The rise and resilience of Robert Smith, the governor of British boxing

Though certain promoters, heads of broadcasters and, on occasion, boxers might be deemed as being more influential than Robert Smith, it is he who has been atop the boxing hierarchy in Britain since he was appointed as the General Secretary of the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBoC) in October 2008. Smith’s authority was heightened further when the Board last year became the commission of choice for General Entertainment Authority’s (GEA) Turki Alalshikh – arguably the most influential of all in the current worldwide landscape.

Smith’s role has indeed evolved enormously. 

It’s easy for those who live through a particular era to overstate its impact because at any given point in history an awful lot of twists and turns occur in the space of a decade or more. Yet it does feel like Smith has overseen 16 years of significant change.

Back in 2008, for example, Alalshikh was taking his first steps in a career with the Saudi government; Eddie Hearn was working on the poker circuit; Anthony Joshua was flirting with a life of crime; women were still widely regarded as being too delicate to fight; pay-per-view was used only for fights worth paying for; the presence of performance-enhancing drugs was rarely addressed; press conferences were attended almost exclusively by the written press; and social media was just an excuse to catch up with old pals as opposed to the ungoverned cesspit it is today. And Smith, who turns 62 today (October 2), was a relative pup.

After 16 years spent dealing with egocentric promoters, legal cases spawned from failed medicals and drug tests, threats to his family on social media, alongside the debilitating heartache of the occasional tragedy inside a British ring, Smith is proudly gnarled. If he’s grumpy at work he won’t hide it and if he’s cheerful only those who know him would be aware. His failure to suffer fools has crafted a blunt, sometimes standoffish, persona that is frankly essential in his line of work. One naturally wonders how much longer he can stand it.

“Common sense tells you I’ve got less time in the job than I’ve had,” Smith tells me. “I’ve certainly been here longer than I anticipated but there are a number of matters I want to get cleared before I start thinking about what I want to do next. Do I still enjoy it? Not as much as I used to because of all the issues, the legal matters. Obviously, I deal with boxing matches, etcetera, but I don’t do as much as I did. I am dealing with more and more legal issues than ever before, which is very frustrating because I’m not a lawyer – even though I’ve learnt a great deal about law – but it’s just one of those things. I think every chief executive in every sport has the same problem.”

Smith’s nine-month journey into boxing was complete when he was born to a Welsh mother and Scottish father in England in 1962. “You could say I’m very British,” Smith says while noting he had an Irish grandmother to complete the set. One grandfather boxed in the Scottish booths, the other for the Welsh Fusiliers, and his father – who was “very strict” – was a boxing trainer and manager. “Boxing was very much in the family, it was in our blood,” Smith explains. “My two older brothers boxed in the forces, and I boxed as an amateur and professional. When boxing is so ingrained in a family, it is hard to shake off which, sometimes, is unfortunate but the sport has been good to me.”

It wasn’t always. Smith turned professional at the age of 18 – “which was too early with hindsight” – but almost immediately started to suffer with injuries. After leaving school at 15 with ambitions of being a boxer, his father insisted he had a ‘trade’, so Smith became a qualified toolmaker only to find himself unemployed when the company he worked for went bust.

“I’d lost my job, I’d got injured [from boxing] so I went to California [and worked in engineering] for three years,” Smith explains. “I came back and tried [being a boxer] again. By the time I was 23, 24, injuries took over; I wanted to continue but the body wasn’t strong enough. I dislocated my shoulder three times, broke my hand twice, fractured my thumb five times and, at that point, I realised I wasn’t really going to get anywhere.”

Smith’s ring record, which features an injury-induced loss to future world welterweight champion Lloyd Honeyghan, has stood at a perfectly respectable 16-5 (11 KOs) since his departure in 1989. “Then I carried on with the engineering, producing water pumps, and I was part of the design team behind [London financial district] Canary Wharf, many, many years ago.”

With a promising and lucrative future ahead of him, he opted to take a significant pay cut to become an administrator for the BBBoC. “I just wanted to be part of the sport,” Smith recalls. “After I finished boxing, I took out a trainer’s licence and trained a couple of boxers but, because of my job, and it was a busy job, I really couldn’t give them enough time, so it wasn’t fair, rushing backwards and forwards, not being able to give them 100 per cent. 

“When I applied for the job of an administrator, my father thought I was crazy. He thought I’d gone mad, being an administrator in sport with all the arguments and disagreements. It’s worked out reasonably well – I think he’d be quite happy with how it’s gone.” 

Smith admits he’s not the same “very happy” person he was on the day he accepted the role, largely because his working days are now taken up with wading through legal jargon and what he enjoyed – “the boxing” – is now the responsibility of others in his small team. 

Increasingly, those legal issues involve performance-enhancing drugs. Smith has been criticised for his handling of certain matters, not least the length of time it takes in the UK between a boxer failing a PED test and the case being resolved. “We, like every sport in this country, have signed up to work with United Kingdom Anti-Doping [UKAD], therefore they deal with all of our testing,” he explains. “So I book the tests for fights, they have an out of competition scheme, where they can test anybody they want to at any point. 

“The disciplinary matter is down to UKAD. I will be the first person to hold my hands up and say it takes too long to get a decision. However, we are very limited with what we can do, we are not experts, they are the experts. Everybody is entitled to argue their case and therefore when you have legal people involved, it takes time. I think it takes too long, but we are signed up to UKAD and they act on behalf of the British Boxing Board of Control and we have to accept their decision and the process they take.”

