The junior middleweight division is one of boxing’s hottest weight classes, and while the dominant talk has centred around the likes of Jaron Ennis, Vergil Ortiz, Sebastian Fundora and a range of others, Josh Kelly believes it is time to enter the conversation.
For now, the Team GB 2016 Olympian knows he is on no-one’s radar but believes that all changes should he relieve Bakhram Murtazaliev of his IBF title in Newcastle on Saturday.
“When I get that belt, then they’re going to be screaming my name, because they'll be thinking, ‘Yeah, let’s get a bit of Josh,’” smiled Kelly, who has been linked with “Boots” should he be successful.
“But my style’s horrible to fight, it's horrible. I’m unpredictable. I can fight as well and actually when I grew up, I was a tough little chubby fat kid from Sunderland and I used to stand toe-to-toe and just go [fight] with people, so I’ve got that in me if all tactics go out the window. And listen, I’m tough. I’ll get in there and I’ll stand with you and I’ll go and if that needs to be done it needs to be done. It’s hard to prepare for someone like me. I’m just a box of tricks and it’s horrible.”
Kelly, who sits on an enveloping couch in a sky blue T-shirt in the apartment of trainer Adam Booth a week out from the fight to talk to BoxingScene, has been shrouded in a positivity, buoyed by confidence and faith in his journey and how Murtazaliev is merely a chapter as his own story progresses.
The sense of the pieces coming together was added to when Roy Jones, Kelly’s idol, called him last week to wish him well.
“It was crazy. It was inspiring,” Kelly beamed, not long after the FaceTime ended.
“I didn't even know I was going to speak to him but it felt like the right timing. It just filled us with so much good energy.”
When Kelly was a kid, he’d go into his school’s computer rooms to watch Jones on the monitors during his lunchbreaks.
He’d put his earphones in and watch an hour of Jones highlights.
There were others, like Sugar Ray Leonard, Naseem Hamed, Nicolino Locche, Hector Camacho, and Muhammad Ali, but it was Jones’ unorthodox brilliance that stood out.
Then, when he went to the boxing gym in the evening, he would try and replicate what he had studied.
“Right,” he’d say to himself. “Tonight, I’m going to be this guy.”
Of course, those schooldays are a long way in the past. Kelly became a good amateur who won his first fight at the 2016 Rio Olympics before losing to the eventual gold medal winner, Daniyar Yeleussinov.
He’s now a seasoned pro, 31 years old, and preparing for his 20th career bout.
But through the journey, he never doubted this moment would come.
“I remember talking to Adam ages ago,” Kelly said. “I remember being in the street when I was a kid and playing football and doing things when I was on the council estate and just running about and I just used to think, ‘I’m going to be on the TV, I’m going to do something.’ When you’re a kid you just want to be famous and you want to think of yourself like a superstar, you look up to people. And I had this feeling inside of me, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m definitely going to be that.’
“‘I’m not normal, I’m something different, I’m special, I’m going to be different.’ I always carried that energy with me in everything I did, in boxing, in different things. And it wasn’t an ego thing, it was just a little bit of self-belief, but I knew this time would come.”
Kelly believes fate has aligned with opportunity and that dedication has aligned with dreams.
Which is ironic, because many believe the champion will break the Sunderland man and stop him on Saturday.
They talk about how fierce Murtazaliev looks, with his chiselled jaw still apparent behind his dark beard, and they see Kelly as the Pretty Boy who is out of his depth.
Kelly, clearly, does not see it that way.
“It’s perfect timing now because I feel like when I was younger, I was a little bit more immature in terms of mindset, in terms of IQ, in terms of training camps, how to go about things in and outside the ring,” he explained. “I've been a late maturer and I think my prime’s between now and probably when I'm getting to 34, 35, 36. I think I've always been a late maturer and I’m just starting to really find the man strength these last couple of years.”
With that said, it is well known that Kelly stumbled badly against David Avanesyan in 2021. He was stopped in his biggest fight to date, but that experience is something Kelly wouldn’t change and, indeed, is one he’s even grateful for.
“God's got certain ways of putting you in certain positions at certain times and sometimes the things that you think, like, ‘I lost that or I didn't perform there or that happened,’ it's always for bigger and better purposes,” Kelly said. “Plans are always bigger than what you have and it’s come full circle now. Now I feel it’s, ‘This is your time, go and shine. Just go and enjoy it. Go and enjoy it and just do you and feel what you want to feel in that ring.’”
While Kelly turned pro as an ex-Olympian, he admits that only adds pressure to a young fighter finding his way in the pros. But, also, that boxing is still only part of life rather than all of it; “the cracks of life” as he calls it.
“People don’t realise what happens outside [of boxing], a lot of things will shape your career outside the ring, it’s not necessarily in the ring because doing the training and doing everything else for me is pretty easy,” he explained. “I love it. I love getting down to hard work. I’m one of the hardest workers in the gym and I’ve never shirked a hard session. I want to take myself to them dark places in my mind. I could take myself there every day but you need them easy days and hard days, but the cracks outside of life when some people end up falling down… Once you've fallen down, it’s hard to get out. That’s why you need the right team and the right people to shelter that.”
