Ernie Lopez
Brian AndersonThroughout this entire conversation, the man himself is almost entirely silent. He still has his humour, but no speed to deliver it. Lance has been collecting videotape of his bouts and has recently been showing it to him. What does he think? “I should have ducked more,” he replies.
Charlie Magri, Herol Graham, Glyn RhodesYou wonder, too, where Anderson would be had that encounter with Sibson gone the other way, nearly 20 years ago. “If I had beaten him, would I be sitting here doing this?” he says. “Probably not. I’d have moved on in boxing. That defeat enabled me to take stock of where I was in my life. Some boxers get beat and don’t stop to reflect. But for me, it could have been a wrong decision. Maybe if I’d carried on with the boxing, I might be a millionaire. But who cares?”
And this is the point: if it means that much, what do you do when it is over? Retirement is a struggle in any walk of life, but for generations boxers have been faced with the challenge and have been beaten by it. “You’re in a dreamworld when you’re boxing,” Magri said. “Every day you have your plan: you get up, you train, you eat, you run. Then you stop and what do you do? You used to have a team around you, but one day you wake up in the morning and you are on your own. It’s a shock. I did not know what to do.”