Fifteen years ago, the world was a very different place. You didn’t have talk about Donald Trump, pandemics and vaccines. Michael Jackson died, Barack Obama was inaugurated and “Avatar” knocked off “Titanic” for the top spot as the highest-grossing movie of all time.
Society has moved on, and this hyper-speed social evolutionary period has altered the landscape in our minds and the minds of others, even within the four walls of a sport named boxing.
In 2009, talking about your problems and your woes was not the done thing.
This was before Tyson Fury lifted the lid on his mental health struggles, Jamel Herring had discussed PTSD and Ricky Hatton conversed about suicidal thoughts. And it was only in 2013 – more than 30 years after his first bout with Roberto Duran – that Sugar Ray Leonard saw fit to document his lowest ebbs in his book “The Big Fight.”
In 2009, an Irish prospect named Darren Sutherland was cutting his teeth in the pros. He was 4-0 (4 KOs), incredibly popular and had the world in his gloves. A former Olympic bronze medallist, he was tipped for the top.
But during an interview at The Real Fight Club one day, I asked him how good things felt, to have the TV deal with Sky, to be the man on everyone’s lips, to have everything a fighter could hope for coming his way.
“It’s lonely,” he confided.
It was jarring. How could it possibly be so? Life, so it seemed, was there for the taking, in that houses, cars, money – whatever – were all right around the corner. And because he was so likeable, everyone wanted him to have them.
Sutherland did not, however, enjoy spending long periods away from his home, training in London. He was homesick. There was pressure. The things you couldn’t see but he could feel were taking a silent toll. Darren was swimming in a darkness that could not be detected with the naked eye, and the warning that he was lonely was an outlier of a confession. Because in this rough, old business, you don’t admit those kinds of things. You don’t show weakness. You can’t. In the ring or out.
But Darren showed a vulnerability that made him infinitely more relatable without it appearing to be a distress flare because I – perhaps we – didn’t know what they looked like at the time.
A few months later, Sutherland hanged himself in his flat in London.
I was on a family holiday in Spain when his image appeared on the television and I turned the mute button off to listen. His coach, Brian Lawrence, and I spoke on the phone. He was still in shock. It was an unspeakable tragedy and all too real.
The hopes of a fighter
A few months earlier, I’d been to visit Sutherland at the gym, a regular commute for me given the same facility also saw Carl Froch, Darren Barker, Lee Meager, Ian Napa, Lenny Dawes, Anthony Small, Luis Garcia and Mike Perez spend time there for sparring, and I interviewed Sutherland for “Fighting Fit” magazine.
I watched the Irishman train with an intensity I had rarely seen. His T-shirt was wringing wet, but still he punched with ferocity, skipped with purpose and did everything Lawrence ordered and more.
“I really do love my work, so hopefully people who come and watch me train and watch me fight can see that I really enjoy my boxing,” Sutherland said. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. My ambition since I was a child was always boxing. I always wanted to be a professional, so right now I’m living my dream. … Whatever happens, I will give it my best. I believe I can do it. And if it doesn’t happen, then I will be able to say that I have done everything in my power to get there and I will be able to sleep at night. But I believe I can go all the way.”
He was not alone. Frank Maloney, now Kellie Maloney, had signed Sutherland in anticipation of big things. Sky Sports had utter belief in him. He had lost to James DeGale in the Olympics, but Sutherland had previous amateur victories over DeGale in a storied rivalry before they even made it to Beijing in 2008.
When Sutherland was training, he appeared at peace. The sweat dripped from him, but there was no sign of torment or struggle in his mind – just a stark, gritty clarity about the mission ahead.
“I’m happiest when I’m in the gym,” he said. “When I’m out of it, I don’t know what to do with myself.”
He loved the buzz of sparring and fighting. He loved the attention to detail. Perhaps he liked the distraction it gave him from the real world.
“I’m a perfectionist,” Sutherland said. “That’s one of the genes I have – that everything I do, I have to be the best at it. There’s no half-doing anything. I either do it at 100 per cent or I don’t do it at all.”
He had only started boxing at 15, and had already been in tough fights as a novice pro beginning his journey. Sutherland was so experienced, such a sure thing, that he started off his career boxing six-rounders. But he talked with relish about great fights of the past, and he was keen to make his mark.
“I want one of those fights,” he said, reflecting about classic wars. “I want to be in a life-or-death fight where I get knocked down, my face is in bits and I come back from the brink to win.”
When asked if he would know when it would be the right time to call it a day in the sport, he said he was too in love with it to quit.
