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David Haye: ‘My mum says I’m not allowed to have a tattoo’
David Haye has been upsetting more people than Nick Griffin of late. There was an angry letter in The Guardian last week: “David Haye has once again seen fit to insult an opponent, calling Nikolai Valuev ‘smelly’. His petty sniping does little to win him much respect among his fellow boxers’.” And another in The Observer: “The British boxer’s behaviour ahead of next month’s world title fight is crass, disrespectful and asking for a bruising comeuppance.”
The German fight promoter, Kalle Sauerland, issued this stinging rebuke: “Haye’s behaviour is very strange and not normal at all. I think one German phrase sums it up well: 1,000 volts but no light.” And there was this bone-shaking uppercut from Valuev: “I cannot take him seriously. When I heard what he has been doing I thought, ‘Oh my God, another idiot in our world’.”
But what if David Haye was working to a plan?
We meet on a Friday afternoon in London at a plush hotel and from the moment we sit down he is making an absolute fool of me.
“I’ve read that your father, Darren, is a taxi driver,” I announce. Not true. His father, Deron, is a panel beater.
“I’ve read that you watched the Nigel Benn/Gerald McClellan fight from a ringside seat at the London Arena?”
Not true. He was a 15-year-old kid from Bermondsey in 1995. Where would he have got a ticket?
“I’ve read that you established a training base in Northern Cyprus and wore the flag of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus on your shorts because the wife of your manager, Adam Booth, is from there,” I suggest.
Not true. Adam Booth is his coach. Booth’s father is a Turkish Cypriot.
“And you can’t possibly have said this about Valuev. ‘He is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. I have watched Lord of the Rings and films with strange-looking people but for a human being to look like him — it’s pretty shocking’.”
But he nails me again. Every word is true. “It was after our face-to-face — or face-to-waist in our case,” he laughs, “and I looked at him and thought, ‘Damn! I’ve never seen anything like him before in my life!’ It’s not so much his size — because you get big guys — but I’ve never seen a head that big.”
“So that wasn’t just hype?” I inquire.
“No, he really did strike me as one of the baddies from Lord of the Rings.”
“But you have hyped it since,” I suggest.
“Oh yeah, I love the whole hype factor,” he smiles. “I like watching it after the fight because I don’t really get to enjoy it while I’m in it ... it’s good fun. But the hype is forgotten as soon as the first bell goes. I’ve said some controversial things; I’ve done some controversial things ... so what? Once the fight happens, that’s what people remember.”
“So it’s just business?”
“It’s business, it gets people excited. Whenever I look to a fight, I look forward to it more when there has been some kind of animosity between the guys and I’m sure other people think like that as well. There’s nothing worse than when you see a lovefest — two guys hugging and kissing. You don’t want to see best friends fight each other.”
ONE of the 479,000 options for David Haye on Google is a short video clip: “See the heavyweight strip for Cosmo’s naked shoot.” It opens with a shot of the Englishman’s impeccably braided head, diamond-studded ears and handsome face, smiling into a camera: “My name is David Haye, aka the Hayemaker,” he announces, “and I’m doing a shoot for Cosmopolitan magazine, getting out the old body for all you lovely ladies.” WARNING! If you’re not a lovely lady, or your name is Nikolai Valuev, you may feel slightly queasy with what happens next; the woman powdering his nose and rubbing oil on his chest; Haye flexing his pecks and flaunting his Adonis curves.
One thing strikes you when you review the clip, the thing that resonates most when we meet a few days later. The absence of malice. He is not Mike Tyson. There is no sense at all that this is one of the most lethal boxers on the planet.
“You don’t have any tattoos,” I observe.
“No,” he replies.
“That makes you kind of unusual.”
“I know. My mum says I’m not allowed to have a tattoo.”
“Your mum?”
“Yeah.”
“Not allowed?”
“Not allowed. She always said, ‘No tattoos’, so no tattoos.”
“How old were you?”
“She said it when I was 10 ... 12 ... ‘You’re not getting a tattoo’.”
“So you didn’t.”
“No.”
“I’m sure there were other things she told you not to do.”
“Yes,” he smiles, “but she would never forgive me if I got a tattoo.”
The second of three kids born to Deron and Jane, he grew up in the south London borough of Bermondsey and set his sights on a career in boxing when Tyson became heavyweight champion of the world.
“I was six or seven at the time,” he recalls, “and I remember everyone saying, ‘Have you seen this Tyson? He’s the most dangerous man on the planet’. I wanted people to speak about me like that. It was all I wanted to do.
“I’d tell my teachers when they told me to listen or gave me homework that it wasn’t relevant to what I was going to do in life. I didn’t want anything to fall back on. I thought, ‘If you put all your eggs in one basket then you ain’t going to fail’. It wasn’t the smartest plan in the world but it seems to have worked.”
The toughest kid in the playground, Haye first laced a glove as a 10-year-old at the Fitzroy Lodge Amateur Boxing Club in Lambeth. Within six years he was boxing for England. “I remember the first time,” he says. “It was Young England against Young Russia. I was a light-heavyweight at the time, the Russians were beating us 4-1 and my fight was last. The guys kept coming back to the changing room, busted-up and bloodied and I thought, ‘Oh, here we go’. But I knocked the guy out in the first round.” Tyson would have approved.
The knockout was a speciality. So was the sleepout. Mick Carney, a gifted trainer and stalwart of the Lambeth gym, described Haye as the most brilliant boxer he had seen ... and the laziest. “He was a pain in the arse to train,” he told The Times last year. “If I had a gym full of Hayes, I’d have committed suicide long ago.”
Haye ships the blow and smiles: “I had a lazy type of style,” he demurs. The way I used to see it was ... you could learn to box like everybody else, but everybody else practises against someone who does the same thing. So if you do something completely different, they’re not really prepared for that, because they haven’t prepared for people like that, so I’d have an advantage straight away.
“But when you’re a young kid coming through they [trainers] don’t really want to see that. I don’t think I’m a lazy person at heart. It’s only as I’ve got older and started fighting better opposition that I’ve actually really had to focus 100%. I’ve gone into fights less that 50% prepared and looked amazing. It has always taken someone to beat me [for me] to pull my finger out.”
His first “Buster Douglas” was a light-punching Coventry amateur called Jim Twite. The year was 1999 and after wiping the floor with the reigning national champion, Courtney Fry, Haye was drawn against Twite at the York Hall, Bethnal Green. “Before the fights I used to tell my mates, ‘Bet on this round’ and sometimes I’d hold the guys up until the round and knock them out so my pals could earn some money.
“This guy [Twite] wasn’t that good so I thought, ‘I’ll do him in two rounds’. So I go out and bounce around and he slings a really big shot and hits me on the chin. I remember thinking, ‘What are you trying to do? Wait until the next round because you’re going to get it!’
“So I’m messing around, trying to kill the clock until the next round when I can actually throw some punches and the next thing I know, I’m looking up at the referee and he’s going, ‘Six ... seven’. I’m thinking, ‘Surely you should start from one!’ I get to me feet at eight and a half and say, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay’ but he stops the fight and says, ‘It’s over’.
“I couldn’t for the life of me understand what had happened. I had never in my life been knocked down in the ring or in sparring since the age of 10. It was a big wake-up call.”
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