Pure Surreal: Four months after his father’s death, Jake Limond prepares to fight without him

TWO years ago, Willie Limond was preparing to box at the Normandy Hotel in Renfrew on a card on which his son, Jake, would also appear. It was, for Willie, a rebirth, his first fight in three years, and the motivation, he said, was simple: to share a bill with his boy before it was too late. He was, at the time, 43 years of age and suggested, when we spoke, that it would be just one fight, with only one box left to tick. 

Jake (pictured left), meanwhile, was preparing for his second pro fight on that Renfrew bill and, at 18, was so young that prior to interviewing him I sought permission from his dad. “Oh, aye,” said Willie, “you should. Jake’ll love that. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, too. Mature for his age. He’ll be all right.”

Two years later, on a Saturday morning in April, Willie Limond (center) suffered a seizure while driving his car following a gym session. He had been training for a bout against Joe Laws on May 3, having discovered that one more fight was not enough, and was found unresponsive inside his vehicle on the morning of April 6. He was taken to Monklands Hospital in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, where he remained in a comatose state and later passed away. He was just 45 years of age, old only in boxing terms.

On Friday night (August 23), Jake Limond, now 20, will box at the Normandy Hotel on a card on which his 18-year-old brother, Drew (right), will also make his debut. There will, again, be two Limonds fighting in Renfrew only this time they will be siblings rather than father and son. Now, when speaking with Jake, I must go directly to the source. “In fact, Elliot, could you do 10am?” he texts me the day before our latest interview. “Need to take ma wee brother to school lol.” 

As I read this message, I am reminded of both his maturity and immaturity. I am also reminded of what happened four months ago and wonder how his life may have changed as a result. 

“If my mum asks me to do it, I’ll do it,” he says, having taken Denny, his brother, to primary school and then his girlfriend to work. “We live in the same house and my mum went to’ – he pauses, smiles – ‘she’s started doing boxing as well. She’s doing these wee boxing classes and that, so I said I’d do the school run this morning. 

“She started about two months ago. I thought it was boxercise or something but she showed me a couple of videos and it’s actually in a gym I used to go to and she’s doing actual pad work and bag work. She’s enjoying it but she says it’s quite hard. So long as she’s not sparring, I’m all right with it.”

In truth, the boxing gym has always represented solid ground for the Limond family, a sort of halfway house where they could meet, bond, and thrive. Even though his parents split when he was 10, it was always through boxing, and in the boxing gym, that Jake and the others maintained contact and saw themselves as a team. Indeed, it was there, in the boxing gym, Jake last saw his father alive. It was there, too, he received the call on April 6. 

“I do personal training, so I started work dead early that day, at like six o’clock, and was meant to be in until 12 or something,” he recalls. “I was training a boy and then I just got a call on the gym’s phone. They said it was the police and I thought, Oh, this is a bit heavy. They were phoning me to tell me they had my dad and I was just thinking this sounds pure dodge. I said, ‘What are youse talking about?’ They said he was taken unwell and I asked them then if he was all right and they just said he had been taken to hospital. It was dead confusing. 

“When they found my dad, they didn’t have any contacts for him and so didn’t know who to phone. Because they knew Willie Limond, though, they typed his name into Google and found him on Instagram. Then they found me, my Instagram, and the gym I worked in.

“Anyway, I drove up to the hospital and it was a big fucking rammy. The first day was all right because it was just close family: me, Drew, my maw, my dad’s brothers, and my dad’s maw and dad. But then people started dropping in all the time and being pure weird.”

Drew, two years younger than Jake, had that morning been holding pads for their father in the gym. The final conversation they shared therefore was conducted in the language in which all three were fluent and with which they were most familiar: leather hitting leather. 

“He was dead fit and all that,” says Jake. “They were doing pads, bags, circuits. He was looking well. That’s how random it was. He was looking well one minute and then all of a sudden took unwell. Completely random, man. Genuinely that’s the only word I can use to describe it: random.

“I know a lot of people have said it’s because of brain damage from the boxing, but it hasn’t got anything to do with it. If I was looking at a 45-year-old guy who had 50 fights, and a lot of them had been wars, I would probably think it was the boxing, too. But that’s why we were all shocked. It wasn’t the boxing that done this. It was literally just a pure random occurrence. If he stopped boxing 10 years ago, or if he had never taken the Joe Laws fight, it wouldn’t have mattered. The same thing would have happened.”

In the hospital, where they waited for 10 days, Jake and Drew took control, first of themselves, then the situation. They entertained hope for a day or so before preparing for the worst; that is, life without Dad. 