“Right now, I can’t imagine it,” Sutherland said. “But when it happens, that’s when you stop. When I no longer want to do it or my heart’s not in it, it will be time to stop.”
The life of a fighter
“Yeah, he comes in my mind quite a lot,” Brian Lawrence said with a sigh.
Scars from the wounds the trainer had in the aftermath of Sutherland’s passing have sealed, but he still thinks of the man who would have been his prized student.
Lawrence still thinks of Sutherland regularly, and that much is clear because his Facebook profile picture shows the two of them talking in the gym.
“He was very good – very, very good. I mean, for me, he had to become a world champion,” Lawrence said, with the sounds of bags being clattered in the background by some of his young prospects. “If he didn’t become a world champion, he’d have underachieved. That’s how good he was. He could do everything. He could punch, technically was very good. He had it all.”
Sutherland’s first pro fight was in December 2008, and his last was June 30, 2009. Lawrence worked with him through the week in London and was clearly impressed with Sutherland’s talents. He spoke with great pride of having the responsibility of bringing out the best in the Irish star, and even today of thinking of how highly others thought of his talented then-27-year-old.
“His second professional fight was live on Sky, and Ricky Hatton was commentating on the show, and after the fight he said Darren looked like a kid who’d had 22 professional fights,” Lawrence said with a wistful shake of the head. “That was just his second fight. That’s how good he was.”
In the gym, it was the same. The determination. The skill. The talent. The drive and ambition.
“He handled everyone he sparred with,” Lawrence said. “He sparred with [future world middleweight champion] Darren Barker after a few months, and it was good sparring. It was even sparring, and I wouldn’t say he had wars, but he was very technically good.”
Sutherland was also coming through as part of a crop of talented youngsters who included future super middleweight champions George Groves and James DeGale.
“Without a doubt, he would have been a champion,” Lawrence said. “Easily. I’d have expected him to achieve as much as them – and even more.
“No doubt, he’d have been a world champion. He had everything.”
But Sutherland’s was a complex mind. His soul was embattled. And then, one Monday, the phone rang. Lawrence picked it up and Maloney was on the other end.
“Have you seen Darren?” asked Maloney.
“No, I ain’t,” Lawrence replied. Nor was he supposed to. They didn’t train Mondays. Instead, Sutherland had a late appointment with a counselor, and so Lawrence did not expect him.
“Ain’t he going to see the counselor?” Brian asked.
“No, that’s in the evening,” Maloney said.
Joe Dunbar, who had been working with Sutherland on his nutrition, had been trying to contact the fighter.
“They went ‘round his house, Joe and Frank, and I was in the gym, and about an hour later, they called me back and said, ‘Brian, don’t say nothin’. Darren’s dead. He’s committed suicide.’
“And I remember, Eric Ochieng had had his first professional fight on the Friday, and he was in the gym on the Monday, and everyone was congratulating him and everything and they were all jolly. But they saw the way I was looking and wondered what was wrong. I couldn’t say nothin’ because they wanted Darren’s parents located before the news broke.”
More than two years on, an inquest heard details about Sutherland’s final days, and it is all so desperately sad.
Fifteen years removed from Sutherland’s death, it remains one of the starker tragedies in modern boxing, particularly because one would like to think that if someone were struggling in such a way today that there would be help, or support, or that it could be avoidable. Maybe. Maybe not.
Lawrence did not know what Sutherland was like behind closed doors, and he doesn’t delve into his fighters’ private lives. Not really. Sutherland kept his battles quiet. Lawrence said occasionally that friends would visit from Ireland. He knew Sutherland would often go by Maloney’s place in London, and he would sometimes meet with friends.
“He was very friendly, everything,” said Lawrence. “But with the problems he had – what I expect now is he [was] bipolar – and people have different moods. Because when his mood switched the week it happened, he was just like a different person. I saw him come in the gym, him and his mum … and that was the first time I knew we had a problem. That was the Monday, and by the Sunday, he’d hanged himself. That’s how quick it was, the kind of deterioration.
“What we learnt after was, even when he was on the Ireland squad, they had a counselor dealing with him. But we didn’t have a clue. We’d just seen him at the Olympics, Frank Maloney’s gone over there, done the deal with him, and that’s all we saw. We were swimming in the dark. That’s the reason why the Boxing Board now, when they do a medical for fighters, their own GP has to do the medical. They’ve got to hear from the person’s GP, so we know about these things. So something like that, everybody knows. Before, you’d just get a doctor to examine someone and fill in the form. With anything like that, unless the person says, you’d never know.
