Interview: Ricky Burns, world champion boxer

[The_budweiser]

“EXCUSE me, son,” says Helen Sloan, an elderly lady in a lilac anorak. “I’m looking for a light jacket.” The sales assistant, an unprepossessing young man of average height, nods slightly, at which a star tattooed on the back of his neck becomes momentarily visible above the collar of his staff uniform.

 

He leads the customer to a rail of clothes towards the back of the sports shop. “What about something like this?” he suggests.

 

Mrs Sloan looks at the jacket. She looks at the sales assistant. “I know your face,” she says.

 

The young man hesitates. He finds these moments awkward. Can’t get used to them. “I’m a boxer,” he admits.

 

“Aye,” says Mrs Sloan, shocked and delighted. She knows him now.

 

“My next fight’s three weeks tonight,” he says.

 

“You’re doing well, son,” says Mrs Sloan. “I always look to see how you’re getting on.”

 

“Aye,” says the young man, blushing slightly as he takes the jacket to the till. “Hopefully I’ll keep winning.”

 

Ricky Burns, the WBO lightweight champion of the world, still has a weekend job working in DW Sports in Coatbridge. Earning a six-figure sum for each fight, he doesn’t need the extra money or, indeed, the staff discount. Margaret, the DW Sports manager, believes Burns continues to turn up for shifts because it gets his mind off boxing for a few hours. “He’s just a humble guy,” she says.

 

Remaining humble seems to be part of his motivation. It’s hard to get swept away by your own hype when you spend Saturdays fitting middle-aged men with golf shoes. “I think that staying grounded is a good bit of it,” Burns says. “When people come in, they can’t believe I still work in here. But I enjoy it. I’m just treated the same as everybody else in the shop. I’m not world champion until I step into that ring.”

 

Ricky Burns is 29 years old but looks younger, boyish. He seems able to turn his physical presence on and off at will. I’ve been in the gym where he trains, waiting for him to arrive, and suddenly he’s there, wrapping tape and blue cloth round his fists, having entered unnoticed five minutes before. He’s not one of these boxers whose arrival in a room changes and charges the atmosphere. He’s not lightning, he’s haar. When he takes off his top and you see that pale, sculpted body, the tattooed muscles covered in fire and barbed wire, the defiant challenge in those bright blue eyes, you know then he’s a fighter. He feels no need to shout about it. Silence, for Burns, is a mark of strength; gallusness, garrulousness, he seems to regard as weaknesses. “Talk’s cheap,” he says. “I like to do my talking with my hands.”

 

Since July, Burns has been training to defend his world title against the English boxer Kevin Mitchell. The fight will take place at the SECC in Glasgow later this month. They would have fought before, says Burns, had it not been for a certain hotel buffet. “I let myself go a wee bit too much when I was over in Mexico getting married,” he admits, “as you can expect with two weeks, all-inclusive”.

 

Watching Burns in the gym is not to witness a man obviously laid low by the temptations of all-you-can-eat. He snarls and bellows as he wallops the heavy bags, even bringing one of them crashing to the floor. It takes six men to lift it back into place. By the time they are done, Burns has moved on to circuit training, which is a fancy name for what he is actually doing – lifting a sledgehammer above his head and smashing it into a truck tyre again and again and again.

 

Fighting Scots Gym is in Mossend, to the south of Burns’s home town, Coatbridge. Set in a small park surrounded by pebble-dashed semis, it is a long, low brick building, a former bowling club, the green overgrown with long grass and wild flowers. This place is the pride and joy of Billy Nelson, Burns’s trainer. Nelson is middle-aged, a former residential social worker, gruff, paunchy and sleepy-eyed, who gives the impression of slothfulness, but in fact is alert to every move his fighter makes and dedicated to making sure the world champ stays world champ.

 

Nelson is a Govanite by birth and Spartan by inclination, intent on vanquishing every foe. He and his beloved German shepherds, Molly and Murphy, are in the gym at ten past six every morning; then he’s up past midnight watching DVDs of the men Burns is due to fight, his obsessive brain teeming with endless tactical calculations. “See him?” says Nelson, waving a meaty hand towards a poster of Roman Martinez, the previously undefeated Puerto Rican boxer Burns beat to win the super-featherweight title in Glasgow two years ago. “I watched him every day from November 2009 to 4 September 2010.”

