SAME BOOK, NEW CHAPTER
THERE is no expression on the face of Glasgow’s Kash Farooq (16-1, 6KOs) as he scans almost every table in the bar where we’ve arranged to meet. Every table but mine. It’s blank; there is no smile splitting his young cheeks from ear-to-ear; there are no tears rolling over the little bumps on his fight-damaged skin. It’s hard to tell just where he is or how he feels, a month after boxing granted an unwelcome, permanent clemency. He is lost.
Suddenly, flanked by his trainer Craig Dickson, our eyes eventually meet, and he wanders over, half-happy to have located me, half-anxious at what’s sitting opposite: the truth. And despite trying, he can’t outpunch it or masterfully slip his way to a different conclusion. Retirement – it seems – is already dragging on…
Farooq, aged just 26, announced that very retirement officially on January 8, but the reality is that he’s been dealing with the issue itself for a few months now. He was set to make his US debut on Devin Haney’s bill in Las Vegas in early December and was already contracted to face Edinburgh’s Lee McGregor in an enormous all-Scottish rematch this spring. Yet since October last year, his career as a professional boxer has been largely reliant on the contents of the thick, brown envelopes passed between doctors and specialists, from second to third opinions.
“The first scan came back, and it said we needed to see a – what was it again? A physio-…” Farooq asks, screwing his face up, with Dickson stepping in to assist: “It was the radiologist – he reviews the scans and reviews his history. He had a change [in a brain scan] a couple of years before and we got it checked out.
