SAINT GEORGE’S DAY

HE appeared heavier in the face but lighter in both the head and shoulders than before. His skin, too, usually paler than alabaster, at last welcomed colour and that colour was red; not anger but passion, warmth, and pride. As for his breathing, that had become noticeably slow and erratic, suggestive of some great race having been run or some great battle having been won, neither supposition wide of the mark.

All in all, with a Corona beer, his third that afternoon, cradled by his jabbing hand, and a fork in his power hand, it’s fair to say George Groves was both bigger and happier than he had ever been in his life. He remained an athlete, and would at some point need to again act like one, but that day, six weeks after his world stopped, he was an athlete without a single athletic thought on his mind or a single athletic twitch in his body. That day, he was a tourist. A fan. A winner.

That day, a balmy Saturday in July 2011, Groves could be found sitting outside a fish bar in Hamburg, Germany, just hours before he would watch someone else attempt to fulfil their life’s ambition in a boxing ring. His friend, David Haye, would ultimately lose his world heavyweight title fight against Wladimir Klitschko that weekend, but, in all honesty, this hardly mattered. All that mattered was that Groves was watching rather than fighting and that his own battles were over, at least for now.

Six weeks earlier Groves himself had endured all the common stresses, anxieties and fears associated with a big fight. His