It was on March 1 when Errol Spence shared on social media: “Worse thing I did to MYSELF was drinking if you an athlete focus on the end goal. Hopefully it’s a better situation for you and your love ones.”

The tweet took hold, and did so further when Gervonta Davis wrote underneath: “I felt this..I hope you and your lil ones doing well champ..”

Plenty of fighters have fallen foul of alcohol, both during their careers and after, but more and more are trying a different look and giving up drink during their careers. It has long been popular for fighters to celebrate or commiserate post-fight with a drink before they allow training to consume them once more and they give up their vices to focus in camp and on the next fight again.

Featherweight Tramaine Williams, 20-3 (6 KOs), had a seizure in the ring when he collapsed mid-fight last year and unsurprisingly that experience proved transformative. After that contest, the 32-year-old gave up alcohol, but that wasn’t before he went down a deep spiral of depression.

Of course, boxing is a sport of natural highs and lows. Those emotions can be spiked by alcohol, but increasingly fighters are realizing that alcohol only adds to the false economy of a fighting high – sometimes feeding into a subsequent depression – and that it does them no favors when they return to camp. Alcohol is a stimulant, so it interrupts sleep and plays havoc with sleep quality and it can cause inflammation. It is also not the wisest use of calories.

Several fighters have, either during or since boxing, given up alcohol realizing how much it had held them back in their twenties and thirties.

Matthew Macklin, Darren Barker and Joe Calzaghe are three of them.

One fighter, a former world champion, had all but given up booze, but one night he fell down the stairs and had to wear a neck brace for a while and that put him off drinking again.

Brad Pauls, former English middleweight champion from Cornwall, has been sober for three years. The 32-year-old has won 20 fights, lost two and drawn one.

“There are multiple different things, all positive,” he said, of what has changed since he gave up alcohol. “I’d say I’m more productive overall, more so outside of camp, I come back to camp in better shape and doing more with my promotion and building myself up outside of camp. Just every aspect of my life seems to be better.

“Financially I’m better, my relationships are better, and it’s just a no-brainer. I wish I did it sooner.”

Pauls, "The Newquay Bomb", turned pro 10 years ago.

“I would have been 22 and the culture then is to drink and party and it’s like you’re a product of your environment, and where I’m from, that’s what everyone does,” he explained. “It’s like a British culture thing and to not do it, you go so against the grain, you’re so out of place, you’re really putting yourself in an awkward situation if you try and socialise, or even if you’re trying to sell tickets and stuff and you’re not mingling with those sort of crowds. It’s difficult. I never drunk loads anyway. But what would normally happen is I’d have a fight, I’d go back to Cornwall and I’d make up for lost time with drinking. I’d go out with pals and drink, not train at all, not do anything productive, and then I went to a boxing show in Liverpool, a Wasserman show, June 17 [more than two years ago], and everyone drank apart from my gym mate and I was ill that week – because I was drinking – and he was back in the gym Monday. And I said to myself, ‘I can’t call myself a professional if I’m not really gonna live the life.’ I’d missed a week’s training because I was drinking, and I can’t afford to be doing that at this level. That was a little wake up call for me then. That was the last time I drank, and after that I was completely done and I knew I wouldn’t drink again. I’d never drink too much. I would never do it in camp, but if you’re being really honest with yourself and saying, ‘Am I doing everything I can to better my career?’ And drinking wasn’t. You can’t call yourself a professional athlete – and then go down the pub. I don’t think so. By coincidence, or whatever reason, since I stopped drinking, I had all my biggest successes of my career, my biggest belts. I’ve upped my following, I’ve done everything positive since I stopped drinking. “It’s got to coincide a little bit.”

Pauls is noticing changes outside the sport, too. In rugby, it was common for players to drink beer together after matches until perhaps the 2000s, but as torches were passed, alcohol was replaced with post-game protein shakes and the players became more professional.

“I think there’s a generation younger than me, they’re drinking less and less,” Pauls added. “And a lot of people these days are just seeing the light, I think. A lot of my pals have gone sober. They’ve made their mistakes and they’ve seen the positive impact not drinking has.” 

