“Probably the biggest one is when [George] Groves fights [James] DeGale – no one thought he was going to win that – and [David] Haye fights [Wladimir] Klitschko, and everyone favoured Klitschko for that,” explains Adam Booth. “That’s water under the bridge now.”
Booth is reflecting because a parallel has been drawn between then and his preparing David Adeleye for Filip Hrgovic at the same time that Josh Kelly is potentially nearing what could prove his defining fight. The point hasn’t even yet been made that Adeleye, another heavyweight, is widely considered the underdog against Hrgovic, and that Kelly – should he fight Bakhram Murtazaliev or another of the junior-middleweight world champions – would be similarly unfavoured.
In the summer of 2011 the respected Booth, partly because of the culture around Haye and partly on account of his independence, was being treated with suspicion regardless of his increasingly coming to be seen as the finest trainer in the UK.
James DeGale, the celebrated Olympic gold medallist, was the favourite against George Groves and yet Groves, guided by Booth and Paddy Fitzpatrick, earned a narrow decision over his long-term rival that propelled his career and stalled DeGale’s. Six weeks later Haye, also the underdog against Wladimir Klitschko, ultimately disappointed on the occasion of a fight so defining that memories of that night perhaps unfairly undermine his previous achievements. The ecstasy and the agony likely did much to continue shaping a lower-key, mellower Booth who is no less passionate and committed to his fighters’ success. Should Adeleye surprise many by defeating Hrgovic then the attention of Booth, his trainer, will immediately return to Kelly. Even if he doesn’t, as with Kelly after his defeat in 2021 by David Avenesyan, Booth can be expected to attempt to continue shaping Adeleye, and to reflect on risking his progress against so dangerous a puncher with minimal regret.
“If you’re training more than one pro, and they’re good, and they’ve got a good promotional deal and they’re winning, there’s these cycles where you end up with two people fighting for something significant,” he tells BoxingScene. “There was Groves and Haye; there was [Ryan] Burnett and Andy Lee. There was Mick Conlan, Josh Kelly; and now it’s Josh Kelly and David Adeleye. It’s a cycle.
“It’s also because I don’t work with many fighters. It’s never been like that for me. It’s just my path, and I’ve learned that if you keep winning, the way the yin and yang lines up, you’re gonna be up, then there’s gonna be a lull; you’re gonna be up, and there’s gonna be a lull.
“I was asked to give a wish list of fights, and I gave them five names. Filip Hrgovic was the second on that list. But that was earlier in the year before the [Jeamie Tshikeva; a sixth-round stoppage for Adeleye] TKV fight, and then after the TKV fight it was ‘Go back and do that one properly’, and I was asked for the list again, and I just repeated the same one and the next thing, I was asked very quickly if I would take that [Hrgovic] fight, and I jumped at it.
“There’s been flaws in [Hrgovic] a lot of his pro career, and I’ve known Filip ever since he was an amateur and he sparred with David Haye. I’ve always known he’s tough – immense experience – and he knows how to compete in the amateurs. As a pro, it almost looked like he never strived to be more than what he was. He looked a bit flat in some performances. It looked like he got tired against Daniel [Dubois]. But then against Joe [Joyce] he proved that he can sustain it, because one thing Joe Joyce can do is pressure you, and he didn’t crumble under that pressure, and he won that fight. He won that fight quite clearly.
“I couldn’t believe how tough he was. He was taking flush right hands that hurt nearly every heavyweight they were landing on, and he just ate them up and kept doing his thing. When he was in our gym he was sparring with David and he was sparring with Deontay Wilder and Richard Towers, and they were rough, tough spars for him, because he was young – he was 21, I think. He proved he had the mettle in him to be a pro fighter. It was good work. At that time, in that camp, we had Hrgovic, Wilder, Robert Helenius; Richard Towers was sparring at the time; I think David Price came down as well; we had good quality sparring and he was one of the spars. It was Filip [Haye, cancelling a fight against Tyson Fury] was sparring when he got cut.
“Styles make fights. David Adeleye is the type of fighter that needs a stress and a fear in front of him – he needs that to bring the best out of him. The problem with the TKV fight is that they knew each other really well; they’d sparred, and he knew what there was and what there wasn’t in front of him, and that played out. In the [Solomon] Dacres fight he was the underdog; he had a lot to prove because he’d been stopped by Fabio [Wardley, prior to working with Booth], and he showed how he can rise to that when his back’s against the wall. He’s the type of fighter who needs his back against the wall to get the best out of him.
