“Prince” Naseem Hamed takes a seat in front of a promotional poster for the movie “Giant.”
The film stars Amir-El Masry as Naz and Pierce Brosnan as the late Brendan Ingle, the eccentric guru who guided Hamed from being the son of an immigrant family from Yemen that ran a corner shop to fame and fortune, billboards in Times Square and the bright lights of Las Vegas.
Ultimately, Hamed made it into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Today, Naz is wearing a black hoodie with the words along the front that read, ‘We bring the drama, baby.’ And Naz certainly did.
He blazed through boxing like a firework – bright, flamboyant and spectacular.
Although some looked on in awe, others looked through their fingers. And some even looked on in disgust, yearning for the cocky little switch-hitter from Sheffield, UK, to get his comeuppance for taunting and mocking his opponents – often before knocking them flat.
He was unique: a little guy who could whack and who drew big crowds and big money.
Hamed turns 52 next month.
He lit up British boxing, specifically, and as a featherweight he did things only a handful of lighter-weight fighters ever have.
He was a household name in a pre-social-media age. Everyone in the UK knew who he was, and he divided opinion – in the lucrative manner of the likes of Floyd Mayweather Jnr.
Mayweather called it relevance, and Naz made himself relevant.
Whether it was unleashing his “rocket launchers,” threatening to “smoke Kevin Kelley’s boots” or somersaulting over the top rope and into fights against some of the era’s biggest names, Naz was can’t-miss, must-see TV.
Naz leans in and smiles at this topic.
“I recently heard an interview with Tiger Woods, and everybody was against him,” he said. “And at that time, there was no black golfers. And I remember him saying, he used to ask for two things when he got to every course. And I loved that. He used to say, ‘Where's the first tee and what’s the course record?’ And I just loved that.
“He was out there to break records. He was out there to show that he was the best in the world.”
But Tiger was often a uniting force, while Naz was both loved by many and loved to be hated by perhaps even more.
“When you’ve got a captive audience, people, if they love you and they hate you, if you’ve got all of them that want to watch you and they’re paying, that’s the main thing right there,” he said with a smile. “My whole thing was to capture the imaginations of the world. And I did that. I don’t care what anybody says. What I went out to do, I did. And I did it in the way that I wanted to do it. And I love the fact that I wasn’t just given this opportunity. I created that opportunity.”
*
There are many who contend that, without the aforementioned Ingle, the Hamed story would not have turned out the way it did or been as successful.
Having linked up when Naz was just 11, they split after Hamed reached the pinnacle. The movie is almost entirely about their complex relationship and their version of one of the hardest dynamics in boxing to control, the one between a trainer who has been accustomed to getting a percentage – or even nothing – from a fighter to being downscaled or left when the purses later have several zeroes in them. There is, of course, a difference between, for example, 10 per cent of $1,000 and 10 per cent of $1,000,000.
The film is even-handed from both sides, but Naz didn’t have any input.
And although Ingle molded many champions, it is the star power of the likes of Naz that so many who give up time to help young boys and girls at the start of their athletic careers that coaches hope might make the long nights of helping others actually pay dividends.
“I mean, it’s kind of hard if you get a ticket like that every now and again, isn't it?” Naz admits. “It doesn’t really happen. But, look, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because, like I’ve said many times, I’ve had nothing to do with [the film]. And it’s hard that way.”
Hamed, however, pays tribute to the cast – and he can’t see a way that Brosnan doesn’t win awards for his portrayal of the old Irish coach.
But there was more to Hamed’s career than the infamous and unsavoury fallout with Ingle. Look at the highlight reels, watch the switch of stances, the crushing left hands, the elaborate screw shots, the face-busting uppercuts.
“Wow,” Naz said when asked what he sees when he looks at such clips. He grins. “I see many things. I see somebody with supreme confidence, somebody with such a will to win, so much belief within himself, and just flamboyant, just different. I love the way my career went. I’m gonna be honest. I just think it went in a certain way where there were many fights that showed different stuff.”
At no point did we see Hamed question himself. He was yelling at the old hacks covering his career that he would be a world champion from the first interview he ever gave.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that many of those journalists felt Hamed’s wrath at one point or another. It’s worth noting, too, that when you look back on cuttings of the Naz career through the prism of the British boxing press, many were far from enamored with the braggadocious upstart.
