It must be strange for a retired boxer to have thrown so many punches in a career yet only be remembered for one. One swing of a fist. One thwack and crack. One example of cause and effect. As well as all the ones thrown on fight night, think too of all the punches they must have thrown in the gym, in sparring, and into thin air when standing in front of a mirror, assessing their form. Think of all the times they will have practised the shot for which they will be remembered and during this process hoped that one day they would get the chance to land it, just once, and see their opponent crumble before them.
For some, an entire career will pass without experiencing this moment and that one shot. Whereas for others, like former British light middleweight Wayne Alexander, it not only comes, this moment, but it ends up defining them, their career, and indeed what it means to finish a fight with just one punch.
His was a left hook, by the way. It was a left hook thrown while under duress in Bethnal Green on this very day (September 10) 20 years ago. It was thrown on a Friday night and sent Merdud Takalobighashi, or “Takaloo”, into another realm, unable to tell you the year, let alone the day.
Now, two decades on, one of the two Londoners has successfully managed to erase it from their memory, at least on some level, while the other, the one forever asked about it, remembers it in ways his opponent cannot.
“Time just f**king flies,” says Wayne Alexander, now 51. “Sadè, my first daughter, was two at the time. She’s a mum now and her daughter is four. I’m a grandad. It’s scary, isn’t it?
“I remember coming back home with the (WBU light middleweight) belt and she (Sadè) was scared of it. We put it towards her and said, ‘Look at what Dad won,’ and she was scared of it and kept pushing it away. She didn’t know what it was.”
Later Sadè would, like everyone else, become familiar with what her father had achieved at York Hall that night. She would see it perhaps in passing when the TV was on, or she would seek it out on YouTube, or she would simply be forced to watch it by her father; his kind of photo album. Either way, it is a one-punch knockout hard to ignore, particularly if you are British, and harder, once seeing it, to forget.
For proof of its staying power, in his list of the “20 most unforgettable one-punch knockouts”, Matt Christie made sure this particular knockout had its place. Not only that, it came in at number nine, with the majority of knockouts coming after it produced in world title fights and watched therefore by a far greater audience.
That means a lot to Alexander, the fact it – and therefore he – is remembered. It means almost as much as the fight itself, back when beating Takaloo, his old sparring partner, meant pretty much everything.
“We trained together with Jimmy (Tibbs) for a good two or three years,” Alexander recalls, “and whenever we sparred it was like a world title was on the line. He was always up for it and so was I. I was a bit more experienced than him, I turned pro before him, and he looked up to me, I think. When he came into the gym, he wanted to impress everybody, didn’t he?
“One day I came into the gym and Jimmy goes, ‘Do you want to spar Takaloo?’ I didn’t feel like sparring but Jimmy said Takaloo needed sparring, so I did it. I put the gloves on, got in the ring, and Takaloo jumps on me and drops me: bang! He put me down with a right hand. I can hear Jimmy going, ‘Get up! Get up!’ I can laugh now but at the time I wasn’t laughing. I was more embarrassed than anything. He put me down on my arse in our gym. Of all the people… I remember Takaloo walking around the gym after that like he’d just won the f**king world title. I was gutted, I ain’t going to lie.”
As is often the case in gyms, there were to be more chapters to this story. By virtue of them sharing the same space, Alexander and Takaloo would inevitably share the ring again and Alexander, having been embarrassed the first time around, wasn’t about to let the same thing happen twice.
“Takaloo forgets that a week later we sparred and had another good tear-up and I hurt him,” he says. “I wobbled him. Jimmy goes, ‘Stop sparring! Stop sparring!’ He gave Takaloo about 10 seconds to recover because he was hurt. We then continue and I wobble him again. This time Jimmy goes, ‘That’s it! That’s it! No more sparring.’
“Takaloo failed to remember that. He lost his next fight, against Jawaid Khaliq (in 1998), and I always remember him saying afterwards that Jimmy Tibbs never spent enough time with him, and that he preferred me to him, and that he had knocked me out in the gym. That’s how it all started.”
By the time he met Takaloo at York Hall, Alexander had, many felt, gone as far as he would go in the sport. He had already challenged Harry Simon for the WBO light middleweight belt, and he had also, two years prior to fighting Takaloo, knocked out Paolo Pizzamiglio to win the European title. Since then, he had been upset by Delroy Mellis in an eight-rounder and dropped by Howard Clarke, a journeyman, in the first round of a fight Alexander ultimately won in two. There were signs, then, that he was on the slide; at best, in need of motivation, help.
“My peak years were between 2000 and 2004,” he says. “But around 2003 and 2004 I wasn’t training right or living the life. I was slacking in my training and preparation. So I decided I needed a change. I needed to start afresh; get a new trainer. It was nothing to do with Jimmy (Tibbs). He was the best trainer I had, along with John Breen. He got me the British and European title. When I trained with Jimmy Tibbs, I was in awe of him. I couldn’t believe I was being trained by Jimmy Tibbs. But after nine years I knew I was getting lazy. I needed something to give me the motivation again.
