BACK FROM THE BRINK
“I DON’T think I’ll ever be at peace with it,” Mick Hennessy says quietly in the deserted Sevenoaks Boxing Club in Kent. The walls and floor around the ring are covered in laminated photographs of boxing’s evocative past. We are surrounded by hundreds of familiar faces from Jack Dempsey and Muhammad Ali to Sugar Ray Leonard and Mike Tyson. It is the perfect setting for Hennessy’s love of boxing to pour out of him. There is hope, too, as he looks ahead with a new stable of boxers and a Channel 5 deal which offers fresh impetus.
But now, midway through the five hours we spend in the gym on a Saturday afternoon, I can feel his hurt. I can see it etched across his face as he thinks of the betrayals that have scarred his obsession with boxing. Carl Froch and Tyson Fury belong in the gallery of famous fighters. But they stand apart, too, for they wounded Hennessy by leaving him as world champions after he spent years helping them build their careers to that peak.
“Those relationships were serious to me,” Hennessy says as he reflects on how much Froch and Fury meant to him. “We were so close. You actually spend more time with them than your own family. You see them at their lowest and their highest and I can’t detach myself even when it’s over.”
Hennessy is 55 and he has been involved in boxing too long to be either naïve about its workings or sentimental in his feelings. Instead, he speaks with raw emotion: “I’ve got so much respect for fighters. I know what it takes to step through those ropes and so I genuinely came into this game to change it and make it better for fighters.
“I’m the same as most people. I thought the promoters were always the bad guys and the fighters were being abused. I learnt pretty quickly that’s not the case. Sometimes promoters are the ones that need protecting because it don’t matter whether a young fighter’s got an ABA Senior title or an Olympic medal. They still need building. They need the backing and the exposure on the right platform. For promoters,
