Ben Whittaker and the curse of boxing's greatest showmen
When Marco Antonio Barrera slammed the head of “Prince” Naseem Hamed against the ring post in the final round of a featherweight title fight in April 2001, it made a sound. There was of course the sound of the impact — head on hard leather — but no, it wasn’t that. Nor was it the sound of the crowd who cheered, some in surprise, others in celebration. Instead, what you heard in that moment were voices. Lots of them. You heard the voice of the referee, Joe Cortez, admonishing Barrera for the foul — “One point,” he told three judges — and you heard Barrera, in Hamed’s ear, making sure Hamed understood the point he was trying to make. You also had the voices of those not present. The disrespected ones. Those fighters who were once silenced by Hamed and on whose behalf Barrera now demanded an apology.
“This one’s for Steve Robinson,” Barrera might have said with Hamed pressed against the ring post, “for that time you offered him your chin for a free shot in Cardiff.” Or: “This one’s for Jose Badillo, for the time you shuffled your feet, wiggled your hips, and screamed in his face.” Or: “This one’s for Wayne McCullough, for the time you made him miss and then mocked his inaccuracy by looking out the ring.”
Hamed kissing the ring post was for all of them, it seemed. It was for all the times he flipped over the top rope, performed a somersault after knocking down an opponent, or simply stood over one, arms raised, until a referee dragged him to a neutral corner. It was a taste of what they all had to taste, in other words. A taste of humiliation. A taste of inadequacy. A taste of his own medicine.
With plenty of it to go round, it’s no wonder Barrera’s second-hand retribution in Las Vegas was accompanied by so much noise and so many voices. You had not only the noise of the crowd — the cheering, the laughing — but you also had the voices of Hamed’s victims and the voices of the know-it-alls who, like the victims, had been waiting for the day. “About time somebody put him in his place,” said the chorus that night in April. “Nobody likes a showoff.”
But the thing is: We do, don’t we? We do like a showoff. We liked them when Muhammad Ali, the world’s greatest, was shuffling his feet in punching range of Cleveland Williams, and we liked them when Ray Leonard was winding up his right hand before nailing Thomas Hearns with the old bolo. We also liked them when Roy Jones Jr. mimicked a fighting cock against Richard Hall, and when in a crouch he spread his arms wide before flooring James Toney, and when he hid his hands behind his back before flooring Glen Kelly. In those instances, there was nothing more exhilarating than seeing a boxer make a sport fraught with danger all the more dangerous for both their own entertainment and ours. In those instances, showing off was more than just a display of arrogance. It was a demonstration of dominance and of mastery. We looked on in admiration because if fighting was something beyond our comprehension, tempting fate while fighting was the work of a mad man, a daredevil, a genius.
Even Hamed we loved back when he was winning. During that time, between 1992 and 2001, he was a breath of fresh air for the sport and did for the featherweight division what no featherweight had ever been able to do before. In a word, he made it sexy. He brought big money to the 126-pound division and made people care. That’s why he got away with it. That’s why every opponent he humiliated in the ring, either by knocking them out or taunting them, was ultimately thankful to have been the butt of his joke for one night.
“His showboating revolutionized not only how people fight, but also how they get in the ring and act before a fight,” says Johnny Nelson, a former longtime WBO cruiserweight champion and gymmate of Hamed’s in Sheffield, England. “The music, the dancing, the theater … he knew it made a massive difference and the sport realized that, too.
“If you get two people with the same skills and qualifications, it’s the one with character who will stand out and will be the one we remember. It’s also the one with character who will nine times out of 10 come out on top. We can all fight, but I’ve got to somehow make you think I’m better than you, and have more self-belief than you, and showboating is a way of doing that. Showboating is a way of getting into the head of an opponent and intimidating them. It is a way of having them think less of themselves and more of you. I rate showboating. If you can evoke emotion, and make them [the fans] either love you or loathe you, you’ve done the job. Either way, they will want to watch you. That’s why your Alis and ‘Sugar’ Ray Leonards have endured. Ali was hated initially. Absolutely hated. But so are many who play that role. If you’re going to play that role, you must expect that reaction and you must accept the responsibility.”
Of course, never have the rewards for showing off been greater than they are today, in the age of the showoff. Forget boxing, anybody with an active social media account these days is to some degree showing off, and even more so if they have ever turned a phone toward their own face and taken a picture with the intention of sharing the picture with strangers. These days people visit the Louvre not for cultural sustenance but to instead queue up for the Mona Lisa and then, when next in line, ask someone to take a picture of them standing directly in front of it. These days most boxers, by comparison, are wallflowers, amateurs. To stand out among a sea of attention-seekers, they must do something unique.
