As Joseph Parker enters Ballybrack Boxing Club on a wet Tuesday morning, he makes it his mission to greet every person inside the gym, regardless of whether he knows their name or not. The intimacy of his welcome will vary, ranging from a hug to a fist-bump depending on familiarity, and watching him I am reminded not only of his nice-guy reputation but also how “nice”, in certain settings, is considered a dirty word.
At school, for example, a student will be advised that there are better adjectives to use than “nice”, while to be called “nice” by a date is often the death knell, for it relegates the recipient to that zone to which nobody wants to be consigned: that of friend. Moreover, should a woman in a new dress ask you how she looks, you don’t say “nice”, and if your mother should ask what you thought of the dinner she cooked, the last thing she wants to hear is that same word: “Nice.”
In boxing, meanwhile, where it pays to be the opposite, “nice” tends to be closer to an accusation than a compliment, seen more as a weakness than a trait to be admired. Nice, after all, suggests a certain passivity, a softness, a kindness, all of which are as unwelcome as fear when the first bell rings.
In fact, by way of proof, before leaving for Dublin, I informed my dad that I planned to meet Parker and was told, “Joseph Parker is too nice for boxing,” which stuck and ended up travelling with me. It was something he had said before, and a concern of mine too, but its relevance increased that night due to us having just watched the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, in which Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet, is shown writing some of the greatest lyrics of all time while being reminded periodically that he is “kind of an asshole”. I wondered, when watching it, whether being “kind of an asshole” was conducive to genius, the thing that separates the great from the good, and applied this theory to a few of the boxers I had encountered over the years. I then thought about Joseph Parker and wondered whether in the context of boxing it was perhaps better to be “kind of an asshole” than a nice guy.
Joseph Parker, you see, is not just nice, but projects a strain of niceness hard to find in a sport like boxing. He is so nice in fact that one worries about getting too close to him, or spending too much time in his company, for fear of one day seeing him defeated and disappointed. After all, it stands to reason that the more time you spend around a fighter, the easier it is to become emotionally involved, or attached, and the more painful it then becomes when seeing the reality of their profession leaves its mark on them. With Parker, someone that nice, it’s not just the fear of seeing him lose. It’s the fear of seeing him hit, hurt, and suffering. It’s the fear of seeing him without a smile on his face.
“Oh, he’s like that just walking down the street,” says Kerry Russell, Parker’s videographer, as I sit marvelling at the heavyweight’s conduct. “He greets everyone he meets. When we went to Saudi to watch the [Tyson] Fury vs. [Oleksandr] Usyk rematch, they had all the legends there and he was going up to each one and hugging them as though he had known them all his life.”
Some fighters on a sparring day will enter the gym and acknowledge only the people of significance – chiefly, their coach and the sparring partners. Parker, on the other hand, greets everybody in the room as though to leave someone out will surely bring him bad luck on a day when luck is as vital as strength, speed, and stamina. He ticks them off in his head as he goes and will double back if he realises he has missed someone. As if it matters, he even asks how I am doing, despite us being unacquainted, and I turn the question back on him. “Feeling good,” he says, smiling enough for us both. “Back to work.”
To prepare for this work, Andy Lee, his coach, had arrived at the gym 15 minutes before Parker and hooked up a couple of butane gas cylinders to provide the room with some warmth. The sparring partners, meanwhile, Boma Brown and Guido Vianello, were already in the process of warming up as Parker emerged. “Is this your last spar?” Lee asks Brown as the British heavyweight stretches at the side of the ring. “I want you to put it on him,” he then says, mimicking a wild right hand. “Give him everything you’ve got.”
More than just encouragement, Lee’s instruction acts as permission to hurt a nice guy and is therefore at odds with normal, decent human behaviour. Yet, of course, the men in cahoots understand the nuances of the language in which they converse. To hurt, in this instance, is to help.
“If you can’t make the switch, you get used to it,” Parker says of this peculiar dynamic. “It’s not like you want to smash them [sparring partners] because you don’t like them. You want to work on certain things and they are here for a purpose: to help you. If you treat them like they are your friend outside the ring and also inside the ring, you’re not giving yourself the best prep. Boma is here to give me the best work and Guido is here to give me the best work. Even though we’re friends outside the ring, they have the same mindset as me once the bell rings. They want to practise their moves, the same way I want to practise mine. They want to land good shots and so do I. That’s a show of respect, giving your best in the ring. It isn’t disrespectful to give your all against someone. It’s the opposite. We want to push each other and help each other.”