Tony Jeffries won a bronze medal for Team GB at the 2008 Olympics. Hand injuries forced his retirement from the sport in 2011 and Jeffries would have a drink until, he remembers, New Year’s Eve 2019.

Sure, he had called it quits as an active fighter by then but he set himself the goal of giving up alcohol for a year to see how it might change him.

“There was a few different reasons why I stopped drinking,” admitted Jeffires, now a YouTube sensation who has millions of subscribers who follow him for, primarily, his boxing instruction. “The first was, I was just drinking too much. I got to the point where I was drinking at home. I felt like it was helping me get to sleep, even though everything shows that it hurts your sleep. And also I was putting on weight because when you drink alcohol, not only is it doing all the bad things like your cognitive function and your brain health, but it also puts you in a place where you don’t give a damn about what you eat, so I was eating loads of food. So I was drinking multiple times a week and I was eating more, so I got fat. And also, the next day I would feel like crap and I’ve got three young daughters. When your kids want to play with you and you feel hungover because I was chasing the buzz the night before, it’s not the kind of father I wanted to be. I wanted to be a good influence. 

“The other thing is brain health. I’ve been thinking about brain health now for around 10 years. After I retired from boxing I wanted to do everything I can to sharpen my brain up and it’s studies that show drinking alcohol hurts your short-term and long-term memory, and it also hurts your brain cells. Long-term drinking can damage brain cells, and there’s a lot of different studies out there that shows stuff like this and like I mentioned with sleep, you need sleep to help recover and repair your brain and even though it was helping me fall asleep, studies show – and my wife’s a sleep expert – that alcohol raises your heart rate when your sleeping and your heart is working more when your body is trying to rest, so it really messes with your body and your brain that way. And I’m focused on getting my brain as sharp as I can be.”

As an influencer, Jeffries knows he now needs to be seen to be providing positive, helpful advice. Now he’s in the boxing fitness industry, he wants to be a role model and he shows people how to be coaches. That means leading from the front.

Even though he wound up giving up booze in the pandemic, he had more energy and he was able to “generate a ton of content.”

He felt a focus that he’d not felt before and instantly could see his life changing.

He then built an online empire from the ground up.

“Because of that, I thought, why do I want to have a drink again, so I thought I’d have another year off it,” he added.

In his second year, he shifted the focus to training, losing weight and getting back in shape. He got down to his fighting weight of 10 years earlier, but said that had he been given that same advice when he was an up-and-coming pro, he wouldn’t have listened when it mattered.

“When I was younger 17-26 Ricky Hatton was the main man in boxing and what did he do in boxing?” Jeffries asked. “And I idolised him. After every fight he was drinking, putting on weight and he was so successful. I copied his footsteps and it wasn’t just me, it was all my England boxing teammates. If it was alright for Ricky Hatton, who was the biggest superstar in boxing, it’s alright for us. So if someone was to say stop doing that, it would have been, ‘No’, because I was in that mindset – so I probably wouldn’t have listened to them. But if you think about Ricky when he stepped up to the next level and the absolute elite in Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather, you can’t imagine them going on big benders [drinking sessions], putting on weight after their fights. Did that make a difference to Ricky’s fight with them? We don’t know and we never will. That’s what I tell boxers who ask these questions on YouTube. I say don’t drink. It doesn’t help you at all. If you look at the top, elite athletes, not just boxers like Floyd and Manny, but Bivol and Canelo, I can’t imagine them going out on big drinking sessions after the fights. They stay professional all the way through, and if you look at other athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, best football player in the world, he’s not drinking and putting on weight, Messi, he’s not, LeBron James, he’s not. What are they doing different? Well, they’re living a lifestyle throughout. Would it have made me a better athlete? I believe it would have. I really believe it.”

But Jeffries is wise after the event. He knows not all fighters have the opportunity at being shown what a positive role model looks like and how they behave. Fighters often come from rough backgrounds, and sometimes alcohol is part of the backstory and family life.