“On this list were five fights I believed David can win, and I believe David can lose. Do the job right; do the job wrong. ‘If you want to be in the big fights, then now’s the time to take a fight like this.’ He’s 28; he’s an athlete; he’s confident; he’s strong. Over the last year and a half he’s learned to be a pro and train like a pro. I know what Filip’s strengths are; I know what his weaknesses are. If David does the job right, then he wins the fight. In winning this fight, look what that does for his position in the heavyweight scene.”
A similar logic applied to the talented Kelly’s pursuit of the IBF champion Murtazaliev; with Groves when in 2013 he agreed to fight Carl Froch. Against Avenesyan, as with Carl Thompson in the case of Haye, Kelly lost and was forced to rebuild, but the pattern is established to the point of being familiar – Booth matches his fighters cautiously while focusing on developing them, and then aggressively when he believes that they are ready to take risks. The retired Ryan Burnett’s ascent and that of Haye, post-Thompson, were judged to near-perfection. Booth is no longer the celebrated figure he became when after his separation from Haye and Groves he succeeded with Burnett and Andy Lee, but his methods are consistent and, in another reminder of how quickly past glories are forgotten, nearing the most unforgiving of tests once again.
“It’s risk over gain,” Booth says. “Every fight is risk over gain, whether the gain’s money or potential money; status. The gain, in this fight, from David’s position in the heavyweight division, makes total sense to me. I expect a lot of people to make David a big underdog, and I’m fine with that. The gain is immense for him, because he can gatecrash the elite level of the heavyweights.
“The big domestic fights are the ones that get the commercial value; juices flowing. When you’ve got big domestic heavyweight fights, it goes to a different level, and he’s got the attributes and the assets to be in that scene. Now is the time to be a heavyweight – a British heavyweight – at that level.
“It’s a fight that you can win. Do the job right, and you can win the fight. I’m only focused on the detail, not the outcome. You can’t go into a fight relying on being able to hurt the other man, because it’s not down to you whether he can take your shots or not. You can’t go into a fight relying on the other man to get tired, ‘cause it’s not down to you whether he’s got the conditioning. Styles make fights. I know where David can have success and I know where Filip can have success and that’s where my hope is. I’m actually not focused on the winning or losing. I’m just focused on the moments.
“The toughness [of Hrgovic] was something I saw when he was young – he had the toughness for it. You don’t get to that elite level as an amateur without having offensive ability. He was winning the first half of the Dubois fight, and Dubois’ gone on to become a great champion. He’s beat Joe Joyce. Offensively he absolutely has game, and that’s the game that we’re working on – you’ve gotta disarm it. These are all game plan elements, so I’m not going to talk about them – he has obvious strengths, and he has obvious weaknesses.
“There’s been improvements in [Adeleye in] a lot of aspects. Certainly in his understanding. It took time for it to take off – quite a few months where I was thinking ‘I don’t think this is gonna work’, and then all of a sudden it started, and when it started, it started to give me a lot of confidence. I like him as well. I like his moral compass; I like what he is as a man. You spend time around him; he’s very positive; happy energy. Training David, it’s not a chore. His brother Ed as well – they’re both just really good guys to spend time with. I think he does trust me implicitly as well, so he’s giving me what I want to see. He doesn’t like me at times – you saw the expression on his face, because he’s feeling things he hasn’t felt before, and he’s carrying some accumulated fatigue, because now he’s got to get certain things in. I know that – I go to start speaking to him, and there’s that look in their eye. That moment in time, they fucking hate you. It’s all part of the job. It’s not my first rodeo.
“His first spar, eight weeks out, his movements were already better than they were for TKV. I’m not being too hung up on the TKV fight, because it was a stinker because David didn’t really do anything for three rounds. But as soon as he started doing something – in the fourth he started walking him down – all of a sudden he looked like the dominant man, and then that moment in the fifth... But I knew that David could hurt him and he knew he could hurt him as well. Once he had him hurt he wasn’t going to let him off, and he unloaded on him. Effectively, what we’re talking about, is a fight where he was complacent, and he started slow for three rounds. I’m not going to judge him on the fact he started slow in a fight. If the ref hadn’t said ‘Break’ in that situation, nobody would be talking about this.
“If I start talking to him about moments that are gonna happen in the fight, he’s really engaged. I’ll hear him repeating things that I’ve said to him to someone else. He’s more engaged in this fight than even the previous two.”
