MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
IT is a Friday evening and Steve Maylett is leaning on his car in the Ancoats sun, one eye constantly peering through the front door of his gym where his group of fighters are skipping. The lads from the locksmith’s unit next door are unloading their vans and the latest batch of apartment blocks that have started to spring up in the area stand half-built and empty, the workmen having gone for the weekend.
“I’ll do it again with one of those lads,” said Maylett, whose job never seems to stop. “I’ll bring one of them through. It’s always hard work to get to British title level but if they do get there and win that, they’ll just go on.”
Maylett isn’t watching his stable of professional fighters. He is talking about his 11 and 12-year-old amateurs. Taking an unknown, unfancied kid from his first skills bout to the top of the world might sound like a fantasy but it isn’t a daunting prospect for Maylett. He knows exactly what it will take. As he said, he has done similar before.
There is a small dog-eared photograph on the wall in the gym. It shows a teenage Maylett and an impossibly young-looking Terry Flanagan joking around.