“We’re very reserved, us Brits, and we don’t like a showoff, but it gets the job done, commercially,” says Nelson. “Here in the UK, we might not like a showboater, but you’re going to watch them. In America, it’s a bit different. They like a showboater — as long as they are winning.
“The bottom line is that it is a gamble, and most people, whether you like it or not, will respect someone who gambles in that scenario. Sometimes you might showboat and there will be a bullet in the chamber. Or you might instead get away with it. But the not knowing is exciting. The risk of it all is exciting.”
Some call it exciting, yes. However, to others, it means something else.
“With the commentary, you always say I’m disrespectful,” said light heavyweight Ben Whittaker to the camera during a now-infamous interview ahead of a fight in 2024. He was, at the time, talking to three pundits from Sky Sports, one of whom, commentator Andy Clarke, had clearly upset Whittaker with some recent on-air criticism. “You keep saying I’m disrespectful,” he reminded Clarke, to which Clarke replied: “When you stand in front of your opponent and tap them on the top of the head with the inside of your glove…”
“That’s skill,” said Whittaker, interrupting.
“That’s disrespectful.”
“That’s skill.”
“It is disrespectful, though.”
“You’re painting a picture of me being disrespectful when it’s an art, it’s a skill,” said Whittaker. “I think you need to sort your commentary skills out.”
“I’m a rules and regulations kind of person,” says Clarke, recalling that flashpoint 18 months later. “Doing the job I do, you need to be on top of that and know exactly what a referee can and can’t do. This is professional sport and people are going to push boundaries and do whatever they feel they need to do to get an edge. There’s no rule against showing off. You can do a dance, pull a face, and do what you want. If the referee feels you are doing more of that stuff than fighting, they can then have a word.
“The point at which I described Whittaker as being ‘disrespectful’ was when he tapped his opponent on the top of the head with the palm of his glove. That’s actually a foul. It’s not a damaging foul, it won’t cause any harm, but by doing that you are choosing to disregard the rules of the ring for the purpose of belittling your opponent. That is not for me.
“I think me calling him ‘disrespectful’ was what he really didn’t like. Because I think he does have a lot of respect for the sport and for his opponents. That was what he didn’t like, the idea that he was disrespecting the noble art. That’s the word that hurt him. If I had called him ‘arrogant’ or ‘flash’ or ‘cocky,’ he wouldn’t have cared.”
Perhaps there is some truth to that. After all, one need only look at the way Whittaker concludes a fight — often consoling his beaten opponent with a degree of compassion — to know that his antics, right or wrong, seldom come from a place of malice. Instead, when watching Whittaker perform, one gets the sense that showboating, for him, is tantamount to hiccupping, or a form of Tourette’s. The only difference, and it’s a big one, is that rather than call a stranger the c-word or bark like a dog, Whittaker acts up in the ring, where there are ropes and rules. He then apologizes for his behavior after the fact, just as you would if calling a stranger the c-word or barking like a dog. It’s a condition, he says. He doesn’t mean it. He is merely trying to live with it, accommodate it. All he asks is that you try to understand.
“From his public persona to the person you meet and are with every day, it couldn’t be more different,” says Andy Lee, a one-time WBO middleweight champion and Whittaker’s latest coach. “The ring antics, which are part of his character, are for fight night, but away from that he’s a gentleman. He’s a pleasure to be around and we have spent a lot of time together, away from the gym as well as in the gym. I’ll tell you the kind of person he is. He’s the kind of person who flew to New York to support Hamzah [Sheeraz, in a fight against Edgar Berlanga] and flew to Belfast to support Paddy Donovan [in a rematch with Lewis Crocker].”
There is another way to judge the kind of person Ben Whittaker is. All you have to do is appreciate the fact that Lee, a respectful and understated former champion, has decided to spend his days in his company, both in the gym and away from it. Indeed, the idea of a man like Lee and a man like Whittaker rubbing along would be inconceivable to anyone who believed that the version of himself Whittaker presents on fight night is an accurate representation of his attitude and character.
“I never showboated [as a boxer], but you’ve got to allow people to express themselves,” says Lee of Whittaker’s approach. “I like to have the fighters express themselves in the ring.
“But there’s a point when it becomes disrespectful and I wouldn’t like that. You don’t like to punch down. If someone tries taking your head off and you make them miss, it’s fine to then celebrate with some showboating. But if you’re dominating a guy and then you do it, I don’t like that. But, listen, we’ve had one fight so far [against Liam Cameron in April] and he was pretty much punch-perfect. There wasn’t room for showboating.”
In truth, Whittaker didn’t just behave against Liam Cameron in April, he revealed a side of himself previously concealed from public view. It was an emotional side. A human side. It was a side of his personality totally at odds with the polarizing showman with whom we had all become familiar.
