Chris Billam-Smith and the real price of battle

BOURNEMOUTH, England – It is six weeks on since Chris Billam-Smith sipped on a coffee and destroyed a plate of eggs and halloumi in this very café.

We are back in one of his regular haunts, not far from his Bournemouth home in a fashionable spot with French toast and fruit, cappuccinos, crepes and, now, seasonal lattes have replaced smoothies and fruit coolers, invoking the idea of winter – and those beverages are a welcome reprieve from the biting wind outside.

But things have changed for Billam-Smith in those six weeks. There is a thick cut attempting to heal above his left eye, and some discoloration in his face.

The mood is not negative. On the contrary, it is relatively upbeat. But having lost his much-loved WBO cruiserweight title to Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez in Saudi Arabia, there is an emptiness about what has transpired since we last talked. From Riyadh, Billam-Smith brought back tales of courage, bravery and his ability to dig deep when in the vortex of a stiff-punching, pirouetting southpaw who was relentlessly crafty and deviously resistant. Billam-Smith returned with a disfigured face, a damaged thumb, probably a cracked rib, and without the metal case carrying his prized possession.

But it was his wounds rather than his lack of silverware that particularly hurt his two-year-old son, Frank, the most. The realisation that his superhero dad is a mere mortal hit hard. Superman left for Saudi Arabia. Clark Kent came home.

Luckily for Frank, his father, “The Gentleman” is one of the finest men you could meet in this crazy world of snakes and ladders.

Sadly for Frank, he is too young to see that and, despite his father’s protestations that he was just fine, Frank wasn’t buying it.

Billam-Smith had already FaceTimed the two-year-old from Riyadh, giving him a preview, a warning of what he would look like when he returned.

“And he was okay with it,” said Billam-Smith. “And then, when I got home and saw him, he wouldn’t come near me, no hugs, no kisses, which was the most brutal thing ever. I’d gone out there, given it everything and come away with a loss, and all I’m thinking about is getting home to him and he’s just, he’s like, ‘I don’t like your ouchies,’ and then I’ll go to hug him and grab him, and he’s like, ‘I don’t like your ouchies, daddy,’ and then just runs away from me. And that happens for like two, three days.”

By Wednesday, Frank was back to cuddling his dad.

“Look at them, they’re fine now,” his dad insisted.

Frank’s love more than filled the void left by the missing belt, but Billam-Smith needed to heal.

Directly after the fight, he did not even go back to his changing room. He went out of the side of the arena and into a medical tent. His thumb was throbbing, his rib was sore, the cut around his eye took more than 30 stitches, inside and out, to close.

Then the adrenaline from battle started wearing off. Around 15 minutes after the final bout, he was transferred from the bed and onto another to go into the ambulance.

“That was painful, really painful,” he recalled. “We got the drugs guy there trying to take my blood, doctors weren’t too happy about it but he eventually did.”

Billam-Smith managed to slurp some Gatorade and chugged some water.

“I was very sore, can’t see out of my left eye, my rib’s in a lot of pain, especially when they moved me, they moved me from bed to bed a lot in the hospital. We were there for five and a half hours, having stitches done, CT scan first, X-ray on my hand, brain, hand, rib, that stuff, and then we were waiting around for so long, then everyone ordered food.”

His team devoured a McDonalds as they waited. Billam-Smith was not allowed to eat, he was given morphine – “but it just did nothing” – and he was on a drip.

“They moved me back to bed and I was in so much pain. The morphine made me feel a little bit woozy, like it does, but then no pain relief with it, so yeah, that was tough.

“I didn’t get back until half-eight in the morning, just before nine o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t sleep for like two hours from the adrenaline and the pain. I probably fell asleep at 11 until one o’clock, probably only had a couple, two to three hours, no more than three hours. Yeah, then I was just in so much pain in terms of trying to move in the morning and stuff. They gave me some ibuprofen and paracetamol to take, which helped. 

“With assistance from my wife, Mia. It was really hard to roll over and find a way to get up, I couldn’t just sit up straight because that would just be agony.”

Chris Billam-Smith believed he was the best cruiserweight in the world. And even if he did not think that skill for skill, he thought that his power and conditioning would get to any opponent in the end. When it had been required, they had been able to get him out of a jam. Not against Ramirez. It was a jarring acceptance and one that revealed itself gradually throughout the fight.