Kelly, cynically and disingenuously according to Booth, was spoken about as a potential opponent for Jaron “Boots” Ennis after Murtazaliev was ordered by the IBF to defend his title against Erickson Lubin. His marketability and standing in the British fight scene regardless means he will remain a potential opponent for other – perhaps less dangerous – junior-middleweight champions and that, as with the 28-year-old Adeleye on Saturday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, his hopes of transforming his career will soon come.
“When you’re challenging for a world title you’re at the elite level, and Murtazaliev knocked out Tim Tszyu in the third round; Murtazaliev is an elite 154 fighter, and Josh is now in the conversation, so that excites me,” Booth said. “The difference between this and the Avenesyan fight is that Josh has always been good enough, but it was what was going on in his head – and it needed the pressure of the Avenesyan situation and his life to expose that there were some significant cracks in his mental make-up that have now been resolved.
“The reward for Josh is the IBF world title, and the standing and status that it has in British boxing. Murtazaliev is Russian, who lives and trains in America. Risk over gain. Why are we going to fight him? We’d fight him ‘cause he’s got an IBF title. The world title means something. That’s the gain. I wouldn’t be chasing it if it didn’t. He can whack. Tszyu made a very sloppy choice that effectively led to the end of the fight. He made a choice against someone like him and paid the price for it, because once he got hurt he never recovered.”
Perhaps the truest reflection of Booth’s methods and his natural grasp of psychology is the reality that, more than a decade on from DeGale-Groves and Klitschko-Haye, Groves and three fighters he worked with thereafter – Andy Lee, Richard Towers and Burnett – have become trainers and Lee, who worked under the great Emanuel Steward before Booth, has widely come to be seen as one of the best young trainers in the world.
“You’d have to be a special kind of stupid if you couldn’t absorb what Andy says, because of how he says things,” Booth says of the fighter he led to the WBO middleweight title. “Andy’s a really classy dude, and that’s what stood out right from the time I first met him. He’s dignified; he’s elegant; he’s got so many great characteristics as a man; the elements that are essential if somebody is gonna guide another man in a combat sport, because there’s a lot of fakes and phoneys and plagiarists in this business. There always has been. Everyone thinks they’re doing a good job – everyone thinks they know what they’re doing – but actually very few people do. Andy does.
“I never thought about whether he was going to be a coach or not because when he was with me we were busy as fighter and coach. But it makes absolute sense, because he’s wise; he’s got the right character to be a coach, and all of the knowledge, and he loves it. He lives and breathes boxing. If anyone was gonna become a coach, and become a very, very high level coach, it’s gonna be Andy Lee.
“His relationship with Joseph Parker, and the change in Joseph Parker, and everything that Andy has learned over the years and how he’s implemented it… Andy’s always lived the life. Look at the sacrifices he made moving to America and living with Emanuel Steward. I’ve personally seen him make sacrifices in life. His relationship with Joseph Parker is a really nice one to watch from the outside, because they look like they gel as people, not just fighter and coach. Andy had that with Emanuel and he had it with me as well. I’m not surprised that he’s having the success and getting the recognition so quickly. He might be good as a coach, but he spent years not just as a fighter, but learning the art and understanding the lifestyle that goes with it. Understanding the life of the fighter and the problems and the jeopardy – you learn so much about the lifestyle of a fighter from Emanuel Steward.
“If Hamzah [Sheeraz] can absorb and execute what Andy is teaching him… they made a big decision to take [the Edgar Berlanga] fight as their first one together, because that was a challenge in itself.”
Groves, who is guiding the cruiserweight Lucas Roehrig, represents a more surprising fighter-come-trainer. Unlike with Lee and Burnett, Booth’s association with him didn’t end happily, but Booth – perhaps in 2025 the most content figure involved in Hayemaker during the era they threatened to conquer the world – also sees in him the potential to succeed.
“He obviously loves boxing, and that’s all he wants to be around, because he’s stayed in it,” he said. “I’d heard he was going down to Dale Youth and helping out on Sundays, where he’s come across this kid he’s trained. So I’m not surprised, no.
“He’s a thinker, and he’s got a boxing brain and a combat sport brain. He was always an excellent fighter to coach, because he would absorb and understand – so he was an intelligent fighter, and evolved into an intelligent fighter outside the ring as well, so it’s not a surprise that he’s exercising that ability. If you’ve got a boxing brain, and you can articulate yourself, it’s a good start. It’s then what you articulate, and really as a coach, what I’ve learned over the years that what you don’t say is actually more important than what you do say. What might get one fighter to understand something might not work with another. Your intonation; your tonality. My philosophy is that the art of coaching is to get across what you want to teach using as few words as possible, where it’s understood.