So it’s fair to say the Board is purely at the mercy of UKAD in the matter of failed tests? “We can challenge it for sure, and I can’t go into that too much, but it has happened. Ultimately, we work alongside them, they work on our behalf.”

Conor Benn is a prime example of one such long and winding process. His two failed tests came to light in October 2022, days before he was due to take on Chris Eubank Jr. Two years later, that saga rumbles on in the background but Smith, who refused to buckle under some weighty pressure, was at the forefront of an appeal against a July 2023 ruling from the National Anti-Doping Panel that essentially cleared Benn on a legal loophole because the tests were conducted by the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association and not UKAD. That appeal, in conjunction with UKAD, was won and on May 7, 2024, Benn was returned to a state of Provisional Suspension.

Smith will not discuss Benn but it’s certainly not unique for an athlete to hire industry-leading lawyers to fight their case. Does that make Smith’s position with the Board more difficult, from a financial perspective, when it comes to enforcing punishment?

“I don’t think it’s that difficult at all,” Smith says without hesitation. “We’re either doing the job or we’re not and if it takes a lot of money then it has to take a lot of money. Unfortunately, these things generally do take a lot of money. But I’m certainly, on behalf of the Board, not scared to spend money to fight something that we believe is wrong. And we have done that in the past and people won’t know how many we’ve dealt with. I believe, for the good of the sport, we have to challenge these things.”

Such matters cause stress and annoyance but Smith can cope with the odd headache. It’s markedly harder to shift the pain when tragedies strike inside a boxing ring under his control. “I can honestly say that the worst periods of my time at the Board are when we’ve had somebody dying during a contest, of which I’ve been involved in a number,” Smith says. “That is exceptionally hard and nothing is going to be any worse than that. When you have to speak to mums and dads, their families, then the other people to deal with, the ins and outs of it all, the coroners reports, etcetera, that is what makes you think, ‘why are you here, can you do any better.’

And can he? “We cannot make this sport 100 per cent safe. We can put in place everything we possibly can to make it as safe as possible, but we cannot make it 100 per cent safe. That’s the one thing that does affect me. It affects my family, my wife, when you come home and you’re dealing with this. Everything else you can deal with, it’s frustrating, time-consuming, makes you angry, makes you disappointed, but the worst things I’ve ever dealt with are people passing away doing something they love.”

The threat of tragedy in the sport is as omnipresent as the wild unpredictability of the business. In the last 12 months, thanks exclusively to the arrival of Alalshikh’s deep pockets, Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn now act like the 12 years of nauseating tit-for-tat squabbling that came before was the wind-up of the century. Both are known to hold a grudge yet, overnight, and as if hypnotized, they went all gooey in each other’s company. Surely Smith didn’t see that bromance coming.  

“I haven’t been surprised because there’s an obvious reason why they’re getting on well,” Smith says with a smile. “I remember talking to you about this many times, that I wanted promoters to work together, we wanted the best fights to take place. It’s taken a long time.”

Smith, however, did not immediately embrace all things Riyadh Season, specifically their first main event that matched an unbeaten world heavyweight champion against a debutant. Though Tyson Fury-Francis Ngannou turned out to be competitive, it would not have been approved on a BBBoC show. Yet Smith and his team presided over the undercard, providing all doctors and approving all officials to immediately add some credibility to proceedings. 

Since then, the BBBoC have overseen all GEA boxing events in Saudi and in the UK. The boxing world has seen plenty of competitive fights as a result yet the desire to cram so much onto one card means the big-fight schedule in the UK, at least on a week-to-week basis, is somewhat sparse. The recent undercard of Daniel Dubois-Anthony Joshua, for example, featured at least four bouts that would ordinarily be topping four separate TV cards; likewise the upcoming October 12 event headed by Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol.

“I’m not overly concerned,” Smith says. “We did 242 shows last year and 80 per cent of that was small halls. They’re still going strong. This weekend we have five, the weekend after that we have seven. Don’t forget that the shows that are taking place in Saudi Arabia are being promoted by Frank Warren and they’re under the British Boxing Board of Control’s jurisdiction. So it’s not some other jurisdiction, it’s ours, it’s our officials, our doctors. 

“The plan, ultimately, is to help the Saudis set up their own governing body but at the present time our doctors are going over there and showing their doctors how to run a show and discussions are ongoing about setting up their own governing body. I think, as a whole for boxing in our country, it’s beneficial. How long it lasts, I don’t really know. 

“When I was young all the big fights went to Vegas or New York. I think we get greedy – look at what we’ve done over the last 10 years, how many major shows we’ve had that possibly America hasn’t had but we have. You can’t have it all your own way all the time; you have to give and take.”

Which begs the obvious question: How much is Alalshikh and co giving and the Board taking? “We employ 12 and a half people, and the half is the accountant, she works part time,” Smith responds. “I think somebody said to me we’re [boxing] the third biggest sport in Britain regarding attendance numbers, yet we run this sport, from this little office in Cardiff, for all the shows we do, with 12 and a half people. Compare that to football and rugby associations and we are minnows. It has [money from Saudi] enabled us to employ another person who will start shortly, so that will be 13 and a half people to manage all of these shows.” 

With safety improved, drug testing increased, stadium shows normalised, two warring dictators at peace, and extra funding secured, there can’t be much left for Smith to achieve. “I’d like to get rid of a few of the legal cases I’ve got going on!” he reasserts. “I’ve had a really good run and I think we’ve done reasonably well and that’s with the help of everybody. I’ve got no plans to pack up just yet, unless everybody makes me go. I think we’re doing alright but, obviously, you get to a stage in life when you want to look at doing other things but I’m not quite there – so you haven’t got rid of me just yet.”