 

In the ring, Nelson wears training pads on his hands, absorbing every punch Burns throws, and giving constant instructions. “Jab. Hook. Slip the right. Left hook. Speed, speed, power. This is his weak side. Attack that side.” They are trying to work out how Burns should fight, based on what they think Kevin Mitchell is likely to do. It is like trying to choreograph a pas de deux with only one of the dancers present. Understandably, they do not agree on every step. “You’re not throwing the punches I want you to throw,” says Nelson.

 

“You don’t understand what I’m saying” Burns counters. “I’m going to be wide open.”

 

After training, Burns sits in Nelson’s office and explains his monastic routine – sparring and training in the afternoons, running at night. “See when I’m training for a fight? I go into hibernation. My friends, my family, I hardly see anybody. You’re training, eating, sleeping. I speak to my mum on the phone, and maybe once every couple of weeks I’ll pop down and see them. But they all know I lock myself away. It’s a lonely time.”

 

His wife Amanda is used to it. They have been together for almost a decade, having met when he was an apprentice mechanic with Renault, the car dealership where she is a manager.

 

Burns grew up in Coatbridge, though he now lives in nearby Airdrie. His mother Tracey is a counsellor and his father Stephen a taxi driver. He was brought up, he says, to be polite and respectful. Is he naturally aggressive, though? Was he getting into fights at school before he became involved in boxing? “Not at all. At school I was the quietest. I was always really quiet. I liked to keep myself to myself.”

 

“It’s easy to seriously underestimate Ricky,” says his manager, Alex Morrison. “He doesn’t look like a boxer. He hasn’t got a mark on him. But he’s very, very brave. He’s fearless in a calm, calculating way. He knows how to look after himself.”

 

The same is true for Morrison, a legend of the fight game; tough and canny. Originally from Skye, he is fluent in Gaelic and Weegie, can say ‘cash on the table’ and other useful phrases in Yiddish, and admits that, though he is 73, he suffers from depression and so would rather not retire as he thinks it healthier to stay active. He speaks to Burns on the phone every other day and is full of fatherly affection for the young boxer.

 

So what is driving Burns in his manager’s opinion? “He wants to be the best. He wants to win the world title at three weights. And he wants to be financially secure for life. Another couple of fights and he’ll be a millionaire.”

 

Coatbridge is a town notable for the intense pride that many of its residents feel for their Irish ancestry. There is an annual St Patrick’s Day street party and parade, which in the past Ricky Burns has led; two years ago, during the Pope’s visit to Scotland, the boxer carried the Saltire at the head of the papal parade through Edinburgh.

 

But religion is not, says Burns, what sustains him in his boxing. Though his late grandmother, Sadie, used to take him to Mass as a child, he has fallen away from the faith. He does, however, wear Sadie’s rosary beads when he enters the ring. “I was really, really close to my gran,” he says. That’s the reason why I always wear them in the fights. But see the amount of people that take that the wrong way?

 

“I don’t really go out much. I don’t really like to drink a lot. But, honestly, see when I’ve been out, the amount of people who are drunk and ask to get their photo taken with me, and they’ll say. ‘You’d better no have thae rosary beads.’” He shakes his head, disgusted. “They are trying to be funny. But they don’t know the reason I wear them.”

 

This is a rare flash of emotion from Burns. But only a flash. There are moments when his seeming diffidence goes to such extremes as to almost seem self-parodic. Take, for example, his account of what he does following a victorious match. “A lot of boxers like to go out and celebrate after a fight. Not me. During the fight my mum watches my dog for me. Afterwards, I go back to hers. Usually, a few coaches come back for a party. But see as soon as everyone turns up? That’s when I disappear. I walk the dog and then go to the McDonald’s drive-thru.”

 

What makes this all the more remarkable is the esteem in which Burns is held by his peers. To sizeable numbers of young working-class men in the west of Scotland, particularly those in post-industrial North Lanarkshire, Burns is becoming a hero. A reluctant hero certainly, an ill-suited hero perhaps, but a hero nonetheless.

 

The atmosphere during his last fight, against Paulus Moses, when he defended his lightweight title at the Braehead Arena, was cup-finalesque: a crowd of 8,000, beer on their breath, blood on their minds, chanting Burns’s name and Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough, an old pop song that has been reinvented as a Celtic fans’ anthem. Someone unfurled an Irish tricolour with Ricky Burns and Coatbridge painted across it. Burns does not play up to this, indeed his manager is a Rangers man through and through, but it is undeniably an important aspect of his support.