“I’ve only ever seen a few clips of [Roehrig]. He looks like a well-built fella. He looks well put together, physically. I don’t know what he did as an amateur, and he’s a novice pro. Time will tell. It looks like George has got the perfect material to work with.
“[Towers has] got a young kid called Yasine who’s just turned senior, and Yasine has lived and breathed every word that Richard’s told him. He’s still a novice in terms of the senior sense, and he’s a joy to watch. Whatever Richard is as a coach is showing out in him, because he lives and breathes every word that comes out of Richard’s mouth.
“I’ve got belief in his heart and his spirit and what his true nature is, because I’ve seen the best side of him. There’s been a dark side to him as well. Richard’s predominantly a good spirit. We’ve all got good and bad in us. I’ve had amazing times with Richard just laughing about stuff.
“He spent a lot of time with Brendan Ingle, and a lot of time with Adam Booth, and he’s absorbed everything. He doesn’t have the same experience as a fighter that Andy Lee does. But he’s still got whatever knowledge he’s picked up along the way.
“The cracks of life got in the way as well and he didn’t start boxing until really late; he never had that amateur background, and then the heavyweight division then wasn’t like what it is now. In the heavyweight division now there’s loads of fighters you can spar with to improve as a fighter. We didn’t have that luxury, so he didn’t have the opportunity to evolve as a heavyweight, but that’s his path. We’ve all got a different journey.”
It was Booth who then, unprompted, reminded BoxingScene of Burnett’s progress. “What about Ryan Burnett? In Belfast, he’s got his own gym; own pros. One of them’s fought on a Top Rank card. He’s living and breathing it. When he finished boxing, he wasn’t interested in it at all, and now… [Booth shows BoxingScene Burnett’s Instagram account].
“Again, intelligent. One thing, if you’re training with Ryan Burnett, don’t expect an easy ride. Of all the fighters I’ve trained, no one trains harder than him. No one would go to that point more than him. The most beautiful thing we had with Ryan was the journey as well, and his appreciation of it. It’s as satisfying as anything.
“He was clever. He was ferocious. He was phenomenally quick, ferociously strong, and clever, and he can articulate himself as well. I’ve listened to his interviews and he’s definitely growing into that role of a teacher.
“They all had their IQ. Maybe that’s why we had our success together, because it worked like that. I’ve never had a tuck-up fighter – who hides behind the ear muffs, blocks, because that’s not what interests me.
“I genuinely hadn’t thought about it in that sense [that I’ve inspired others to become trainers]. It’s just – I was so close with Andy and I was so close with Ryan, and I was so close to Groves up until we stopped working together. We were very close. It’s nice to see. It’s nice to see fighters that I had an influence on in a significant part of their lives and their careers now being that same person for other people. It’s nice to see.”
If for an hour BoxingScene was given Booth’s full attention – and it is perhaps his full attention or none at all – it was partly because Adeleye, half his age and to an afro-house playlist that defined a space in Booth’s gym as his own, was working with a team Booth not only gives his trust to but willingly explains why.
He revealed that his 56 years have contributed to him increasingly leaving Adeleye’s pad-work to one of his assistants; it is tempting to conclude that his decades in boxing, the ruthlessness he encountered at the very top and the lows – as much as the highs – and the “cycles” he has described have taught him to be more comfortable than ever about not being fully in control. It is also tempting to conclude that when he describes the “enjoyment” he is getting from working with Adeleye, it is partly because away from the often-suffocating heights he reached with Haye he again has oxygen to breathe.
“I enjoy working with David, because there is so much to develop and there’s not a foregone conclusion, and the same with Josh because of the absolute weapons that there are in the 154 and the 160 division,” he said.
“It’s not a foregone conclusion that their wins are there for them. They’ve got to do something for it, and I guess that’s what interests me. Without that, when you walk to the ring on fight night and you know, ‘Okay, I’ve done all I can; I’ve got to let go. It’s on them; I’ll do my job in the corner.’
“I can see that we can win it and have that feeling at the end, and I can see that we can lose it and have that feeling, because I’m personally invested in the fighters that I work with.”
The rodeo hasn’t stopped.
