The good thing about team sports is that it is never really your fault. If something goes wrong, there will always be a long chain of culpability, as well as various other people wearing the same colours as you whose faces look the same as yours: sheepish, away.
Rarely in the event of a defeat will you have to question your own ability, your importance to the team, or the part you played in the team’s downfall. Because this – defeat – is bigger than you. It hurts others just as much as it hurts you and therefore to mope, or claim responsibility, is rather selfish if anything. There’s no “I” in team, remember. You win together; you lose together.
Now boxing, that’s a little different. Not only is boxing an individual sport, but it is the loneliest of sports. Ask any boxer and they will tell you how lonely they feel during training camp, when everybody else is off eating what they want and having fun, and how this feeling is then intensified on fight night, when they have only an opponent and a referee for company. There will be a ring, too, which keeps them contained and adds to the sensation of being trapped, while the lights directly above them will be warm and bright, like the lights in an interrogation room. From the lights there is no escape. They reveal every imperfection on a boxer’s skin and in their style and highlight every wince and grimace as the fight plays out. Then you have the crowd, of course, whose support is only heard, not felt, and who hope to see one of the two boxers in the ring – either you or your opponent – knocked out.
If that doesn’t constitute a lonely experience, it’s hard to imagine what does. In fact, so lonely is the experience of training for 10 weeks and entering a ring with an opponent, it takes a certain type of individual to consider it remotely fun or in any way pleasurable. Along with the isolation of it all there is the constant fear of it going wrong, not to mention the pain, and yet seldom are these things ever discussed by a boxer – at least for as long as they are active. To do so would be considered a weakness, perhaps, so therefore they shrug it off, bottle it up. They pretend they don’t feel pain and they pretend that even nerves are not part of the fight-night experience. That then only adds to it, of course: the loneliness, the sense of carrying everything on your shoulders.
Should it go wrong, that load becomes heavier – too much for some. The opponent celebrates, the referee raises their arm, and you – the defeated fighter – have nowhere to look and nobody but yourself to blame. Even your corner team, who tell you they love you, enter the ring with a reticence you interpret as disappointment and at half the speed of your victorious opponent’s.
In the days to follow, both long and aimless, you have no choice but to sit with the loss and suck it up. You are told to take some time off and to rest, but that only means a return to civilian life and to a phone that now never rings yet holds within it your epitaph scrawled on numerous social media sites. Gone in an instant is the whiff of camaraderie you had in the gym when surrounded by coaches and hangers-on for 10 weeks. Gone, too, is the routine you only realise is essential when it no longer provides structure to otherwise flat days.
During this period of aimlessness, a beaten boxer will look for answers to questions they are scared to ask. They will, before looking inward, perhaps study the faces of the people around them and scan them for signs of doubt. If any are detected, that could be enough to see a parting of ways. Why? Because at their lowest ebb a boxer needs a cheerleader, not a mirror. With enough doubt of their own, the last thing a beaten boxer wants to see on the face of a coach, or a friend, is a similar level of doubt or concern. They want to instead see a kind of delusion, ignorance and blind faith. They want to see everything they, the boxer, cannot generate themselves given the realities and dangers of their profession.
To even just carry on following a defeat requires an adjustment – in attitude, in approach. It’s why so many boxers choose to switch trainers, gyms, or the country in which they train just to be able to say, “Yes, that was it! That was the reason I lost!” Do that and they can obviate the need to take ownership of the defeat and for a fleeting moment pretend boxing is a team sport. Do that and they feel as though they can still be rebooted, repaired.
Without this change, and without the safety net provided by controversy (bad scorecards, bad officiating, etcetera), the only person to blame for a defeat is the boxer, the one who felt it. That, for any boxer at any level, is a scary thought to consider, so most of them do all they can to avoid it. It’s why a coach often gets kicked to the curb whenever a high-profile boxer loses and why few boxers elect to keep things the same following a setback. It’s also why news of Daniel Dubois splitting from Don Charles following Dubois’ defeat against Oleksandr Usyk last month came as no surprise. Dubois, after all, is just the latest boxer coming to terms with a very public defeat and now figuring out how to frame the defeat to give him the best chance of rebounding from it. He is young enough, at 27, to still dream of becoming world heavyweight champion, but knows that he can only get there if he first convinces himself that something went wrong against Usyk and that, with a slight tweak here or there, things could have been different. He has, in his mind, now made that necessary tweak by getting rid of Don Charles, his coach, and joining up with Tony Sims, the next one. This, in theory, will allow Dubois to experience new surroundings, new ideas, and something of a restart. Better yet, it removes the temptation to look inward and reflect.
This approach, for Dubois, is nothing new. He has been here before, changing trainers to change his fortunes, and he is also no stranger to finding reasons for why he lost and then using these reasons to rebuild his confidence and take him forward. He did this with Usyk the first time around, in fact, when a ninth-round stoppage loss was repackaged by both Dubois and his team as a controversial one on account of a semi-contentious incident in round five. Were it not for a “body shot” ruled low in that round, Dubois would have beaten Usyk that night, they said, and this belief – repeated so many times it stuck – was what enabled Dubois to (a) land a rematch with Usyk two years later and (b) have many, including Dubois, feel as though he actually had a shot at beating Usyk.
As it turned out, the second fight between them was even more one-sided than the first. For four and a half rounds Usyk toyed with Dubois before putting him out to pasture in the fifth with a vicious left hand. It was all a bit easy, really. Easier than last time. Easier than most said it would be. Easier than it was supposed to be.
To try to make sense of it, and explain it, excuses had to follow – and they did. There was first the revelation of a pre-fight party thrown by the Dubois family which Dubois, the special guest, attended just hours before boxing Usyk at Wembley Stadium. However, this party, although dumb, would have likely had no bearing on the outcome of the fight and was, we learned, something the family did before Dubois beat Anthony Joshua last year, so was soon viewed as less an excuse than a tradition.
A better reason for his defeat to Usyk had to do with training, they felt. Training, trainers, gym stuff. Forget the fact that no coach alive, or indeed dead, would be able to get Dubois to conquer the great Ukrainian, he had by now exhausted all other options. He had looked everywhere – in cupboards, biscuit tins, and behind the sofa – but still couldn’t find what he was after: the right words, the right excuse, the right story to tell.
In the end, he stopped searching for it, this thing he knew didn’t exist, and just cleared the place out. He removed all traces of what had gone wrong in July, as well as anybody around him with any knowledge of it. If he couldn’t find a reason, he certainly didn’t want reminders.