It's all about learned experience and growth.
The perfect storm for Kelly’s perfect moment has seen him reunite with Matchroom as Saturday’s promoters, though Team Kelly remains grateful for the work the Sauerland brothers have done for them.
The fact he’s back with the promoters he turned over with only adds to the feeling of his career coming full circle.
“It’s been written,” he added. “It's like you always have a breakdown before a breakthrough. It always feels like things are going against you before you get your chance. Inside and outside the ring, I've been dealing with things in these past few years and resetting and it's been crazy the amount of stuff I've dealt with outside the ring, never mind inside the gym… But sometimes, when things get hard, I sort of just switch on more into boxing and just get this mindset where I can just block this out and just do this and it helps us focus more on this [boxing]. When things are hard here [points to his head], I'm just like, I'll just do this [boxing] and these things will slowly fade away. In my mind, obviously they're always there after your fight, but in my mind, this is the most important thing now.”
That is something experience has helped him learn to deal with. Before the growth came the loss of the exuberance and boldness of youth, punctured by Avanesyan and crippling bouts of hypochondria.
In his own words, he was beating himself before he even made it to the ring, thinking he was getting sick, taking medication, like Lemsip, to try and feel better, but his psyche had already been infiltrated and with that, doubt always lurked nearby.
All of that, Kelly contends, has been banished.
Which is just as well, because in Murtazaliev he is facing the man heralded as the division’s boogeyman.
If any frailty remains in Kelly, many believe the man he is facing will be the one to identify and exploit it.
“I love it,” said Kelly, asked of Murtazaliev’s fearsome status.
“This is just another fight against another guy called Bakhram. He’s another body. He’s got two arms, two legs. He’s built the same. He eats the same. He goes to the toilet the same. He showers the same, brushes his teeth the same, so nothing’s different to anyone else.
“It's exactly the same as what happened when I was boxing Troy Williamson. He was undefeated and look what he's gone on and done. He was the guy who stopped everyone and everyone was like, ‘Josh this, Josh that, Josh is not this, Josh is not that.’ Obviously this is another level up but I’ve levelled up to this now. I’m on this level. I just need to enjoy myself and do what me and my team know I do day in, day out.’
Neither Kelly nor Murtazaliev have been blessed with activity. The champion didn’t fight at all last year while Kelly saw just two minutes of action. But Kelly insists he will be sharp because he’s sparred regularly and stayed sharp while also admitting that activity has not always served him well.
“I’ve had big gaps and boxed and boxed unbelievable, I’ve had fights back-to-back and I fought unbelievable then fought terrible, so I think it just all depends on the night and which way you turn up and which way you find your rhythm and your flow.”
Not having to make 147lbs has also helped. He said he was “a shell of a man” at welterweight.
“You can ask any one of the guys who I’ve ever sparred or ever been with, can Josh fight? “Yeah, he can fight inside 100 per cent but when I was growing up I didn't grow into my features until I was like 16, 17 so I was still this ugly looking kid… just in the gym… just training… never got the attention off any girls… never went out… never drank with my friends… never went to parties. I remember the first party I went to and the first ever party my dad let me go to. I was about 17, it was a house party and I went in because I had a name in the area for boxing when I started winning things, there were all these girls and I was like ‘What the fuck is all this?’ ‘This is crazy.’ And I went back and said to my dad, ‘Why have you stopped me from ever going to parties, because that was crazy?’ He was like, ‘That’s exactly why.’”
Kelly didn’t get away with much when he was younger, but there was a spell when he quit the Olympic cycle in 2015 to become a nightclub promoter for a few months.
“I needed that mental break,” he said,
But boxing was his calling and he believes Murtazaliev is his destiny. He’s envisaged the fight relentlessly.
“I’ve seen it loads of different ways,” he said. “All the scenarios go through your mind. I think he’s going to start fast. Hopefully he does. God willing he starts fast because it’s perfect for me. I want people to start fast and it sets me in my rhythm straight away, but I don’t want to give too much away in terms of what I think. But I can see certain things happening in the fight. I’ve seen them in my mind loads of times and I can hear people listening to the commentator saying ‘Bakhram's hit the floor for the first time’ or ‘it's the first time Bakhram’s been down in his career. ‘I can hear that, and I've heard it too many times not to be a coincidence. A lot of people think, for some reason, I don't punch and when I'm moving it's hard to really set your feet and punch but – when I want to punch – the speed is the power and I think he’s going to get a real big shock and he’s going to think where did that come from.”
Kelly believes every word he says. He is convincing. It doesn’t matter if we buy in.
Six months ago, I asked him about potential rivals and mentioned Murtazaliev by name.
“Perfect fight for me,” he said.
Being reminded of that conversation only reinforces his belief in what lies ahead.
“It’s been written, it’s been said…. I’m at the perfect age. I’m not killing myself to get any weight. I’m not trying to be the weight bully. I’m not doing any of that. I’m at the perfect weight. I’m in a perfect mindset. Everything’s the way it needs to be. Just let it take care of itself. Go on and enjoy it and it will take care of itself.”
