Intensely alone inside the ring, boxers seek safety in numbers from an entourage – the royal court of helpers that surround them in training camps and on fight nights.
Anthony Joshua has a typically large support team of trainers, friends, fitness and nutrition experts, masseurs and fixers. Their number is diminished by two: Sina Ghami and Latif Ayodele, known as “Latz”, the confidants and cornermen killed in a car crash in Nigeria that Joshua was fortunate to escape with minor injuries. He was inches from his friends as they died when their Lexus SUV collided with a stationary truck near Lagos.
There is a notable picture from 2019 of Joshua’s sprawling support staff. Among the 23 assistants was a self-titled “marketing magician,” a former actor who had played alongside Judi Dench, and a football agent.
But there is always a core: those who do the technical work, tape hands, follow the fighter everywhere and listen to their hopes and fears on long dull evenings in training camps. There were four or five in Joshua’s inner circle.
Ghami and Ayodele were by his side for the lucrative but farcical bout with the YouTuber Jake Paul two weeks ago.
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Ayodele was a former lower league footballer who trained alongside Joshua and converted to Islam in 2012 to become Abdul Latif with encouragement from his boss. Ghami ran a London gym and was a recovery expert who had been on the team for 10 years while also working with footballers and NBA and NFL stars in the US.
Heavyweight prizefighting will feel even lonelier now to the former world champion, who was plotting a late-career showdown with Tyson Fury this year. That mega fight has been placed in doubt by the loss and trauma Joshua endured at a crash site when he was meant to be visiting family on holiday.
Entourages change over a fighter’s career, but some members are irreplaceable in the affections of the boxer they serve.
Mike Tyson’s entourage was a rolling circus of hawkers and opportunists. One, known as “Crocodile”, would perform a throat-cutting gesture at press conferences and stride through Las Vegas casinos shouting “guerilla warfare” and “hand to hand combat” over the chimes of slot machines.
When in 2002 Tyson and Lennox Lewis shoved each other at a promotional event on stage at a New York theatre, their retinues came together in a tangle of blows and headlocks, ripping several luxury outfits on either side and plunging boxing into one its periodic moral panics.
Muhammad Ali, the greatest of prizefighters, was accompanied for years by his bodyguard, an ex-cop called Pat Patterson, his physician Ferdie Pacheco and fixer, Gene Kilroy, who once said: “We had fun, mister. We lived, mister. Every day was history. Millionaires would’ve paid to do what I did. To be near him.”
Ali’s chief motivator, Drew Bundini Brown, went on to appear in Shaft and The Colour Purple. Later Ali’s circle was dominated by senior figures from the Nation of Islam, following his conversion in 1964.
Celebs are often co-opted into the retinue in fight week. Floyd Mayweather invited Justin Bieber, Lil Wayne and 50 Cent into the camp, and the late Ricky Hatton was accompanied on ring walks by fellow Mancunians, the Gallagher brothers of Oasis, and footballer Wayne Rooney.
But the two men who died with Joshua played a more humble – and important – part. They helped build the world champion Joshua became, and were with him in the quiet times of toil and solitude, when the spotlight was elsewhere.
Photograph PA/Alamy