Johnny Nelson sets record straigt on Naz & Ingle

The difference between beckham,s early coaches and say the ingles is....Beckhams coach was most likely giving beckham and the other kids a couple of hours a week of their time say following a passion. Whereas the ingle gym was run as a family affair boxing gym. Open pretty much every night etc. Including as many kids as they could help and spending multiple hours with guys like naz weekly/daily. Passing on expertise. Much needed expertise in a sport you can end up with brain damage in.

That type of system doesnt work without the success stories helping to fund the not so successful stories. Without the ingles theres no naseem hamed. Theres no johnny nelson. Or ryan rhodes. Or kell brook. Etc. Its not a coincidence they brought through so many.

The reality is you probably cant play at boxing as a bit of a passion outwith say your 40 hour work week and expect real results. Exactly why most gyms that arent run like businesses are extremely lucky to bring one guy through that makes money.

Its a bit like we can run a gym. One that probably wont prepare you all that well for the top level....in a sport you can easily end up with brain damage in as a bit of passion. Or we can run it like a business where we,ll have the time necessary to prepare you to be succesful in a dangerous sport.

I know which one i,d pick.

 

But here’s the thing, it’s actually a blessing and a curse, mate. For young kids and amateurs coming through, training around seasoned pros and a world champ like Naz is gold, it elevates them massively, inspires them, and shows what’s possible up close.

The flip side? The last thing a seasoned pro, let alone a world champion, needs is a gym full of kids, amateurs and journeymen buzzing around. It dilutes focus and drags the standard down. That’s exactly why Freddie Roach used to shut Wild Card down for hours whenever Manny Pacquiao came in to train, no distractions, pure intensity.

And if we’re really talking about inspiring the next wave of kids, tell them Johnny Nelson’s story over Naz’s. The long grind, the public lows (like those stinkers vs De Leon and Warring), the years on the road when he was persona non grata, then the payoff, becoming WBO cruiser champ. Yet it’ll always be Hamed’s flash, knockouts and status that gets the big film, same reason the Kardashians dominate social media. Glitz and glamour sell, but the real lessons are in the perseverance, not status games.

 

The big problem tho is without a naz. Without a johnny nelson etc. If they all ran off as soon as money was being made. The end result probably is no gym that ended helping hundreds upon hundreds of kids and more gyms where guys who just follow a passion without the time really needed to focus on making a fighter ready for a career in boxing. Just basically a race to the bottom in one of the most dangerous sports out there.

The ingles had it right imo. Their success stories should have funded their not so successful stories unfortunately human nature is pretty selfish and the results pretty much ends with the boxing coaches just being used as lackeys for their passion while people sit higher up ready to take them off their hands when moneys being made. In turn it ends up killing the grassroots.

Naseem still would have got his millions. Something that wouldnt have been possible without the time and expertise put in over the years from the ingles.

The system that made naseem the success he was....should be backed by the people it helped become succesful. Probably why its a much smaller gym now and their winding it down. The system just ends up getting exploited to the point its not really worth any of the hassle. Thousands of kids end up missing out so one guy can have 150 million instead of say 100 million. That money could have been used to roll out more gyms in different areas etc. Instead we,re mostly relying on drug money to do it now.

 

The coaches (like teachers) help bring out the skills in the athlete, Naz would have been special with another coach too.
there have been probably thousands of unsuccessful boxers through the same gym as it comes down to the fighter, however ingles do well at teaching.

I think the reality of the situation is the star is the star, and those around the star can often feel entitled but they aren’t the star.
Ingle was a pro boxer and had his chance at being a star as a boxer, he failed and became a star coach, helping others become star boxers. but star coaches never get paid what the star boxer does.

ingles was probs the highest paid coach in the world with Naz, yet you think that’s not enough from Naz?? Should speak to all the other fighters and coaches

“because I did my job and helped you come up, you are in debt to me for the rest of your life”
surely parents can apply this logic aswell.

 

Exactly why its 25 per cent to 75 per cent. The star gets the 75 percent. The guy thats spent all the years training, organising, nurturing, giving up all their spare time passing on expertise and paying out their pocket etc gets the 25 per cent.

The ingle service went above and beyond your normal boxing gym. Hence why it relied more so on the successes covering the many not so succesfuls.

Saying naz would have been a star with another coach. Very few coaches ran gyms like the ingles. The chances of naseem even becoming a professional boxer without the ingles is pretty small imo. Especially ones with the expertise the ingles had.

 

amazing amazing messages @bbjc dare I say handing out lessons, well done sir, a pleasure to read them

 

Let's be honest, naz' style was never going to age well at the top of the game there were plenty of fighters that would have made a fool out of him just like barrera did, let's not fool ourselves here, he was constantly off balance, wild and held his chin in tha air.
he was entertaining, although most of us wanted him to lose, but he was a great entertainer, not a great boxer though, really.
I do appreciate his skills and athleticism, and he did have very good power for a little man, dont get me wrong, but lets not sugar coat reality.

 

If theres one thing to be highlighted it would probably be the bit about plenty of fighters that would have made a fool out of him. If there was infact plenty of fighters around that could make a fool of naz. The competition must have been deep and the level of competition must have been high.

Which means there must have been very good gyms bringing them through. The big question is where is that level nowadays. Where is that depth?

Its not there probably because these guys that we,re bringing them through got fed up playing the lackey role. That lost out as soon as one of their successes starting making real money to someone with no real interest in the grassroots etc.

All ends up having a knock on effect and further helps to ruin boxing all so one guy could make tens of millions while giving nothing back to the system that got him to that position while stopping the next guy getting into that same position.