As true as it may be that hurting means helping, there is still something odd and rather unsettling about the sight of a boxer limbering up among sparring partners. Usually, if on the cusp of trading punches, the two boxers set to throw them will be kept apart – in changing rooms, for example – until the moment they are within arm’s reach and a bell has rung. Yet, when it comes to sparring, the boxers involved will exchange pleasantries upon arrival and then proceed to warm up in each other’s presence, each doing their best to focus but at the same time not seem either rude or truculent. It is the strangest of setups and one suspects that, for someone like Parker, navigating it is no easy feat.
Not that you would know from watching him, mind. Waltzing into the gym, the thickset New Zealander wears a long black raincoat, its hood up, and shorts and flip-flops, managing to somehow encapsulate all the paradoxes of the morning in just his attire. Part grim reaper, part beach bum, Parker displays on the outside what he feels on the inside, forever torn between what his profession asks of him and what his role as a man – a father, a husband – asks of him; forever torn between human and machine.
“I’m a better fighter now because I’m a better husband and father,” Parker tells me. “I feel like when you have a great family life it transitions into your boxing life. If your family life isn’t going well, your training camp won’t go well either. If it’s good, though, it helps your energy, and it helps the energy of everyone around you. As you can see in the gym, we all feed off each other’s energy and everyone wants to see everyone do well. It’s a great environment to be in.”
Inside the gym there are two rings, one big, the other small, and it is in the bigger of the two Parker will soon spar eight rounds with Vianello and Brown. Surrounding this ring are a dozen punch bags, mostly heavy bags, as well as a variety of boxing-related pictures and murals, the majority of which celebrate amateur boxing medallists from Ireland. On the back wall there are murals of Michael Conlan, Michael Carruth, Katie Taylor, and also Darren Sutherland, a boxer whose smile served only to conceal the turbulence in his mind.
By the ring, sitting on its edge, Parker starts to undress and lace up his boots. As he does so he is asked by Andy Lee, “Ready to go, Joe?” To which Parker replies, “Yeah, ready to go.”
Lee then laughs. “Let’s go, Joe!” he says, his voice that of the hype man he will never be.
“Are you ready to go?” says Parker.
“I’ve only got to watch and give you water.”
With the rain still lashing down against the roof, and still visible through the gym’s various windows, Parker and Vianello climb into the ring just before half ten, by which point the gym has hushed in anticipation. “No summer this year,” Russell whispers to me after revealing that in New Zealand, where it is summer, the daily temperature is 30 degrees. “It’ll be worth it, though.”
Somewhat poetically the last big spar before they all head to Saudi Arabia begins to the sound of not only rain on a roof but “Dirty Cash” [Money Talks] by Adventures of Stevie V. That is the song playing on the gym’s speakers at the time and it is shortly accompanied by the sounds of Parker clearing his throat, which he does throughout the spar, as well as punches being landed by both Parker and Vianello, the stand-in for Parker’s next opponent, Daniel Dubois. Added to this are the calls of Andy Lee, who, in round one, says to his fighter, “Thinking 3-D, nice and sharp. Now you’ve got him hesitant. Very good.”
At the round’s conclusion Lee invites Parker back to the corner and the third man in their team, George Lockhart, prepares a stool for him. Vianello, meanwhile, elects to stand.
“We’re just replicating the fight,” Lee tells me afterwards, when I say how unusual it is to see a boxer sit between rounds in sparring. “Paddy [Donovan] doesn’t do it, but Joe wants to do it. I used to stand, but we’re all different. He wants it as close to a fight as possible.”
In round two Parker is reminded to keep his focus, again with the fight on February 22 in mind, and in response he says to his coach, “Yep!” It is an acknowledgement of what he has been told and Lee, with the lines of communication now open, elaborates: “It’s all about focus and concentration.”
“Yep!” Parker says for a second time and listening to him I can’t help but think how rare it is to hear a boxer and a coach communicate during rounds of sparring. It would never be mistaken for conversation, of course, yet still it is a mark of Parker’s awareness, not to mention manners, that he is able to not just adhere to instructions but respond to them while doing all he can not to get punched.
“Sometimes I wonder if he’s saying ‘yeah’ because he knows what he has to do but doesn’t want me to tell him what to do,” Lee, the coach, muses in the car on the way home. “But sometimes I know he is actually acknowledging it. It just depends on the tone of the ‘yeah’. He does listen, though. He’s a great listener. If I call a shot, he’ll do it straight away. It’s a great trust. He does it in fights too.”