“He had all of Ireland behind him. He had a lot on his shoulders. His debut fight sold out in a couple of hours over in Ireland, and he would have been sensational if what happened didn’t happen to him.”
The loneliness of a fighter
Johnny Nelson is a former world cruiserweight champion, who did his fair share of fighting on the road, competitively and as a sparring partner. He had heard of Sutherland’s potential when the latter was just an amateur, given that Nelson’s Irish mentor, Brendan Ingle, still had his ear to the ground.
“Brendan saw him in Ireland and he was telling us all about this kid he was going to bring over, and Darren, when he came to the [Ingle] gym [in Wincobank, UK], just needed that extra little bit of TLC,” recalled Nelson. “So in our gym, the way it was, you give them hellfire and take the piss a lot, and he blended in quite well. He fought his own corner and he ended up moving in with me for a while, in my house, and I remember my wife at the time saying, ‘It’s like having another kid!’”
As a Sky pundit, Nelson worked as a commentator on Sutherland’s fights and saw the potential. He also saw the domestic landscape filling up with stars, such as Froch, Groves and DeGale, and he saw Sutherland’s place on the scene. Comparing it to the Nigel Benn-Steve Collins-Chris Eubank-Michael Watson era of the early 1990s, Nelson believed the Sutherland hype – but also felt that Sutherland, the soft-spoken Dublin talent, was the quiet one who would ultimately let his fists talk the loudest.
“He was the Michael Watson of the lot. He was the one people ignored. He was the one they didn’t give credit to when it was due. He was actually the probably better boxer of all of them. He was a very talented kid,” Nelson said. “He was an unbelievable talent. I think with Darren, it was more he was a clever boxer. He’d figure things out, so if he was having a hard time sparring, you’d see him understand it mid-round and change things, which is an amazing talent. Because you get some fighters that go out there, they can’t switch and they can do one thing, but he was very good at adapting. I don’t know how far he’d have gone.”
But Nelson – who was sent to Germany to spar the likes of Henry Maske, Torsten May and Axel Schultz, spending weeks away from home at a time – knew how soul-destroying swimming in the darkness could be.
“When he moved down to London, I remember him calling and saying he had an apartment and he had a car and he was saying, ‘I can’t believe it.’ He loved it. He did love what they’d given him, but I know what London is like. It can be the loneliest place in the world,” said Nelson, who had also endured training camps in the capital. “And I think the type of kid he was, he needed someone around him – a parent, a friend, someone to have an arm around his shoulder. Because in London, you’re gonna train in the gym and you’re gonna go home. Unless you’ve got a friendship circle or family, it’s gonna be hard. So when, unfortunately, I heard the devastating news, I thought it was just a combination of so many things. It was so so sad to hear.”
The pressure of a fighter
Tony Jeffries, for Team GB, grabbed a bronze medal at the same Olympics as Sutherland. He also signed with Maloney, the promoter who spoke of great things to come at 168lbs and 175lbs in the UK over the next three or four years.
Jeffries was a ticket seller and popular, from Sunderland in the north of England, and the idea was to build the two bronze medalists together and, one would imagine, to ultimately have them fight. By that point, Sutherland and Jeffries had known one another for years, given their days globetrotting before they turned over.
“I remember him from the amateur days, when we would travel around the world, and I would always see him around and about,” Jeffries remembered. “The top fighter in the weight below me, James DeGale – that was his nemesis, if you like, and [Sutherland] was a top, top fighter. Fit. Strong. He could punch hard with both hands. Very dedicated. He turned pro with Maloney before me, then I went into the same stable as him. We did a couple of press conferences together. There was one when we both brought our medals, and there are pictures of us together with our medals, and my thoughts were Maloney was trying to build us both up and then match us together, because I went down to super middleweight. … Or, basically, he was going to invest into these two Olympic medalists, hoping one of them would be really, really good and be successful. But, unfortunately for Frank Maloney, neither of us did that.”
Jeffries, now an online and social media star through his online boxing coaching, had to call it a day after 10 pro fights because of hand injuries that he couldn’t shake. But as “Jaffa” and “The Dazzler” came through, there was a new pressure they were starting to experience.
When Jeffries and Sutherland first laced on gloves, MySpace was not even a pipedream. Their hopes of fame and fortune were to be on the back of newspapers, drive fast cars and go to the trendiest nightclubs. By the time they started on their pro journeys, however, every move was being decrypted on social media – and often by trolls. It is a society Jeffries has learned to live and thrive in, but he admits it was a tough period for fighters who were exposed to previously unparalleled levels of scrutiny and criticism.
