A few long months after selecting which songs would be played at his own funeral, what guests would be there to hear them, who would carry his coffin into church and where that coffin would be buried, Joe Gallagher sits with Roberto Duran, his hero and friend, in a lavish hotel in Bangkok sharing a dessert.
Such is life these days for the British trainer.
After getting the all clear from Stage 4 cancer, Gallagher was at the WBC Convention to accept a lifetime achievement award, one the 57-year-old knows he is receiving predominantly because he’s still alive.
“I’m finding it hard getting used to people being nice to me,” Gallagher says, chuckling. The trainer has long been known for battling with promoters, media and sanctioning bodies purely for the benefit of his boxers. Naturally, he has rubbed some people wrong along the way. But the entire industry rejoiced when Gallagher, after telling everyone he would do so, beat the deadly disease.
“Genuinely, the warmth and the kindness is quite thawing,” he goes on. “The way I was looked after yesterday and we had the reception at the cocktail party around the pool and they brought out a huge birthday cake for me, we had candles, they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. It was like, wow, Mauricio [Sulaiman] and the whole team at the WBC are being brilliant.”
Gallagher was astonishingly positive, at least on the outside, during that grueling 12-month quest to kill the cancer that was invading his bowels and liver. There must have been dark clouds behind the scenes, though. Did Gallagher ever lose his grip on the silver linings, even if only momentarily?
“No, I wouldn’t say I did,” he says. “I wouldn’t entertain [negativity]; I didn’t want to entertain it; I didn’t want my brain to be entertaining the complications. I did have to go through the process of arranging funerals. Wills, all that type of stuff. Songs to be played, people to speak, where to be buried. All that stuff. And that was hard.”
Gallagher’s forever mentor is Phil Martin, the trainer who passed away from cancer in May 1994, barely months after being diagnosed with the disease. “I was always aware of the aggressiveness and how quick things would go,” Gallagher explains. “I was always aware of that in the back of my head, but I wouldn’t entertain it. When I went to [cancer center] Christie’s and they gave me leaflets, I just put them in carrier bags, put them on the stairs. Didn’t want to see things lying around the house to remind me of it. I just threw myself more into work – more fights, more fighters, more dates. I just thought, ‘Well, I’m the captain of my own ship and I’ve got to lead by example.’
“‘Cancer,’ I always thought, ‘Fuck you. I’ll beat you. I’ll fucking do you,’ no problem. That ain’t a problem. What was the problem was the small little battles along the way: your pride, your bit of respect, going to the hospital, having medicals, having your colonoscopies, asking to roll over and have another finger stuck up your bum. Then, when you’re in the hospital ward at two in the morning and you think you’re passing wind and you’re not, and you’ve had to go and ask a nurse in the ward to help change the bed sheets and stuff like that. They were the battles where you think, ‘Fucking hell,’ like, Jesus, especially when you think yourself bigger and better in your pride, and that’s what got stripped away.”
Gallagher had resisted going to the doctors for a comprehensive check-up for several years prior to his diagnosis. He felt fit, you see. There were no symptoms, no reasons to seek help. It was only after he was persuaded to get what he calls “a full-body MOT” and a stool sample was taken that the cancer, lurking boldly but silently behind his bowels, was discovered. For Gallagher, arranging that checkup was his “sliding doors moment.”
“I always think to myself: If I wouldn’t, in that haste of a moment, [have] picked that phone up, at what point this year would my bowels have ruptured?” he explains. “Would I have then gone to the hospital and looked at the possible treatments and then what would it have been? You’re on the egg timer. The egg timer is turned upside down. That’s how long you’ve got. … I’ll always be forever grateful for the one or two people around me that forced me and pushed me to go and have that done that time, because at the time when it was diagnosed, the tumor was huge; it had broken the back wall of the bowel and had spread to the liver. I had no signs.”
Therein lies the obvious takeaway from Gallagher’s story: get yourself checked out regularly. But the sport of boxing, and its pull to those under its spell, is second only to Gallagher as the hero of the piece. After enduring further treatment late last summer, the coach knew he had only six weeks to get himself in shape for a trip to Las Vegas. One of his boxers, flyweight prospect Mikie Tallon, needed him in the corner, and Gallagher had no intention of letting him down.
“I’m going for walks around the block and then the next day crashing out, being in the gym, not being able to shout because the energy was taken out of me,” he remembers. “The lads seeing me breathless. I was being stupid, but I was just pushing myself, going in oxygen chambers, having Vitamin C, Vitamin D, B12. Everything just to make sure that I was on that plane for Mikie Tallon. So I think boxing, like always, gave me a place to be. It was something in the diary instead of being sat at home and having to deal with it. It was feeling that I had to be somewhere, to still do a job, and that’s what boxing did to get me through that period of time.”
That period of time, incidentally, was only three months ago. Now he’s here, among his superheroes in Thailand, as one of the stars of the show. Roberto Duran by his side and the road ahead restored. It could all have been so different; something that struck Gallagher sharply when silence descended on the room during the awards ceremony and the faces of those who died in 2025 were shown on big screens.
“I could easily have been on there, which doesn’t bear thinking about, to be honest, but then you can’t help but think about it,” he says. “Yeah, I’m truly blessed. I’ve got to make the most of everything that I’ve got now.”
Matt Christie, a lifelong fight fan, has worked in boxing for more than 20 years. He left Boxing News in 2024 after 14 years, nine of which were spent as editor-in-chief. Before that, he was the producer of weekly boxing show “KOTV.” Now the co-host of ”The Opening Bell” podcast and regularly used by Sky Sports in the UK as a pundit, Matt was named as the Specialist Correspondent of the Year at the prestigious Sports Journalism Awards in 2021, which was the seventh SJA Award he accepted during his stint in the hot seat at Boxing News. The following year, he was inducted into the British Boxing Hall of Fame. He is a member of the BWAA and has been honored several times in their annual writing awards.