For evidence of this telepathy look no further than between rounds two and three, when Lee says, “You know what I’m going to say, so I don’t need to say it,” and stays true to his word, his silence the proof. Better yet, halfway through round six those in the room get to witness an example of the marionette in full flow when Lee shouts “jab-uppercut” and Parker, without so much as a stutter, produces a jab and an uppercut on command, landing both punches to boot.
After six completed rounds, there is applause in the room and Lee can’t fathom why. He asks, “What are you all clapping for? He’s not finished yet.” Sure enough, two more rounds then follow, this time with Brown, the second sparring partner, and Parker at the end of it all says, “Let’s do one more!”
He is directed instead to the numerous heavy bags dotted around the gym and en route to one goes over to thank both his sparring partners for helping him in a way unique to sparring partners. He promises to send Guido Vianello something via text message after he has left the gym and, without hearing what it is, I attempt to guess what it could be. It could be anything, I decide. It could be something as simple and obvious as footage from the morning’s sparring session. Or, if not that, it could be his favourite Bob Dylan song, or his 10 favourite cat videos, or the latest skit he has filmed with his family, which, you may recall, were all the rage during a global pandemic, serving to reveal the human being behind the fighter.
“It’s like that old saying: true strength is the ability to be gentle,” says George Lockhart, Parker’s strength and conditioning coach. “Most good fighters I know understand this. If I go into a bar and a guy slapped me in the face, I wouldn’t be mad at him, I would be surprised and wondering what I did wrong. If a five-year-old slaps you in the face, you’re not going to beat his ass, you’re going to ask him, ‘Where are your parents?’ Why? Because you know what you can do to that individual. Fear breeds anger. If a guy my size came at me and I was intimidated I’m going to bow up because of that.
“Joseph is so good, and he knows he is so good now, he doesn’t need to be anything other than what he is naturally. At the press conference with Dubois, he didn’t need to say much. It was all there in his face and in his eyes. Joe knows it’s coming.”
All the time Parker pounds the heavy bag, Lockhart yells, “One… two… three…,” and the fighter responds in kind, throwing three-punch combinations comprising jabs, hooks, and crosses. The punches start off crisp and straight before inevitably slowing down and becoming sloppier on account of Parker’s exhaustion. It is at that point Andy Lee tweaks the gym’s playlist and selects the Roy Jones song “Can’t Be Touched” in an effort to squeeze from his fighter the last remnants of energy. It works, too, though the feeling, both during and afterwards, could never be described as nice. In fact, once the ordeal is over and he sits down on a chair, Parker is heard saying to himself, “Who would want to be a fighter?” He then chooses to repeat it: “Who would want to be a fighter?”
“You go to another place,” he later explains, having been reminded of what he had said. “It’s not so much pushing yourself, it’s more that your mind is playing games with you. Sometimes your mind is saying, ‘No, stop this, you’ve done enough.’ But you also have another part of your mind saying, ‘This is easy work. Keep going. Push through.’ When I hear that voice, I know I’m pushing myself. It’s not really a question of: Do I want to be a fighter? I want to be a fighter. I love boxing. I love this sport.”
Typically, if a journalist wants to raise a contentious issue, or ask an uncomfortable question, they will often use a conduit through which it becomes easier to bring up this issue or question to their subject. They might, for example, quote someone else, or float a vague theory, all with the aim of getting from their subject what they want without being seen to have directly offered their own opinion or spoken out of turn.
In boxing, this applies even when a journalist wants to ask a boxer if they are too nice. In that instance, rare though it is, a journalist might be inclined to relay to the boxer a quote from their father, not yet knowing whether the content of the quote – that is, the accusation of niceness – will be received by the boxer as a compliment or an insult.
“Firstly,” says Parker, “I want you to thank your dad for saying that.
“Secondly, I’m just who I am. I can’t be an angry person and I can’t put on a show like I’m angry or want to talk crap. That’s not me. I probably have tried a little bit in the past but it comes out fake, not real, and it feels like I’m trying to be someone I’m not. I’m naturally calm-natured outside of the ring but in the ring, when the lights are on and the bell goes, something switches. But I need more – I need more of that in the ring.”
This need to switch is not something exclusive to Joseph Parker, but is instead a transition all boxers must make on the night of a fight. For some, the lucky ones, the switch tends to be simple, made so by virtue of the divide between human and machine being so small it can easily be crossed with a regular stride. Yet, for men like Parker, and indeed his coach, Andy Lee, who was also labelled “too nice” throughout his fighting career, the chasm is considerably larger and the switch akin to metamorphosis. It is not just a leap, or a change of clothes, or the application of makeup. It is closer to what happens when a name is repeated a specific number of times or there is a full moon.