“What I’ve always thought about fighters who go down that road of ‘love me or hate me, you will still watch me,’ is that it’s a hard road,” says Clarke. “There are very few people out there who genuinely don’t care what people think or say about what they do. That’s an incredibly difficult thing to achieve. I can think of maybe one who genuinely fit that category in boxing, during my time, and that was Chris Eubank. He didn’t get riled up by people, he was never rude to people, and he didn’t even get tetchy. He just was who he was. People were perfectly at liberty, it seemed, to say whatever they wanted to say about him. He didn’t care. But he’s the only one I can think of.
“If you go down that road, it comes at a real cost. It’s demanding. I’ve never really felt Ben Whittaker is that guy. I don’t really know him, but I watched him in the amateurs and all the reports you would get from people who were around him were really, really good. People can have different personas — boxers are not the same people outside the ring as they are in the ring — and I think judging Ben, the person, on what he does in the ring would be wrong. There’s definitely that inner showman that comes out and expresses itself when he’s fighting, but I don’t think it extends to ‘love me or hate me, you will still watch me.’ Because I think he cares. Most people do. That’s normally the sign of a functioning human being.”
The bottom line is it’s a gamble. Sometimes you might showboat and there will be a bullet in the chamber. Or you might instead get away with it. But the not knowing is exciting. The risk of it all is exciting.Johnny Nelson
Some, like Chris Eubank, really embody it, while most are just content to play a part; make the faces, wear the clothes. In the case of a fighter like Josh Kelly, there is a clear distinction between the man he is at home and the character he adopts when prowling in a changing room or dancing to the ring on fight night. In his eight-year pro career, the flamboyant Brit known as “Pretty Boy” has not only received the same criticism Whittaker faces today from the same set of purists, but has also experienced plenty of attention online, both the good and the bad. He, too, has had his highlight reels and a queue of sponsors itching to exploit his viral potential. He, too, has heard that same expression of surprise whenever he meets someone for the first time: “Wow,” they say, “you’re nothing like how I expected you to be.”
“From the outside, you look at me and think I’m a showoff or a certain kind of character,” Kelly says. “I’ve got a split personality in the ring. When I’m warming up, I get this cocky thing about us and I’m a completely different person. It’s not something I choose. That’s just how I am when I have a fight. Something takes over and I feel comfortable in the ring that way. But when I go home, I’m just chilled. I’m the deepest thinker in the world. You wouldn’t recognize me as the person you saw in the ring.”
In the ring Kelly is known to shuffle, pout and prance. He drops his hands, he jigs his shoulders, and in his suit of lights plays matador to the most dispirited-looking bulls you have ever seen. In the end, though, it is, as always, only a performance. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. Sometimes the crowd applauds, other times they’re silent. Either way, Kelly has a style and isn’t afraid to flaunt it.
“I loved Pernell Whittaker and Roy Jones growing up,” he says. “When I won the Junior ABAs [Amateur Boxing Association], people said, ‘You box like Roy Jones.’ That was the best feeling in my life because I walked to the ring and thought I was Roy Jones. I used to try and walk like him, move like him, box like him, everything. It gave me so much confidence. It gave me a style.”
When it’s done right, showboating can be as effective as any other move produced in a boxing ring. It can, if authentic and timed correctly, accentuate one boxer’s dominance over the other, thus giving them the edge in the mental battle, which, history suggests, is often as important as the physical one. It can be used to distract an opponent, too. It can make them take their mind off what they should be focusing on and leave them vulnerable to a sneak attack. It can also be used to increase the stakes.
“It was, for me, a confidence thing,” says Nelson. “If you were confident in yourself and how things were going, you don’t mind a bit of showboating. There’s no social awkwardness or a feeling of discomfort when you’re in that kind of mood. You think, 'God, I’ve put it on the line here, now I’ve got to back it up.' It can, in that sense, be motivational; a self-motivation. You put yourself under a certain pressure that you feel you need at that point in the fight.
“We all did it in the gym, but the thing is, not everybody had the bottle to act like that in public. When Naz [Naseem Hamed] started doing it publicly, we thought, 'Why not?' Even if we were just flipping over the top rope, we would do it. Five times out of 10 the bigger guys would end up on their back, but the little guys like Naz would land on their feet. We took what we did in the gym and did it in public, including the showboating, and soon it felt like what we were doing in public was no different than what we were doing in the gym. It was fun. It was like a private joke between us all.”
As with any joke, showboating comes with an element of risk. The risk of falling flat. The risk of not finding its audience. The risk of nobody in the room finding it either appropriate or amusing.
Moreover, given the sport’s inherent danger, any joke told in the ring is already testing the boundaries of good taste. It’s why, when it comes to showboating, so many struggle to see the funny side, perhaps. It’s why to some it’s a skill and to others a sign of disrespect. It’s also why, whether charmed or offended, we must at the very least admire the temerity to make light of something so typically dark.
