Michael Conlan opts for Grant Smith as new trainer, will return to featherweight

After pondering a few options for his new trainer, former featherweight title challenger Michael Conlan has selected Grant Smith.

The other options included Stephen Smith and Buddy McGirt.

“I appreciate the time I’ve had with all the guys I’ve worked with. It’s been great, but I believe Grant’s the next step for me. He’s the right one to help my career, and the right coach for me at the right time,” Conlan said in a recent interview with Louis Hart of Boxing Social. “I just like how he operates. It was a very, very hard decision.”

One of the crucial factors, according to Conlan, is the number of other notable boxers who work with Grant Smith, which is a key difference from Stephen Smith and from Conlan’s previous trainer, Pedro Diaz.

“I actually chose Grant because of the quality fighters he had around. Stephen only has a few fighters, Charlie Edwards being the main one,” Conlan said. “Pedro’s probably one of the best coaches I’ve ever worked with. I’m very grateful to have been under him for a while. I was basically training by myself a lot of the time. It was alright when we were doing it, but in hindsight it probably wasn’t what I needed. I chose Grant because he has so many high quality fighters there [who] you can push yourself against in the gym and try to excel.”

Among Grant Smith’s fighters at the Steel City Gym in Sheffield are former undisputed 140-pound champion Chantelle Cameron, former flyweight titleholder Sunny Edwards, junior welterweight prospect Dalton Smith (Grant’s son), and junior middleweight prospect Junaid Boston.

Conlan earned bronze in the 2012 Olympics as a flyweight and then competed again in the 2016 games as a bantamweight, suffering a highly controversial loss in the quarterfinals to Vladimir Nikitin.

He turned pro in 2017, worked his way up the featherweight ranks, and got revenge over Nikitin in the process. In 2022, Conlan was narrowly ahead on the scorecards going into the final round of an absolute war with secondary WBA titleholder Leigh Wood, only to be dropped and stopped with about 95 seconds to go.

After picking up a couple of wins over Miguel Marriaga and Karim Guerfi, Conlan challenged IBF titleholder Luis Alberto Lopez in May 2023 and was stopped again, this time in the fifth round. Conlan then suffered another loss last December, put away in seven rounds by Jordan Gill.

That dropped Conlan to 18-3 (9 KOs).

The fight with Gill was at junior lightweight. Conlan feels he now has more time to get his body lighter and plans to return to 126.

But he’s not calling out any names just yet, preferring to get used to working with Smith before signing up for another fight. Conlan, who turns 33 in November, says the latest he’ll be back is March 2025.

“I may not fight this year, because I need to make sure everything’s right. I need to spend quality time with a coach before we decide to go into training camp and start fighting,” Conlan said. “We’ll have plenty of time working together and gelling and getting to know each other. And learn his methods and show him my own kind of style and let him get used to that. You can’t rush into things.

“I want to come back and have one [fight] to get back in with a new coach, then we move forward, maybe another kind of middle-level one, and then we go straight back to the top,” he said.

That approach reflects the fact that this is, as Conlan puts it, his “last chance.”

“If I was to lose next, that would be it,” he said, and soon added: “I’ll keep going now until it’s done, until the next loss and then I would be done. But I’m not putting loads of emphasis on it, I’m just enjoying it and trying to get back to  the best me, which I believe will be world champion.

“My career’s a long story,” Conlan said. “It’s been a very great career, an up-and- down career. I’ve earned an awful lot of money. And me coming back now isn’t about money. It’s about trying to reach the goal.”

Follow David Greisman on Twitter @FightingWords2. His book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” is available on Amazon.