“I went to Frank Warren, my promoter, and said I wanted to train somewhere else and try somebody new. Frank said to me, ‘How about John Breen?’ I said, ‘What, in Ireland?’ He said, ‘Yeah. How do you feel about going to Ireland?’ I said I’d give it a go but I was expecting him to suggest to me someone in England.
“I always remember flying to Belfast and looking out the window and saying to myself, ‘Wayne, you’re not going to f**king stay here for longer than a few days, mate.’ I was in f**king Northern Ireland, all The Troubles, they hate the English, and nobody looked like me over there. I didn’t think I’d last a week.
“But I’m not going to lie to you, I went there and within five days I felt at home. I was treated like a king. I had a guy called ‘Cooky’ who was a marathon runner and he took me running every morning at six o’clock. We’d do four miles, three days on, one day off, and then we’d do seven miles up County Armagh, bandit country, and John had one of these old-school sixties’ gyms with the electric heater on. It was f**king boiling in there but I soon got used to it. I had good sparring with Jim Rock, Jim Webb, Eamonn Magee, Paul McCloskey, Neil Sinclair. Ten weeks I spent there and the day before I flew over for the weigh-in I felt like I could have beaten anybody. I could have beaten Oscar De La Hoya and Fernando Vargas. That’s how good I felt.”
In other words, Alexander arrived in Belfast with no small amount of uncertainty and left with the same amount of confidence. Now all he had to do was use the ill will he had towards Takaloo to motivate rather than distract him and also avoid being clipped by something big en route to plotting something big of his own; the trap that catches so many heavy punchers.
“I just remember thinking I cannot lose this fight after everything he has said,” Alexander recalls. “I’d been defeated by Delroy Mellis, a bad defeat, and came back and got put down by Howard Clarke and won. Takaloo had lost his last fight against Eugenio Monteiro in a 10-rounder, but Takaloo was still favourite. I was just like, ‘Forget that, Wayne. You cannot lose this fight.’ I would rather die than lose.”
Often for a boxer the two things feel the same: dying, losing. They feel the same when in the process of happening and for some boxers the thought of losing a competitive fight is akin to death. It certainly ends a part of them, that’s for sure, a feeling then only exacerbated when their own professional death breathes life into the career of a rival.
“The first round was an even round,” Alexander says. “Then in the second I was pushing him back, pushing him back, hit him with a left hook, and he threw a shot under my floating rib. I’m not going to lie, it took all the wind out of me. No word of a lie, if it was sparring, or if I was fighting anybody else, I would have gone down. That’s how much the shot hurt me. But Takaloo was just eager to finish me off; all he was thinking about was knocking me out.”
Though now bent in half, when Alexander dared look up he could see it in his rival’s eyes: the bloodlust, the certainty, the confidence. He imagined, too, that his own were every bit as revealing and that seeing in them the panic and pain would be the fuel for whatever Takaloo had planned for him next.
But then… “I always remember the shot I caught him with because it was a shot Jimmy Tibbs taught me,” says Alexander. “I watched Nigel Benn do it for years, the roll and the left hook. I worked on that shot for years and years with Jimmy and obviously when I went to John Breen I worked on it with him as well.
“I see Takaloo coming in to finish me off, I rolled and I landed it. People over the years said it was a lucky shot, but it wasn’t a lucky shot. I knew what I was doing. I planned it and executed it. I knew what he was doing and I knew what I wanted to do. He walked straight on to it. Everything then went into slow motion for a second or two when it landed. I knew that’s it; I got him. I had never had that same feeling before or after. It was like it was meant to be. It was my finest hour.”
Then it ended, time slowed down, and Wayne Alexander’s finest hour ended up lasting 20 years – perhaps even longer, too.
“When I put him down, and the referee waved it off, I couldn’t find my breath,” he says. “I was still winded and hurt by that body shot. I couldn’t breathe properly. One more tap on that side and I would have gone down. I was out on my feet.”
When asked if he still watches the knockout, he says, unequivocally, “Of course I do,” and laughs. He says he goes through spells where he might watch it three or four times a week and then there are other times when he realises it has been months since he has watched it. As for Takaloo, he has seen him “about five times” since knocking him out at York Hall, and each time it has been pleasant, cordial. “He lives in Margate,” he says, “so that’s only like eight or nine miles away (from where Alexander lives in Croydon). But he was never a big boxing fan, not like me anyway, so he kind of disappeared from the scene once he got out of the game.”
Some can do that, you see. They can escape. They can fade away, move on, forget. Yet Wayne Alexander, someone who bleeds boxing, never wanted that for himself, so stuck around. Now, even if his right hand started to wave, his left, the one of great interest to anyone aware of the damage it has caused, simply wouldn’t allow it.
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