“It’s tough, because most of us boxers are working class, our parents are working class, and what do working class parents do? They like to have a drink,” Jeffries added. “And when we see our parents, peers and everyone around us in the boxing gyms having a drink, we think it’s part of a culture, which it kind of is. I hope it’s changing. I hope people hear what I say and what other people are saying and it’s helping them.”

Jeffries has been astonished by how much time he has got back to make use of.

“If you drink twice a week and the next day you feel like shit, and you wake up and for the first four hours of the day you feel like crap, that’s eight hours a week that you’re getting back. That’s 32 hours a month. If you can put that 32 hours into a business like I did, what’s going to happen? Your business is going to build and grow, that’s exactly what happened to me.” 

He now has better days, more energy, is in better shape, and healthier.

He’s in the Guinness Book of Records for throwing the most punches in 24 hours, has the biggest YouTube boxing channel in the world and, for a while, competed in jiu jitsu, even winning a gold medal while he was a white belt in a competition in Australia. 

“I will never drink alcohol ever again in my life,” he said.

Another who feels the same way is Bournemouth junior middleweight Lee Cutler, who is 15-2 (7 KOs). “Chaos” ended the unbeaten run of Irishman Stephen McKenna in December 2024, and lost a disputed decision to Sam Eggington in April after Eggington could not continue due to a cut over his eye and the fight went to the scorecards. Cutler is hungry for revenge against Eggington, but he is not thirsty for alcohol. He is part of a stable, McGuigan’s Gym, where none of the fighters drink alcohol, including Adam Azim, Caroline Dubois, and Chris Billam-Smith. It is the same for head coach Shane McGuigan.

“I was out with my mates and in America for his wedding and I just said, ‘I’m gonna do a year with no drinking to see what happens with boxing,” Cutler recalled. “It was mainly boxing orientated. I don't know if it was a heavy [drinking] 10 days out in America. I was like, ‘I'm gonna just do a year’ and then soon into that year, speaking to Chris Billam-Smith, he’d quit drinking for like six years now or something and he was like, ‘Mate, just do the rest of your career, what have you got to lose? ‘Cos if you say you're just doing a year, you'll have friends that when you go to an event, a wedding or something, people will say, it’s only one night and then just get back to it for the rest of the year. But as soon as you say you’re never drinking again, they will leave you alone so you don't drink.’”

Cutler had always been dedicated. He was a decent amateur, and others took his decision harder than him. He was sober for his brother’s wedding at the start of his sobriety journey.

“He's much more thankful that I’m not drinking now he’s seen where my career has gone,” Cutler said.

Cutler would not drink in training camps, eight to 10 weeks from a fight, but he would go out between camps and party with friends. Now he hits the ground running when he has fights on the agenda. 

“I like my food and we put on a little bit of weight after a fight but I think it has benefited me,” he said.

He also knows it gives him a psychological edge because he is making sacrifices that some of his rivals are not making.

“You know that you’re doing something not every boxer does,” he went on. 

He’s also known fighters to struggle with problems with booze and has seen the effect it has had on them.

“Nothing good comes from it, nothing good comes from being out drinking all the time, so it gives you that upper-hand that if you don't drink in the off-season and in between fights then you'll see the difference in between fights. You're still training. You’re not just going to the gym to say you've been to the gym. Now I’m going in and thinking about improving instead of just going in to keep weight off, tick a box and say, ‘Yeah, I’ve done a session today.’”

While Cutler never suffered with particularly bad hangovers, he liked to go out and enjoy time with his friends. But seeing how Billam-Smith dedicated his life to claim the WBO cruiserweight title was inspiration for his stablemate.

“I think your mindset changes as you get older, you just wanna get the most out of your career, you have this short career and I don’t think I will ever drink again now.

“Now I think I can go out and enjoy myself without a drink. I think I will just be like ‘What's the point?’ It can't add any benefit to my life.”

Errol Spence is now 35. His career has not, over the last two years, gone the way he would have hoped. Alcohol would have played its part in that.

“Worse thing I did to MYSELF was drinking,” was what he told the world.