 

I get what you mean, and in principle I agree: the success stories should help fund the not-so-successful stories. That’s how you keep the doors open for hundreds of kids in a sport this dangerous.

But that’s also why Wincobank shows the flaw in the model. The whole set-up relied on having a Naz (or a Johnny Nelson/Ryan Rhodes) at the centre. Once there isn’t a superstar bringing money, attention and energy into the place, the economics don’t really hold up.

And Naz wasn’t just a product of the gym, he was the gym’s biggest draw. Kell Brook basically admits he walked in because of the aura, not because he’d grown up dreaming of being or working with Brendan Ingle: “There was ‘Naz’, Johnny Nelson, Ryan Rhodes… TV crews in… the gym was packed… and me being a kid watching that, I thought ‘that’s what I want to be’.”

It also didn’t help that Wincobank was always an amateur/pro mix. If it had stayed purely amateur, or set up a separate charitable entity under the Ingle brand, it might’ve got the kind of concessions proper amateur clubs get. Repton’s the obvious example: 999-year lease, peppercorn rent, long-term security.

Once you’re a pro gym as well it becomes more like an academy system. Lads will outgrow it and move on. The difference is football academies are scalable, but a boxing gym built around one coach’s time isn’t. When Naz was coming through you had Brendan plus John plus Dominic. Who’s picking up that slack now?

Plus Brendan said by the time the book came out his cut was down to 10%, so it wasn’t like he was trying to rinse 25% forever. But I do think the book was the point of no return. It stopped being about “funding the gym” and became ego and betrayal, and after that it was always going to end messy.

So yeah, I’m with you on the grassroots point. I just don’t think it’s as simple as “fighters should pay forever”. The structure was never built to survive without a superstar at the centre.

 

Yeah, that’s fair. The Ingle style is slick and safe in theory, but without the right adaptation it often ends up either flat (Nelson–De Leon, Witter–Judah) or getting punished when one mistake happens (Rhodes–Matthews, Graham vs Jackson).

Naz is what made it marketable. He added the flair, angles and spite, so the movement wasn’t just negative, it became explosive and entertaining. And you can see it in the next generation too: Kid Galahad is the most recent example of the style in a purer form, clever and hard to hit, but sometimes a bit sterile. Whereas Kell Brook showed it needed a twist, he kept the Ingle base but added structure and spite in the pocket, sat down on shots when he got you in range, and made it fan-friendly.

Bottom line, the blueprint works, but it needs that extra layer to really pop at the top.

 

Naz was an elite talent no doubt, nurtured and honed by the Ingles.

The % when you are talking millions will always be bought up very few fighters would be happy to pay say 2.5m of a 10m purse, then very few fighters will ever earn huge PPV figures and purses the lower the weights for UK fighters he was a total one off that's a fact.

Duke McKenzie a three weight world champion fighting on Midweek Sport Special and Sportsnight under Micky Duff wouldn't of earned life changing money but he did ok, six figure purses at height and I'm talking 100k-200k not much more. He said many a time it was still Duff taking him on and investing in him, Duff had turned him down multiple times.

I'm no huge Naz fan I didn't particularly care for him and frankly was delighted when Barrera beat him, but he was box office.
That a renegotiated deal couldn't be agreed only hurt one person in the end Naz. He ran the show, lacked focus and discipline towards the end it actually ended up costing him money.

Why? Barrera schooled him had one more fight with Calvo a dull UD and that was that.

With also what you are getting by coaches invested in you is also belief, Ingle looked after his fighters tried to make the right fights unlike many in his position that would not cash in on you, worse, way worse, cash you out.

 

For Naz, the real break wasn’t the money, it was the book, Paddy and the Prince. By the McCullough fight the deal had already been renegotiated and Brendan was down to about 10%, with Dominic and John doing most of the day-to-day work for that camp anyway.

Once Brendan put that book out and “exposed” him, the relationship was basically dead. Naz’s ego couldn’t take that public hit, or the feeling of being outshone, and after that everything turned personal. You can even see it in the McCullough fight itself: in the corner Hamed barely looks at Brendan, he’s not really taking instruction between rounds.

And once he left and surrounded himself with his brothers, plus a yes-man like Oscar Suarez, he could do whatever he wanted in training. Emanuel Steward only came in late in camp, and by then it’s too late to rebuild discipline and structure. From that point you just see the decline, fight by fight.

Also, timing matters. If Naz had caught Barrera when he first wanted him, around the period Junior Jones wiped Barrera out, I honestly think the Hamed of then dismantles that version of Barrera

 

Because of Naz, so many fighters left other gyms who had invested in the kids to move to ingles, because they had a star.
So should those fighters pay the coaches who started them off too?

Everyone charges the standard rate pal, but when you become a star, you renegotiate. Ingle was probably the highest paid coach in the world because of Naz, not roach or steward of any of them…so what is the issue? Naz just realised he’s overpaying.

What you’re proposing would never work and would probably end up in court as a scandal.

 

superb post but people dont want to hear it who did he really beat?

 

And in the end the sport diminishes. Look at the possible fights naz could have had and look at the boxing landscape now. The depth isnt there and the reason for that is the coaches realised their basically just the lackeys. In turn the next generation and a lot of real boxing knowledge died with them both here and in the US. Hence why more and more of the coaching nows about withstanding your opponents best shots cause your fitter and stronger and do the weight better.

Its basically a waste of time giving tomorrows stars the coaching and the time they actually need coming through. Its a massive comitment turning amatuers into professional fighters and an even bigger commitment doing it while the pay is low. We,re not talking about a guy doing a couple of sessions a week here. As commendable as that is.