Even some of his best performances were dismissed as imperfect, arrogant with the implication that all the sizzle didn’t make a very good steak.
That was even the case when Naz lit up Madison Square Garden against Kevin Kelley in a multi-knockdown thriller. George Foreman, for HBO, said Hamed was the second coming at featherweight, while Larry Merchant declared their bout was a featherweight Hagler-Hearns.
Boxing News, the UK trade publication, said it hoped for more. It wasn’t alone.
Naz bristled at it all then. He doesn’t care now.
“There was one point in my career where I thought it was most satisfying of winning, and that had to be the Kevin Kelley fight, because working your way to becoming a world champion’s huge,” Hamed said. “But then to get to America, where everybody thinks you’re gonna fail, and everybody knows it's the Mecca of boxing, it’s in Madison Square Garden. Can you perform? Can you come out with them entrances? Can you still do all of that? And it was done with abundance. So that was one of the defining fights in my eyes, and one of the most satisfying.”
Naz had even started naming the rounds he would dispatch his opponents in.
And he was right about Kelley.
“I said three at first, but I changed it up to four,” he said, smiling. “But what happens in between, I don’t know.”
**
Hamed says his freakish power was a gift from Allah. He still prays, and his media timings ahead of this week’s release of “Giant” were based around his prayer schedule.
He cuts a content figure as he fires off answers freely.
And some don’t understand how he can be content.
How can he lose to Marco Antonio Barrera and not try to avenge the defeat? How could he not be chasing down Mayweather or Juan Manuel Marquez or Derrick Gainer or all those he was linked with? Why leave, at age 28 and with a 36-1 (31 KOs) record, when there was so much left to do?
Naz couldn’t disagree with that more.
When asked for his worst moment, having offered Kelley as a highlight, Hamed has little to respond with, and that is – in large part – thanks to his religion.
“So, I can’t think of a lowest of the low,” he replies, having initially paused to consider the question. “I was always appreciative for what Allah gave me. I love putting my head on that floor and worshipping Allah, because He gave me what I’ve not seen many people have. So, lowest of the low, what is that? I can’t.
“Listen, you know boxing. When you get beat in boxing, you get beat, right? You’re down and out. You’re looking up. Embarrassed. Deteriorated. Out. Written off. That didn’t happen with me. I lost one fight on points against a guy that everybody knows, including himself, that I would have beat him if I would have been right and if he would have fought when I told him that I wanted to fight for all the five years that he dodged me. But, look, that’s the way it was meant to happen. I’m not mad about it. I’m cool with it.”
Hamed says it with the anger of a tranquil summer breeze. He did all he wanted, got what he wanted and got out when he wanted.
The Barrera fight was a downturn, of course. Hamed contends he wanted the Mexican long before, that he had damaged his hands against Augie Sanchez, spent too long out of the gym and left himself with too much weight to drop in too short a space. But, Hamed said, he couldn’t have robbed 10 banks for the amount HBO offered him.
“It was an impossible mission,” Hamed admits all these years on. “But, I thought, there’s no way that he’s going to knock me out. I can’t see him stopping me or knocking me out. Never happened in my whole life. I’ve had over a hundred fights, amateur and professional, never got stopped or knocked out. Never in the gym, nothing. So I thought – and I sparred heavyweights, middleweights, cruiserweights – no matter what happens in the fight, he can’t knock me out or stop me. But I was saying to myself, ‘There’s no way that we’re going to go 12 rounds and I do not catch him properly.’ But even though I caught him and broke his nose, I think in one round, I didn’t catch him clean enough and with an unbelievable shot to take him out. And that was my issue. I honestly thought and relied on power and one shot that was going to win that fight. And it never came around, and it wasn’t meant to happen.
“And he won that fight fair and square, and I give him all the credit in the world. But he dodged me for five, six years. He wouldn’t fight me, Tris.”
Was Hamed on the downside by then because he had had his best days, or because of how he was living?
“It isn’t that I just had my best days in the ring,” he insists.
“In my eyes, I was hurting my hands a lot. And I was leaving home and going on training camp and getting a little bit sick of that. I’m not going to lie. And then leaving the boys [his three sons] when they were young, and it hit me a little bit. But it was just perfect timing for [Barrera]. That was it. He was on his way up, active, world champion for a while …”
***
What Hamed did was enough to get him enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame, where only a few British greats have a plaque on the walls.