“I knew how good he was,” admitted Billam-Smith, pausing to sip his coffee and reflect on what had happened just two weeks earlier. “I just genuinely thought that. I didn’t expect him to be as tough as he was. I thought, I’m pretty good at seeing where people are good and their strengths and weaknesses and I just thought I’d be able to slow him down, slow his feet down and stop him pivoting around me and stuff with the volume. He was better with his hand defenses, which surprised me. I thought ‘You’ve got to hit this guy to the body,’ and I hit him a couple of times to the body, but on the inside he was so good at catching the shots.

“If I threw a two-punch combination, he’d catch them both. Then, I realized later in the fight he keeps catching them so if I put threes and fours together, I catch him with the third and fourth shot, so I might go left hook-right uppercut, and he’s bumped the left hook off his right shoulder and then caught the uppercut with his right hand. And I throw that quickly; that’s a great combination, and he could catch them and was very very good at it.”

Hitting the Mexican’s body was part of the strategy, slow him down, but that proved a hard target, too. And as the Englishman endeavoured to do that, he became more ragged and tried hard to get back on track.

“I lost my shape at times, which is one of my weaknesses,” the former champion confessed. “But that is because I put a lot of power into the shots and a lot of torque into the shots, so I lose my shape and that’s almost how I create that sort of torque, but the power can get through that way and you can slow your opponent down in that respect, so there are a lot of variables to it. But he didn’t slow down and he took headshots amazingly well.”

The same punishing blows, clean left hooks, that Billam-Smith has hurt sparring partners with in the gym while they’ve worn headgear and he’s donned 18oz gloves, had no effect.

“They just never seemed to make a dent. Now and again you might get a tiny reaction, but then he’s still able to step back and come again,” he recalled. 

“And it’s just like, well, keep chipping away. Especially when it’s a 12-rounder and you’re doing that around six or seven. I know I carry power. I don’t ever question my power. I just wasn’t able to land clean enough, often enough.”

Billam-Smith believes the lessons learned from Latino Night in Riyadh Season serve him well enough to beat Ramirez in a rematch. Maybe that’s bravado, or confidence, or just the mindset a fighter needs to have when they are still ambitious and now he has a point to prove. Billam-Smith was a bit too one-dimensional, he agrees. Ramirez “was very good.”

“Zurdo” punched to the body well, and his volume was impressive.

“All the ways I described him in the build-up happened during the fight, I’d probably say he maybe moved his feet a bit more than I thought he would. He wasn’t necessarily moving quick, but he was just moving a lot and stepping off and stuff like that.

“The [cut] eye happened early on, round three or four, end of fourth the inspector came over, had a look and said to the doctor, ‘He’s on borrowed time’ or something like that or ‘he hasn’t got long’, something along those lines. And I was like, ‘oh here we go’ and at that point I wasn’t sure if it was a headbutt or a punch, because I hadn’t been told.

“I assumed it was a punch. I remember feeling the head. Obviously the head in was going a bit throughout the fight, but you never know, you don’t want to risk it. So I kind of probably tried to step on it a bit, and he just kind of made me fall short in those middle rounds.”

And through it all, from early on, Billam-Smith struggled with blurred vision from the cut. Then, he was cracked in the ribs late on, winded, but bit down and rode out the storm. 

“The cut was not ideal against a southpaw who keeps moving to my left with the left eye not being able to see anything,” the Bournemouth man explained.

“But all I’m thinking about is winning, and how to win, so it’s just effort, effort, effort, and just keep pushing forward. Because I don’t have it in me to just give up and go, ‘oh this is too much,’ I just, I could never do that. But, it [the cut]’s not an excuse, it’s not. It’s something that happens in a fight, you still got to get through it and you still got to win. No matter what happens, you have to find a way to win and that’s what I had to do and I wasn’t able to.”

Defeat is painful. Always physical, sometimes psychological. It is etched permanently onto a record, and it does not hurt only the fighter but those around them. Billam-Smith has long been a key component of Shane McGuigan’s Gym, first as a young student and now as a role model to others. He has become close to Shane’s family, including his Hall of Fame father and Irish boxing legend Barry McGuigan, who was filming a reality TV show in Australia while Billam-Smith defended his title in Saudi.

But, with Billam-Smith back in Bournemouth, he watched Barry on I’m a Celebrity… being informed that his friend had lost his title. In his time with the McGuigans, they have together shared marriage, birth, and loss.