 

Silky’s, a small, busy pub between a bookie’s and a tanning salon, close to the home where Burns grew up and his family still live, is a hotbed of support for the boxer. Supporters’ buses leave from outside. For those without tickets, matches are shown on the big screen, and when Burns wins the singing is so loud that his mother, too nervous to watch him fight, can tell from a few blocks away that her son is still the best in the world. Silky’s does not hide its allegiances. There are pictures of Celtic players all around the bar; Jinky Johnstone is right up beside the gantry, not far from a bottle of Buckfast. “The fight nights are electrifying,” says manager Jim Toal. “You couldn’t fit a fag paper in here. We’re a real close, close community and proud that one of our own has made a name for himself. When he won the title we put a banner across the front of the pub with World Champion on it. He has put Coatbridge on the map, and God willing he’s going to win a lot more titles.”

 

The gym where Ricky started is not far from Silky’s. The Barn Boxing Club has, for 36 years, been run by Rab Bannen, a well-kent figure around Coatbridge and on the Scottish boxing scene, known for his work in the community and his many amateur champions. He won’t give his age – “Don’t mention that. No one in here knows” – and, indeed, there’s something about him that seems timeless, geological, a craggy hunk of iron ore in a wooly bunnet.

 

Bannen describes the Barn as a Christian club. When it first opened, he dedicated it to God. Its patrons are Saint Margaret and Saint John Bosco. Above the ring: pictures of Christ and the Virgin Mary. On one wall: the Soviet flag. Next to the door: a life-size cut-out of Rocky Balboa held together with duct tape.

 

Burns first came to the Barn when he was 12 years old. Bannen remembers a wee boy approaching him in the park outside and asking, “Mister, can I join your club?”

 

Could Bannen see from the start he had potential? “Oh, aye. I called him the Golden Boy. I’ll tell you a strange thing, a true story. I had him out sprinting one summer and as we were coming back in he found a four-leafed clover. I said to him, ‘Son, you’re destined for f***ing glory. The leprechauns are looking after you.’ He was like my own son. He should never have turned his back on me. I was family.”

 

After many amateur bouts, Burns had 17 professional fights with Bannen, losing two. Following his 2007 loss to Carl Johanneson for the British super-featherweight title, he quit the Barn for the Fighting Scots. “When he left me, Burns was a made man, like the Mafia say,” Bannen insists. “I made him. Billy Nelson taught him nothing.”

 

Since joining the Fighting Scots Gym, Burns has gone on to take world titles at two different weights. “That’s no fluke,” shrugs Nelson.

 

The respective influence of the two trainers is debatable. What seems inarguable is that those values he first learned at the Barn – discipline, dedication, humility and hunger – are deep, deep in his bones. Bannen was hurt badly by the separation, and banned Burns from the gym. He recalls, though, that the boxer came to see him two days before the world title challenge to Roman Martinez, saying that he wanted to be friends again.

 

It would be pleasant to think that making peace, so close to the fight of his life, was important psychologically for Burns. Certainly, he won with a devastating performance at the Kelvin Hall. Bannen watched it on TV with his heart racing. “When they lifted Ricky’s hand,” he says, “they lifted my hand.”

 

And would he like to have him back? Bannen does not hesitate. “Oh, I would love to have him back. He’ll always be my laddie.”

 

On 22 September in Glasgow, Burns will walk out in front of 10,000 fans, all of whom will feel, for one night only, for 12 rounds or however long it takes, that he is theirs. Burns himself will hear the roar as he bows his head for Nelson to remove his grandmother’s rosary, but he won’t really take any of it in. Not the chants, not the flags, not the stink of sweat and beer. He will turn those blue eyes on Kevin Mitchell, the bell will sound, and he will go to work.

 

The daytime Ricky Burns, the humdrum, shy, shop-boy Ricky Burns, will fall away and the fighter will step forward. The champion who sells jackets will fight to keep his belt.

 

“Anything I need to do,” he promises, “I’ll do to win.”

 

• Ricky Burns vs Kevin Mitchell is at the SECC, Glasgow, on 22 September

 

http://www.scotsman.com/scotland-on-sunday/scotland/interview-ricky-burns-world-champion-boxer-1-2515636

[gavpowell]

Some interesting points from Burns, but the whole piece is horribly contrived.