When people sit down to watch Ben Whittaker fight, they are less concerned with seeing him win than being entertained. After all, entertainment is Whittaker’s stock-in-trade. It is the thing he promises and the thing on which he has built his name, both as an amateur and professional. In fact, it could even be argued that Whittaker has the reputation he does not because he has won titles or beaten great fighters as a pro, but instead because he entertains, he divides opinion, and he makes you want to watch.
That, for any young prospect, is perhaps the key to getting noticed – particularly early on. It is at that embryonic stage of a boxer’s career when victories are taken for granted, if not guaranteed, and opponents are so disadvantaged that the fight suffers as a spectacle. In the case of most prospects, you almost wish you could fast-forward through the first 10 fights and get to the real stuff, the juicy stuff, the meaningful stuff. But then occasionally you get a prospect like Whittaker, for whom even the so-called easy and routine fights possess a narrative and give you a reason to watch.
For some, that reason is simple: they wait for the day Ben Whittaker slips up and loses for the first time. Yet, for others, much of the appeal of watching Whittaker fight lies in the fact that he has backed himself to deliver entertainment every time he competes and therefore to merely win a fight is not enough. That is especially true during this early phase of his career, when every time Whittaker appears in the ring he is expected to win with relative ease. That is a kind of pressure in itself, of course, and the greater the prospect, the greater that pressure then becomes. Not only must they win these early fights, but they must do more than just win them. They must win them with minimal fuss and maximum style.
So far, Whittaker, 10-0-1 (7 KOs), has been able to do this. He had a couple of surprisingly tough ones in 2024 – distance fights with Leon Willings and Ezra Arenyeka, followed by an ugly technical draw with Liam Cameron – but on the whole his career to this point has been in service of the highlight reel. There have been one-punch knockouts, shimmies, bolo punches, Ali shuffles, behind-the-back attacks, and pretty much everything else one’s imagination can muster. Some have loved him for it. Others have hated him for it. Whittaker, though, is seemingly just doing what comes naturally.
“From his public persona to the person you meet and are with every day, it couldn’t be more different,” said Andy Lee, a former WBO middleweight champion and Whittaker’s latest coach. “The ring antics, which are part of his character, are for fight night, but away from that he’s a gentleman. He’s a pleasure to be around and we have spent a lot of time together, away from the gym as well as in the gym. I’ll tell you the kind of person he is. He’s the kind of person who flew to New York to support Hamzah [Sheeraz, in his fight against Edgar Berlanga] and flew to Belfast to support Paddy Donovan [in his rematch with Lewis Crocker].”
The first time Whittaker and Lee worked together was ahead of Whittaker’s rematch with Liam Cameron 12 months ago. That, of all the light-heavyweight’s 11 fights to date, featured the least amount of showboating, which begs the question: Why? Was it because in Lee he has found a po-faced disciplinarian who won’t tolerate those kinds of antics once the first bell rings and a threat is detected? Or was it simply because Whittaker knew, having already had a rough time with Cameron, that there are certain opponents against whom it is easier to relax and perform tricks than others?
“I never showboated [as a boxer], but you’ve got to allow people to express themselves,” said Lee when asked for his thoughts on Whittaker’s approach. “I like to have the fighters express themselves in the ring.
“But there’s a point when it becomes disrespectful and I wouldn’t like that. You don’t like to punch down. If someone tries taking your head off and you make them miss, it’s fine to then celebrate with some showboating. But if you’re dominating a guy and then you do it, I don’t like that. But, listen, against Liam Cameron, he was pretty much punch-perfect. There wasn’t room for showboating.”
No room for showboating is perhaps the perfect way of illustrating a prospect’s progression from gimme fights to more demanding and dangerous ones. Suddenly, having had it their way for so long, a prospect will discover as they step up in class that there is a lot less room to move, think, and yes, act out. Suddenly now they are more focused on what is coming back at them from their opponent and less preoccupied with what they can do to make their opponent feel belittled or out of their depth.
Whittaker’s next fight, against Argentina’s Braian Suarez on Saturday, won’t be the one to tell us everything, no, but it will, one assumes, put him in a slightly smaller room. It will also tell us more about Whittaker’s state of mind and temperament when he is presented with a marginal increase in danger.
That’s not to say Suarez is anything like his litmus test – he is not – but with 20 knockouts from 21 professional wins Suarez is, if nothing else, capable of humbling a braggart. His style, in fact, seems made for it. All he needs is one tiny opening and bang, it can all change.
That, for Whittaker, might be just the threat he needs in his 12th professional fight; the crucial reminder that only at a certain level, against a certain type of opponent, can he express the degree to which he is having fun in the ring. In Suarez, he could have an opponent with enough one-punch power to keep him alert, on his toes, laser-focused. He could have an opponent with just enough of a threat level to quell his worst impulses and, in turn, bring out the very best of him, just as Liam Cameron did last year.
Even if that is true, there is still an expectation. There is an expectation for Whittaker to not only win, but win convincingly, and Suarez, for all his power, has lost four times in 25 pro fights, three times by stoppage. Last year he was outpointed over eight rounds by Vasily Voytsekhovsky in Russia, while the year before that he was stopped in two by Sharabutdin Ataev. He is known to British fans, however, for his thrilling fight with Lyndon Arthur in 2023, during which Suarez dropped Arthur only to fall apart himself in round 10. If anything encapsulates Suarez – the good, the bad, and the ugly – it’s probably that fight, which he lost.
If required, the fight with Arthur should give Whittaker a decent idea of how Suarez operates and the danger he presents. Better yet, it should provide him with an ideal yardstick to measure his own performance this weekend in Liverpool. For if Whittaker can beat Suarez quicker and with less difficulty than Arthur managed in 2023, he will know that he has done a good job. He will know he has won well. He will know it was all worthwhile.
One day it won’t be like this for Ben Whittaker, of course. He will eventually be judged solely on his results rather than how they were secured and how he, the victor, acted in the process of securing them. Soon it won’t matter how he looked, how often he showboated, or how decisive the finish was. All that will matter is that Ben Whittaker won a fight he wasn’t expected to win against an opponent considered either his equal or his superior. It is then that things will start to get interesting in the career of Ben Whittaker. It is then we might see him relax, go through the gears, and show us the extent of the damage he can do in a small room.