Naz mentions his titles, his chutzpah, his flamboyance, but he doesn’t talk about Canastota a lot.
“Now, I don't go on about the Hall of Fame like Carl Froch, because he can’t believe it [that he’s in], bless him,” Naz says, grinning, knowing he is due to appear on Froch’s podcast next.
Froch – a former super middleweight world titleholder from Nottingham, UK, and now a podcaster – was among those invited to interview Hamed. Growing up, Froch was a huge Hamed fan, and he hoped to learn a few bits at the Wincobank Gym about Naz’s journey through boxing that ultimately led to Canastota.
“He can’t believe [he made it into the Hall of Fame],” Hamed joked about Froch. “That’s why he's always talking about the Hall of Fame and talking about 80,000 people. He can’t believe it, the guy.”
I had been speaking to Froch earlier and told him to ask Hamed what the biggest live crowd he had fought in front of was.
Naz was well-prepared as we spoke.
“Eighty thousand. Tell us another one, mate,” Hamed said. “But, hey, it's a compliment, though. That’s a compliment.”
****
While Froch starched George Groves at Wembley Stadium before 80,000 fans, Hamed’s crowds were modest. But greater things had been expected of the Sheffield Prince. I had always wanted to ask Hamed whether he felt like he fulfilled his potential. The boxing magazines at the time dreamt of him against Mayweather, against Juan Manuel Marquez and Erik Morales and all the big names in and around his weight. Ingle had once said Hamed could have held titles in more weight classes. It was important to add that context to the question, even if Hamed promptly moved the goalposts to view it through the lens of life.
“Firstly, let me mention this,” Hamed said. “For anybody, or any fighter of any level to win any title, is big. But to be a world champion at 21 is something else. And then to win and defend your title 15 times in a row and accumulate the rest of the belts and be seen in the sport as the lineal world champion, and all them years after, they still give me that Ring magazine belt … they had to. Hall of Famer.
“Let me finish off what you just said with all them other fighters that I could have fought and could have won and fulfilled the potential.”
Hamed leans forward to make eye contact.
“Tris, it wasn’t written for me to do that. It’s as simple as that. And the thing is, like I said to you, once I got the breakdown of the hands in such a way, it was merely done. You see so many fighters come back. Why do they come back, most of them? Money. They’re prizefighters. They want that dough.”
That is often true. But we also know of fighters who have died from broken hearts of not being able to fight again. Can Hamed relate to those who spiraled into depression, unable to obtain the sporting high they had become dependent upon?
Pushing Hamed, even gently, generates a different reaction.
“Listen,” he confides. “There isn’t a day that goes past where I feel like, ‘Wow, just imagine if there’s one more fight’ or ‘Get yourself ready.’ I have today, but it’s impossible because I’m happy with my career the way it went. When you’ve got fulfilment in your heart and contentment and you praise the creator of the heavens and Earth, and you’re happy and you thank God that everything that you have done, why can’t we look at that aspect of it instead of thinking what we didn’t have?
“I’ve got three beautiful boys that keep me grounded, with a beautiful wife. I’m in the mosque a lot. I do my prayers. I don’t struggle with mental health. Look, I’m gonna tell you the truth. When it comes to them moments of thinking when … ‘You sold out so many arenas’ and ‘Things were so good’ and ‘Them nights were so unbelievable.’
“They were a moment in time, Tris. … You can’t get them back. They’re gone.
“Just be happy that you was given them. And I was given them and … listen … nobody did it like that.”
Nobody did it like Naz.
Tris Dixon covered his first amateur boxing fight in 1996. The former editor of Boxing News, he has written for a number of international publications and newspapers, including GQ and Men’s Health, and is a board member for the Ringside Charitable Trust and the Ring of Brotherhood. He has been a broadcaster for TNT Sports and hosts the popular “Boxing Life Stories” podcast. Dixon is a British Boxing Hall of Famer, an International Boxing Hall of Fame elector, a BWAA award winner, and is the author of five boxing books, including “Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing” (shortlisted for the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year), “Warrior: A Champion’s Search for His Identity” (shortlisted for the Sunday Times International Sportsbook of the Year) and “The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxing’s Wastelands.” You can reach him @trisdixon on X and Instagram.
