“FEAR is like fire,” the great boxing guru Cus D’Amato used to say, “It can cook for you. It can heat your house. Or it can burn you down.”
The dictionary puts it this way, “Fear - an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm,” – coincidentally listing the three elements that make boxing the most viscerally exciting of all sports. Anyone aspiring to step into the ring must possess this emotion, control it and use it.
Fear has many levels, ranging from the tension, or ‘nerves’ that any sportsman may experience, pre-match, to the black depression that can eat away at a boxer’s confidence for days before a big fight, the sort of tension that never shows in sparring, but manifests itself in a tense, unambitious performance on the night, an erosion of confidence, or at worst, complete meltdown.
Seriously destructive champions such as Mike Tyson and Joe Louis benefitted greatly from the fear their reputation generated. The former reaped the scalps of Frank Bruno and Bruce Seldon in successive fights; Bruno stiff with apprehension, enduring a methodical beating and Seldon collapsing in terror from a phantom punch.
Tyson shares a victim with Lennox Lewis in Andrew Golota. The mercurial Pole entered the ring against Lewis in the fall of 1997 having previously destroyed the career of Riddick Bowe in two brutal fights which had both ended with his disqualification for attempting to re-arrange Bowe’s reproductive organs. Pre-fight predictions were about evenly balanced.
His challenge [] lasted less than one round. Turning up at the arena an unexplained 45 minutes late