“I was gutted,” BIllam-Smith said of seeing Barry being told about the result on air. “I hadn’t properly cried at the result since I’ve been back from Saudi and then, seeing that, I just felt like I’d let him down, like I felt so disappointed for him because I know how much Barry loves home, I know he’d be struggling in there in a sense of not having [his wife] Sandra, who’s his absolute rock, his grandkids. I know what Barry’s like and I know and I can almost see it at times in there, but he’s Barry and he’s driven which is why he does so well on most of the trials.”

Just three days after Billam-Smith’s only other career defeat, to Richard Riakporhe – since avenged – Barry’s talented daughter, an actress named Danika, passed away. Billam-Smith felt like he’d let the family down at a time when they needed good news. It was a weight he never needed to carry but could not shed.

“I felt like I let the family down that night, because they needed good news. And I almost felt like that, the same with Barry. When I saw it [his reaction in Australia], I didn’t really know, going in there, I know he would be missing home and stuff like that. And I wasn’t able to give him good news. Because I know his reaction would have been, he would have been jumping up and down all over the place and he would have been so happy. Probably would have sworn a fair bit.”

What-ifs flood through Billam-Smith’s thought pattern, but his moment with Zurdo had come and gone. He was babysitting Frank as he watched Barry to the television.

“I ended up just, yeah,” he sighed. “And I just watched it and just like cried watching it because I just hated disappointing others. He [Barry] won’t say he’s disappointed that I didn’t win the fight, but he would be disappointed I didn’t win. He’s not disappointed in me, just about the outcome.

“It was really tough, really tough to watch that. And I was genuinely so gutted and upset.”

It was on November 16 that Billam-Smith’s record moved to 20-2 (13 KOs). Against Ramirez, he had absorbed hard punishment but kept coming. So much so that his stock rose in defeat, for many at least. His promoter at Boxxer, Ben Shalom, has said Saudi Arabia is keen to welcome him back. And the WBC promptly installed the former cruiserweight champion at No. 4. Billam-Smith does not want to box at anything less than world level again.

Rather than being deterred by the competition and opposition, the defeat has served as motivation. He knew he belonged, and he was always aware there was no shortcut to the top. Losing to Ramirez has told Billam-Smith to go away and get better, add to his toolbox, don’t rely on what has always worked and come back better.

For someone who has always strived to improve, adding one per cent at a time, Ramirez gave him critical yet constructive feedback and it is something he is willing to learn from

“Massively, because I almost feel like I can reset in a way and go back to the drawing board, because I felt like before, we would just use my strengths and allow my strengths to get me through a lot of fights, whereas now I feel like I’ve really got to work on my weaknesses to become a little bit more of a complete fighter. That’s inspired by Zurdo. He’s very complete in all areas. He can do everything really, really well, not necessarily anything absolutely outstanding, but everything really well, and, yeah, I think, you know, you’ve got to learn from it, otherwise what are you doing? If you can’t learn and take things from opponents in fights or anything like that and re-evaluate, you usually do anyway after wins, but even more so after this run. If I’m realistically going to be out May time. I’ve got plenty of time to focus on that, so I feel like in January I would have had a nice break, I’m training again now, had two weeks of training, nothing at all now, get fit and strong again, and then January I’m going to start doing a bit more boxing.”

And he has a 12-round template to learn from, now, where he can dissect his performance and build a new version of himself. That is a challenge he is embracing.

“It excites me, it really excites me in that sense, like, wow, I can really do it. Because people are going to go, He’s 34, never going to change,’ and I love that. Because that just motivates me even more. Old dog, new tricks and all that, and I would love to come back and just figure it all out.”

Billam-Smith is not moping. He is a fighter who finds value in every part of his boxing education. He was heroic in defeat, too, and sporting – as you’d expect, living up to his nickname as “The Gentleman.”

“It’s hard to have darkness when you’ve got Frank around,” the former champion smiled, discussing the pain of defeat. “I’m very lucky. I’ve had an amazing time since the fight of just spending every second with him, pretty much, that I can. I’ve had so much fun.”

He’s not climbed on his ribs, then?

“He has, and he punched me in the eye as well. He hit me a few times by accident on the eye. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, you know. I mean I get to, get to wrestle him before bed every night and bath him and read him bedtime stories and that’s what matters most.”

Chris Billam-Smith remains a hero in Bournemouth. And in the future, Frank will know that the price his father paid in battle, to give him a better life, is one that he was always willing pay.