“When I was with Adam Booth [Lee’s former trainer], we actually talked about the need to have that switch and that transformation,” says Lee, the one-time WBO middleweight champion. “For me, it was when we left the dressing room and as you walk to the ring you transform. You change your mindset and become The Fighter.
“In Joseph there’s definitely a determination and a steeliness. He is the nicest man you will ever meet. Me and him have never had a cross word – ever. In our personal life, that is. In our professional life, maybe I’ve ripped into him a few times, but away from the ring there has never been an issue. Anybody who comes into contact with Joseph says the same thing. You will never meet a more genuine or nicer person. But I can also see it inside of him. There is a determination and a willingness to hurt people. I can see it there. For want of a better word, or term, that is what it is: he wants to hurt the person in front of him.”
Parker, with a record of 35-3 [23], will be the first to admit his relationship with boxing has been a fluid, unpredictable one over the years. Taken for granted young, he has, in the tradition of all toxic love affairs, seen both how it damages and delivers, and now, at 33, it is once more his everything. He knows it is no place for nice guys but, equally, when you know what it is to lose, winning becomes the nicest feeling in the world.
“When I was [WBO] champion of the world, I didn’t love boxing,” he confesses. “I had the fight with [Anthony] Joshua [in 2018], which was a unification, but when I became champion I wasn’t even thinking about stuff like that. I wasn’t thinking about unification, or undisputed, or even what’s next. I became champion, ticked that off, my dad was happy, my coach at the time Kevin Barry was happy, and I was too. New Zealand and Samoa were very proud.” He shrugs, a towel still draped over his shoulders. “What’s next? That’s when I felt like things went the other way. I struggled big time. I didn’t really think or talk about it then because I didn’t know what was happening. But now, looking back, I know that I wasn’t happy. I certainly wasn’t happy the way I am now. If I become champion of the world now, by beating Daniel Dubois, I will be so happy. It will mean something different. It’s just about appreciating the position you’re in. The first time I became champion I was in a great position but I didn’t really take any of it in. I didn’t know the value of it. I didn’t enjoy it.
“Now I know what it feels like to lose. I know what it feels like to have the whole world say I am done and that I am a gatekeeper and that I have had a great career but should now retire. I know what hearing that feels like.”
“And how does it feel?” I ask, knowing he is too nice to say it otherwise.
“It feels shit,” Parker says. “It feels like crap, because I know what I can do. When I lost to Joe Joyce [in 2022], I knew that wasn’t the best of me. Things weren’t really right in my ‘off season’ and the team I had gave me the best they could, but I wasn’t me on the night. That fight made me ask myself all those questions. It made me the fighter I am today. I had to go looking for something that was missing. But I never doubted myself.
“After losing to Joyce, I went back to New Zealand and I said to my wife, ‘I know this is not the best of me. Something’s not right – but what?’ I then fought Jack Massey [in 2023] and it was another crap performance. Why am I feeling like this? Why can’t I perform to my best? Why don’t I feel sharp? What’s wrong with me? I had all these questions. It made me reach out to George and change some things with Andy as well. I feel like questions are very important. Not everybody wants to try finding the answers to them. You have to be mature enough to say, ‘I’m doing something wrong here.’
“Some fighters, when stuff isn’t going right, will ignore it or blame someone else. They can’t make a change because they are used to their comforts. I was uncomfortable making changes. I didn’t know what to expect. Am I making the right move? I guess we’ll find out soon. That was my approach back then. Look at me now. I’m a happy man.”
If he was happy that day, a wet Tuesday, one can only imagine how happy Parker would have been during the four weeks he spent in Dublin with his wife and four children. “It was beautiful,” he says. “I know other fighters want to stay away from their family in camp, but I love it. I love seeing them for a few hours each day and just hanging out with them. It takes my mind away from fighting. It’s a beautiful thing for me. I need a clean break between fighter and human. I’ve been that machine for 12 weeks in the past but I know what gives me more joy and happiness and it’s being able to see my family.”
By now, with Paddy Donovan about to spar, we both move away from the ring and Parker, spotting my notepad and pen still on the canvas, picks them up and holds them for me. He does so in order to ensure Donovan, his stablemate, suffers no accidents, a move as perceptive as it is considerate. Yet, rather than return the notebook and pen, Parker sees the Dictaphone in my hand, respects the fact that we are in the middle of an interview, and instead keeps hold of the notebook and pen until I have finished exploring the absurd notion that kindness is somehow a weakness. He waits until I have seen kindness for what it is: the most impressive thing about any human being – yes, even a boxer.
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