What does the future hold for life-changing government scheme which led Fabio Wardley to the top?
It is now nearly 17 years since Fabio Wardley’s journey to the world heavyweight crown started amid inauspicious circumstances on a football pitch in Suffolk.
It was there he first met Robert Hodgins, the man who would eventually lead him to his current position as the 11th world heavyweight champion in British boxing history following the news that Oleksandr Usyk had vacated his WBO belt.
But this was not exactly love at first sight as the 13-year-old Wardley took exception to his future coach’s decision to sub him off of a game he had been enjoying.
“He was my height back then when he was 13,” Hodgins tells The Ring. “The first time I met him I was filling in on a football session and I subbed him off.
“He didn’t like that decision too much. I said to him ‘do you think you could take me, Fabio?’ He’s 13 years old and skinny as a rake but he replied ‘I don’t think I can, I know’.”
It was not the first bit of backchat that Hodgins had experienced in his position as a coach, primarily boxing, as part of the Suffolk Positive Futures programme. To this day, the scheme’s mission statement is to make the county 'a safer place by diverting young people from anti-social behaviour and gang-related activity and providing opportunities that they may not otherwise have access to, to help better their life chances.’
As far as Hodgins could see, Wardley was not a bad kid, but he engaged with the opportunity to play sport instead of getting involved in less agreeable pursuits on the streets.
“He was strong-minded and did what he wanted,” Hodgins says. “I don’t think the system gave him an outlet, he had to be doing something. With Positive Futures he did a couple of boxing sessions but really he excelled at football and he was a very good player.
“The project was for kids who were misbehaving but he jumped on them as well. He wasn’t the typical kid getting kicked out of school or anything like that but he was still a handful and wanted somewhere to channel it. He needed to do something instead of sitting around, he’s a very clever man.”
But this was not exactly a Mike Tyson and Cus D’Amato type situation. Wardley cared little for boxing in his early teens despite trying his hand at it a couple of times. It was not until he was in his 20s that he sought Hodgins for more regular work.
“He disappeared for a while,” Hodgins says. “Like a lot of them do.
“But then he walked back into my gym when he was 20 years old after he got injured playing football. We used to get 100 kids at the football sessions but then only five or six at the boxing, Fabio had been one of the football kids but when he came back he had his heart set on boxing.
“It had been a few years and when he came back in he’s 6-foot-5, strong and athletic and it was like he’d never left. You could tell straight away how much he wanted it and he wanted to do everything straight away.”
That included sparring, although he found out pretty quickly that boxing is not quite as easy as he thought it looked.
“I remember he had these big pink 16-ounce Winning gloves and he wanted to spar on the first session. He was like ‘Rob, put me in, put me in’, so I let him spar. I would like to say it was brilliant and he had the best spar in the world but it wasn’t the case.
“He sparred a top amateur and I think he took quite a lot of body punishment but he loved it, he got out of the ring with a smile on his face and that made him train even harder after that. He caught that bug.”
His meteoric rise from those early days, through four explosive white-collar wins, to the top of the heavyweight rankings has been well-documented but it was nothing like an easy road. He is often described as something of an overnight success but it is now a decade since Wardley, resplendent in pink gloves, walked through the door at Hodgins’ gym.
Given his background as an amateur coach, the door was open for the heavyweight to get carded and head down that well-trodden route until a professional manager made contact. “I remember I sat him down and said that’s what we should do,” Hodgins remembers.
“I said I thought he should go amateur because I was an amateur coach and I thought he would be very successful, we had that belief in him. But he said ‘no, I’ve got this opportunity and it may never come again. I’m going to do it and I’d like us to do it as a team’.”
But that was really where the problems started. “No one would spar us,” Hodgins says. “I reached out to all my contacts about him but nobody would have us in their gym apart from Sam Sexton.
“We just couldn’t progress because people thought Fab was a novelty act. I was an amateur coach who had trained national finalists and people were asking me what I was doing with this kid from white collar. The funny thing is, most of them now tell me they always knew he’d do well.”
But there was still the small matter of getting a professional licence. These were still the early days of white-collar boxing and men with zero amateur experience were not exactly welcomed with open arms by the British Boxing Board of Control. In a bid to sweeten the deal, it was declared that Wardley had won 24 white collar fights by knockout, instead of the reality of his four quick wins.
In the end, it was actually the former England cricketer Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff who helped Wardley’s attempt over the line. Only a few years earlier, Flintoff had a professional fight under the guidance of Barry and Shane McGuigan with zero prior boxing experience for a television programme. He won his solitary bout in November 2012 on points.
“We could say, if you’re willing to licence Flintoff, we’ve got this kid here who has had 24 knockouts already,” Hodgins says. “They made us have an assessment at the Peacock Gym in London but they quickly saw he was up to scratch.”
It was not plain sailing from there however, and the early stages of his career were wrecked by a series of cancellations. On a couple of occasions, a coach load of friends and family made the trip from Ipswich to York Hall, Bethnal Green only to be told Wardley’s opponent had pulled out hours before the first bell.
“I actually remember pulling Fab to the side and saying that we tried our best but this is not our time,” Hodgins recalls. “I thought it might be time to knock it on the head.
“But Fabio said, ‘let’s try one more time, just one more shot’, and I suppose the rest is history.”
Undefeated Wardley is now 21 fights in, with the only blot on his copybook the pulsating draw with Frazer Clarke on Easter Sunday last year. He then brutally knocked Clarke out in just 158 seconds of their rematch six months later.
At the time of writing, Wardley is The Ring’s No. 2-ranked heavyweight but he will be No.1 in time for Christmas when the retired Tyson Fury drops out due to inactivity in December.
Put simply, Wardley has fought his way to the very pinnacle of the sport after having just 25 fights in his entire life, four white collar and now 21 as a pro. It would never have been possible without the Suffolk Future Positive Futures programme but, given youth services funding has been slashed by close to 75 per cent since Wardley first met Hodgins, the need for these schemes of this nature could not be more stark.
It is estimated that government austerity measures since 2010 have led to the closure of 600 youth centres, and a loss of jobs for 1,500 qualified youth workers. The social consequences of these cuts are hard to measure but any would-be Wardley's will have a higher barrier for entry.
“I’m not involved in Positive Futures as much any more,” says Hodgins. “Fab was lucky to have the opportunity to come in and try those free classes back them, without them, who knows where we all might be.
“Fabio is a clear example of what these youth schemes can do for people's lives and we need them. Could we find another Fabio without that funding? No I don’t think so. It just widens the horizon for a kid that may not want to take up boxing, or try sport, to come in and find out there is a natural talent for it.
“It’s upsetting that schemes don’t get funding like that nowadays because if it wasn’t for Positive Futures and their funding, we may never have found Fab.”
I laughed but very likely