For all the many gifts of Daniel Dubois, a world heavyweight contender this weekend, and a hugely likable pure sporting talent, it is hard not to find yourself circling back to the press-ups. As first trailed in a fascinating 2019 interview with Donald McRae in these pages, the teenage Dubois would regularly settle down and do between three and five hours of press-ups.
Really: five. No water, no food, just press-ups. It seems useful to put that in a real-world context. If, for example, Dubois were to start doing press-ups in your living room as you left for a half day at school – bus ride, registration, lessons, morning break, sandwich lunch – he would still be there doing press-ups as you opened the front door again.
Coming to the end of his stint, perhaps. Thinking about picking up the post from the hall and clearing away the breakfast things, which he hasn’t been able to do yet because he hasn’t stopped doing press-ups. But still, and this is the key point, doing press-ups.
This degree of immersion is common in boxing training, which is famously devastating. The teenage Mike Tyson would spend at least half an hour each day working solely on his neck, transforming himself into a whirling, throbbing tube of human muscle, all the better to scythe his way through the rubber-legged veterans of the outer circles en route to that first world title inside two years.
With Dubois, who is still only 25, and who will walk out on Saturday night in Wroclaw, Poland to face Oleksandr Usyk, the most thrillingly high-stakes fight available to him at this stage in his life, the sense of obsession has always felt a little more earnest and willed.
I am a huge Dubois fan. Not just because he’s an authentic son of the south-east London soil, product of a remarkable 11-sibling sporting family, with a dad who made his fortune selling suitcases stuffed with posters in the streets of New York (“at one point we had seven guys from south London flying over”).
Dubois is also a hugely watchable heavyweight, with real, visceral power in his fists, a great work ethic, and with something just a little tender about him, a quality that feels almost too real and everyday for this retailed brutality. The thing with Dubois is that it looks like boxing hurts, like this is a mortal human being in there, not some portable slab of flesh-granite.
Watching the Joe Joyce fight in November 2020, his only loss to date, you felt every blow as Dubois’s right eye was repeatedly pounded into the bone by Joyce’s high, chopping jab. It was doubly painful to hear him accused in the aftermath of giving up, when by any reasonable take on the human capacity for pain what Dubois did was persevere, risking his sight in the process.
But it also felt as though this verdict – too nice, too normal – was waiting for him. Here is a fighter who speaks softly, who doesn’t have the backstory of a furious fighting clan or the classic street-corner chops. And these things do matter, if only because all boxers have to create a fighting identity, a sense of their own narrative destiny.
The trash talk, the posturing, the origins stories: it all plays a legitimate part in making this spectacle happen, a necessary flipside to boxing’s hard-edged reality, the constant battle with pain and life-threatening danger. Start acting too rationally and no one is actually getting in that ring in the first place.
With Dubois that self-mythology is drawn from his upbringing, the conviction even before he was born that he would become a world champion, the family talk of an ancestral bare-knuckle fighting spirit. And from the celebration of his undeniable physical gifts, through teenage press-up trances, to talk in his latest camp of hitting so hard he severed the biceps muscle of his sparring partner.
All of which will of course count for nothing once he gets in the ring with Usyk, who would seem to have too much craft, skill and warrior-king destiny to offer any real hope of an upset. Not that this matters too much. A decent defeat, eight good rounds, could still feel like a career boost.
Meanwhile the question of whether Dubois is for real seems to speak not just to this fight but to something wider, to a heavyweight division that has been drifting like an imperial ghost ship, and to boxing’s battle with its own future.
At times it can feel as though boxing is actively concealing its notes of actual, robust sporting drama beneath the scroll of lucrative nonsense events. For so long it seemed the greatest threat to boxing was the degree of risk. Here is a sport that can claim in its most sublime moments to be the greatest spectacle of all, but which wouldn’t get past the first three seconds of the PowerPoint if you were to pitch it as a suitable mainstream activity.
Rather than regulation it is an unexpected dilution, the revenues available from fakery, the Garth-Crooks-Vernon-Kay-all-or-nothing-beef circuit, that seem like the real threat currently. Tommy Fury made £4m from pretending to hate Jake Paul for a few months. Why do anything more dangerous than this?
Meanwhile those genuine, hard-honed points of value can get a little lost. Usyk versus Dubois has gone a little under the radar, which is a genuine shame as it’s a great prospect, with three world titles on the line two days after Ukraine’s Independence Day in a country with a shared eastern border.
It might not feel like an upset waiting to happen. Usyk is just too good, a champion who will glue himself to your weakness and dance all over it. Dubois was put down three times in the opening round of his last fight against Kevin Lerena. But Frank Warren thinks he can win on Saturday, albeit Warren’s victory strategy seems to involve hitting Usyk really hard all the time and never getting tired.
Dubois, who is a puncher, retains a puncher’s chance. And it is just a great occasion for a young fighter, plus an authentic, normalising event for a heavyweight division that has spent the past few years running away from itself, when the revenues available from pay-per-view have generated a paralysing brand-caution, an excessive regard for the bargaining power of legacy and unbeaten records. Anthony Joshua has been first to hit the exit button and cash out, facing Usyk twice, and now gearing up for the necessary farewell rounds against his fellow dukes a few years too late.
But that wider sense of unreality, of a product being stretched a little thin at the edges, applies not just to boxing but to all sports now. Is this spectacle robust? Is it propaganda product? Is it two men hugging for money inside an air-conditioned globe?
Dubois versus Usyk is at least real. Just as Dubois, win or lose, deserves credit just for going there, doing this now, and risking a little more of that very public pain.
