-20 years for attempted sexual assault; the sentences to be served consecutively. 

Having served his time, Ibeabuchi was first released from prison in November 2015, though would soon violate the conditions of his probation and return for four more years; the president re-elected. The next time he was released it was September 2020 and the world was still feeling the impact of lockdown and a global pandemic. Even freedom, then, had its limits, caveats. Even freedom had him feeling stuck. 

Almost five years on, little has changed. Despite his release, and despite his attempted comebacks, there has been no Ike Ibeabuchi ring return and still nothing can fix what has been done. For all his trying, the charges stay the same, the accounts stay the same, and the order of his Wikipedia page – Amateur career, Professional career, Troubles outside the ring, Comeback, Imprisonment – stays the same. All he can now hope to change, at the age of 52, is its opening line and the number of professional boxing matches he has to his name. 

Should he fight again on August 23, he can at least do that. He can erase the word “former” and change the number 20 to 21. But really, that’s about it. In life only the tense can be changed. Never the past.