“We were the ones speaking to all the doctors and staying on top of the situation,” Jake says. “With me and Drew, we’re dead realists, right? We were immediately on the same kind of wavelength in terms of what the script is. In the hospital the first day they made out like they had to do this and do that and would wake him up in the morning; you know, as if it was some overnight thing and in the morning he’d wake up and just be a bit unwell. But then the next day we were told it was quite bad actually and then me and Drew were like, ‘You know what the script is, don’t you?’ Aye, we did. We just had to see it out for the next couple of days. But having Drew there helped. Sounds daft, but me and Drew are like best pals. It was good having him there to just talk to about stuff. Also, because we’ve got that dark humour…” Jake pauses to laugh at a joke yet to be shared. “At one point, right, Drew told all the boys from the boxing gym what the script was and said they should probably come up and see him. So they’ve all come in one day and Drew has stormed the door to the ward and they all looked pure shocked as Drew just did this mad jump and yelled, ‘April Fools!’ I thought, For fuck’s sake, Drew. But it made the situation a bit easier. It added a bit of fucking light to it. That’s what my dad would have found funny.”

They call it gallows humour, of course, yet Jake has another word for it: necessary. It was, during this period, perhaps as essential to the Limond boys as their maturity and mental strength. “My dad and my maw are both mentally strong people,” Jake says, “and I’ve always been quite mature. Everybody in the family has said it for ages. Being like that has obviously helped quite a lot in the last four months.”

Another thing that helped was the boxing gym. The ability to go there between spells at the hospital allowed both Jake and Drew to not only burn off the weight they had put on while waiting around, but also to maintain contact with their father in one world – their world – as he departed the other. 

“Drew went up to about 85 kilograms and I was about 83. It was the heaviest we’ve ever been,” Jake says. “You’re sitting in a hospital all day waiting, not eating, and then you go home and just stuff your face, man. It was pure panic-eating; unhealthy. 

“Us waiting wasn’t going to help my dad, or the doctors, so me and Drew were still training. We’d do a session with Michael McGurk, who is our trainer now, and go hit the bag for a wee bit and take our minds off it. We’d then shower and go back to the hospital. Once the funeral happened, we were in the gym every day.”

It is hard to know when listening to Jake whether his stoicism, as well as his ability to speak with such clarity about something so harrowing, is the result of strength or a certain numbness. Equally, it is hard to say with any confidence whether his ability to cope is the result of maturity or instead immaturity; that is to say, a youthful ignorance and an ever-developing perspective and view of the world. Either way, there is a sense he is in a daze.

“After the second day me and Drew knew it was going to happen but even when it did it didn’t feel real,” he says. “It sounds pure stupid but to have our dad gone felt strange. He was a big part of our lives. He was a big character; not just a normal guy. He was more like our actual pal. You could hang out with him and his pals and he could hang out with you and yours.

“Also, seeing him train for the Ricky Burns fight (in September 2023), and do all that training at his age, we were like, ‘How can he do that?’ It was pure inhuman. Then all of a sudden he dies. That is so random. That is so out of character for him to die that way. Like, I’m still expecting to receive a phone call from him or a voice note. He used to always send voice notes to us and that was his thing. It’s pure strange not receiving them now. It’s like being in a dream.”

I remind him that his father’s dream was to compete on the same bill as his son, the memory of which pleases Jake. “Me, Drew and my dad, we were always this close group, so it has been hard to be down to two,” he says. “When you actually deep it, it’s pure surreal. Like, what actually is this? It is a horrible situation. But hey, you can’t do anything about it, so there’s no point putting everything we have been doing on the backburner. We both have opportunities now and if we lose momentum my dad would be like, ‘What are you doing? Why are youse sitting about doing nothing?’ We have to just keep it going.”

Even the thought of continuing without the presence of his father doesn’t unsettle Jake. In fact, when contemplating this, he says, rather jovially, “I’ve had a couple of square goes in school and my dad’s not been there, so it’ll be all right.” He also gets a kick out of revealing, when asked what he has taken from his father, “I’ve bumped his design for my shorts. My shorts for this fight are the same shorts he wore for the fight against Curtis Woodhouse.” 

As for the fight itself, Jake, 6-0, expects it to be no different than any other, a claim he makes with all the bravado of a fighter. “If there was ever going to be an outpouring of emotion it would have been this week,” he explains. “Usually nine or 10 days before a fight I’d stay with my dad. I’ve not been able to do that this time and nothing’s happened yet. I think I’ll be all right.” 

“He’ll be all right,” Willie said to me two years ago. 

He’ll be all right.