Josh Kelly likes to feel settled. He is not alone in wanting this feeling, of course, but on account of his career choice, finding this feeling is for Kelly more difficult than it is for most. In boxing, after all, the feeling of being surprised or even upended comes with the territory. It is why so many watch two people throw punches and fight. It is also why a fight, where everything is so wonderfully unsettled, remains such a compelling and unpredictable spectacle until the ring clears.
When I first interviewed Josh Kelly in 2018, he was 24 years of age and 5-0 as a pro. We met at Adam Booth’s gym in Merstham and within minutes of us meeting he had labelled himself “the deepest thinker in the world”. Like most deep thinkers, Kelly said this with not an ounce of pride or self-importance. Instead, he almost winced as he said it, as if wishing he had been built some other way, given some other brain. He then explained to me that before a routine sixth-round stoppage of Jean Hamilcaro he had become obsessed with his opponent’s jab; obsessed to such a degree that he found himself watching it repeatedly on video, often while eating dinner or interrupting his fiancée’s favorite television programme. The scene, which he acted out for me, went something like this:
“Can he beat me?” Kelly would ask his fiancée. “He can’t, can he?” In need of a second opinion, he would then position his laptop closer to her. “Watch that jab. Go on, watch it.” He would now hit rewind on the video and together they watched the journeyman throw his jab, over and over again. “Look at that jab. That’s the slowest jab I’ve ever seen.”
“Josh,” his fiancée would say, “just eat your dinner.”
“He’s going to get torched off that jab. If he throws that jab, I swear to God…”
As expected, Kelly had no problem both negating Hamilcaro’s jab and getting him out there. But that is hardly the point, is it? The point, in fact, is if anything strengthened by the ease with which Kelly eventually stopped a man he had spent far too much time worrying about. The point is this: Kelly, the Kelly of old, saw danger at every turn.
“He’s a worrier who becomes a warrior,” Booth said to me that day in Merstham. “A worrying warrior. He is fascinating. His weird thing is his sensitivity. He’s not a narcissist like some. I don’t think his challenges are in a fighting sense. I think it’s more to do with how well-suited his character is to this sport and this business.”
To remove any ambiguity Booth then explained this concern to Kelly. He said, “Because you have this ability to have such a high IQ in what you do (boxing), your brain is working at a level the average person can’t match. The normal brain function is this: eat dinner, watch a bit of telly, relax, brush my teeth, go to bed. But yours is different, and you need time to recover so it can act like that again.
“The way that will manifest is you will start to doubt everything because you’ll be looking for the reason in everything. When you feel like that, do one thing: don’t try and understand or think about anything. Just batten down the hatches, slow yourself down, and watch some TV. Don’t question anything, because in that state you won’t find answers. Eventually, you’ll be back where you want to be.”
Kelly, at last, felt understood, seen. He was not hearing from his coach anything he didn’t already know about himself, but it was encouraging all the same to understand why every situation and opponent seemed bigger and scarier to him than everyone else.
“From the outside,” Kelly said, “you look at me and think I’m a show off or a certain kind of character. But I’ve got a split personality in the ring. When I’m warming up, I get this cocky thing about us. But when I go home, I’m just chilled. I’m the deepest thinker in the world. It can be a good thing or a bad thing. You can be good at analysing boxers and figuring them out quite quickly, which is good, but you can overthink things.
“Luckily, Adam knows me better than I know myself. Within a month he knew everything. He knew what I was thinking.”
To have someone know what you are thinking can offer a degree of comfort, absolutely. Yet still it is not nearly enough to stop the tendencies of those who overthink. Indeed, the single loss of Kelly’s career to date – a sixth-round stoppage at the hands of David Avanesyan – came as a result of not only his opponent’s ferocity but also Kelly’s own habit of overthinking and worrying unduly. Before that fight, you see, Kelly, having withdrawn from a previous date with Avanesyan, became convinced he was going to fall ill a second time and receive another wave of vitriol. So great was this fear, in fact, he soon became a “borderline hypochondriac”, gorging on Lemsip throughout training camp as though his survival depended on it. He even had antibiotics prescribed to him by a private doctor, despite having no reason other than fear to take them. “It was no good for me,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep and I was convinced I was getting ill. I thought, This is happening again.