When Jeffries fought capable Welsh gatekeeper Nathan King and was caught by a right hand, it had many scurrying to their keyboards to say he would never make it because he had taken a punch that had not overly troubled him.
“With boxing, we had a lot of pressure on us as well,” Jeffries said. “With us coming back from the Olympics, especially with medals, we were put under a microscope – especially because all of our fights were live on Sky Sports. Maloney had a contract with Sky, which was great. But one thing you don’t realize when you’re under the microscope, it’s not just boxing fans that’s watching you – it’s the boxing critics, the boxing haters, the people who maybe didn’t make it as fighters, and they just want to come and shit on every fighter there is.
“The criticism that I got after that fight was ridiculous. ‘This guy’s shit, he’s not going to do anything, he’s not going to go anywhere, how was he an Olympian?’
“I just got so much criticism for getting caught with one bloody punch, and I couldn’t believe it. It opened my eyes. It made me want to pack in boxing, because I got over a thousand messages telling me I was shit, that I should retire, that my mum was a slag. The criticism was ridiculous. And I can only imagine Darren got similar to me. It’s not just us; all fighters are under the spotlight like that, and criticism is harsh. That’s the thing about coming back from the Olympics with a medal and being under that microscope: No one ever tells you that you’re gonna get criticized or how to deal with it. If someone tells you that you’re shit on social media, ignore it. No one tells you about that. So when it happens, it’s tough. It puts doubt in your mind. It’s tough, and it’s something that all Olympians had to deal with and it made me question whether the sport was right for me.”
It was a new time to be a fighter, a new era. They were all swimming in the dark.
“I’m sure he dealt with the same horrible criticism, but he was a great fighter,” said Jeffries. “I really believe that he would have been one who would have gone all the way. Tough. Maybe he’s a bit like Chris Eubank Jnr as a fighter – but he wasn’t cocky like him. I think the resilience and toughness, he could punch hard.
“He seemed like a great lad – always smiling – and I guess that’s one of the things with mental health: You never know what anyone’s facing inside. It seemed like he was obsessed with boxing, where he would eat, sleep and repeat, and that was his life.”
The death of a fighter
In some ways, Darren Sutherland lived on beyond 2009. One fighter who always wanted to make sure Sutherland was remembered was old rival DeGale. He wore the initials D.S. on his trunks. They should have fought. They should have made millions together. And they should have been swapping their war stories, amateur and pro, into old age.
Speaking late Sunday night, DeGale remembered Sutherland: “What a fighter. He was probably the strongest guy I boxed. The strength he had was crazy. I boxed him five times, he beat me three times, I beat him two times. The two times I beat him was to qualify for the Olympics and the Olympic semi-finals.
“He was one of my first senior fights for England in a multi-nations and I beat Craig McEwan in the semis and boxed him in the finals. We had a brilliant rivalry. Two quality fighters from the Four Nations. He was brilliant. Tough, tough guy. It was very sad. Mental health is so important, it really is.”
When DeGale won the IBF super middleweight title, he dedicated it to Sutherland.
“Of course it’s for Darren Sutherland, my late rival,” said DeGale in his locker room, having beaten Andre Dirrell. “When he took his life back in 2009, it was horrendous. And from when he passed, I’ve always had D.S. on my shorts – and this world title is for him as well. He was a great guy; great fighter. Unbelievable fighter. We’ve had some great scraps, and this was for him.”
They had been on the same mission and DeGale felt they had reached the destination together.
“That was my way of saying thank you for our fights. It was such a sad time. I won a world title, so he won a world title at the same time,” DeGale added.
In a way, it was fitting. But it was not the end anyone wanted. Not even DeGale.
Sutherland’s life was a story that we wanted to continue. We were not ready for the untimely end, even if he felt he was.
But Sutherland no longer had to swim in the darkness.
A handful of years later, fighters began openly discussing mental health issues and their problems. The culture had sufficiently changed for boxers at all levels to open up rather than man up.
Perhaps Sutherland played a role in that – swimming in the darkness so others no longer needed to.
Being a fighter always has been a lonely affair. You run endless miles on your own. You wake up and push yourself. You address the self-doubt in your mind, before spars and before fights. You suffer in silence. You struggle.
Sutherland’s story should have been one of success rather than sadness. But that his story is still told is important.
“I think it’s really good you’re writing a piece about him,” said Jeffries. “He shouldn’t be forgotten.”
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