“On fight week, I’m not exaggerating, I must have got, from the Monday to the Saturday, 13 hours sleep in total,” Kelly added. “I was just not sleeping. I was up thinking, What’s happening here? What’s happening here? I couldn’t stop my mind no matter how much I tried. I couldn’t put my mind to sleep. It was just racing, racing, racing, racing. I was in a bad way. But I thought, I have to fight. I can’t not fight.”
Kelly did in the end fight, though perhaps not to the best of his ability, nor ideally how he would have wanted to fight if in the right frame of mind. He also suffered his first defeat as a pro, the trigger for a 16-month period of soul-searching and a switch – not of coach, or training team, but mindset.
“Gradually, I have lifted a lot of pressure off my own shoulders,” he said. “I love boxing and when I’m in there doing it, I enjoy it so much. I’ve just got to enjoy it and not put pressure on myself – because what will be will be.
“As I’m becoming more mature, I’m starting to realise what really counts, and how much attention I spend on certain things, and what thoughts come to mind, and how much attention I give them. Because it’s not our choice, the thoughts that come into our mind. How much attention you give them, that’s our choice.
“So, I’m sort of riding free at the moment. I’m not letting anything on the outside affect me.”
What helped Kelly during those 16 months was the relationship he built with Steven Green, a mindset coach who, Kelly said, “brought us right down – right down to when I was a kid – and then built me back up again.” He described Green as the “missing piece in the puzzle” and claimed that he was no longer worried about anything, either in the ring or elsewhere.
This is easy to say, of course, when you are as talented and as physically gifted as Kelly. He has also been aided in the quest to rediscover his self-belief by some of his opponents of late. The likes of Peter Kramer, Lucas Bastida, Gabriel Corzo and Placido Ramirez, for example, are not the kind to reawaken any trauma in Kelly or have him doubt himself at a time when he has only started to settle down and believe. They were instead the kind of faceless opponents a boxer prone to overthinking would choose if given the luxury.
Troy Williamson, on the other hand, the man Kelly beat in 2022 to take the British super-welterweight title, was a different proposition altogether. He, unlike the others, carried with him a belt, no small amount of ambition and, moreover, was a local rival of Kelly’s, meaning he spoke the same language and could use this language to get under Kelly’s skin. That Williamson ultimately failed to do so is a testament to Kelly’s progress and his maturation, with that 12-round thrashing of Williamson the finest performance of Kelly’s career to date.
Next for Kelly, on Saturday (September 21), is Ishmael Davis, 13-0 (6), a Yorkshireman who outpointed Troy Williamson in his last fight. It was of course meant to be Liam Smith for Kelly at Wembley only Smith pulled out last week, creating a period of uncertainty and leaving Kelly, 15-1-1 (8), in need of a replacement. It is now in this switch of opponents much of the fight’s intrigue can be found. After all, for a boxer who loves nothing more than to be settled, surely the worst possible thing to have to endure is a switch in plans leading to a switch in opponent and style. Suddenly, having for weeks on end been preparing for one face and one body, now you must encounter – first in your mind, then in the ring – a different one altogether. This is a testing situation for even the most malleable and carefree of fighters, yet for a fighter like Kelly, someone whose confidence has historically been a result of knowing where everything is, an impromptu ambushing could be as much a threat as the opponent itself.
That remains to be seen. For now, though, we can be sure of two things. We can be sure, for one, that a short-notice replacement is a more interesting development here, in this fight, than it ordinarily would be, when often deflation is the overriding feeling. And we can also be sure that Josh Kelly, a man who has in recent times learned to care a little less, has never been better prepared for change and unrest than he is right now.
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