Ahead of the biggest fight of his life, Dillian Whyte opens up on family pranks, motherly love and exacting his revenge

Whyte has set his sights on a rematch with Anthony Joshua but, for now, he's focused on bringing down Joseph Parker

Dillian Whyte took a sip from his water bottle as he considered the question, but you sensed he had given the subject plenty of thought already. “It’s far too soon for revenge,” the heavyweight said. “You need to pick your time carefully.”

After a conversation which swung from his childhood in Jamaica where he never had a fridge, to his life on the streets of Brixton where he was shot and stabbed on countless occasions, the topic turned to his beard.

The 30-year-old will face Joseph Parker in the most important fight of his career to date at the O2 Arena on Saturday night with one half of his beard black, and the other a strange, bleached orange. But it turns out this was a matter which fell out of his hands.

“I’ve got a big family and when you’ve got loads of brothers you get bored and play pranks,” he said. “So I glued by brother’s hands together while he was sleeping, I’ve glued his legs together and put mustard up his nose.

“He thought it would be funny to do my beard. He did it while I was asleep. I woke up and thought it was paint, I was there trying to wash it off but nothing was happening. He was just laughing at me.

“So he got me back from a few months ago when I came home and saw that super glue, saw him sleeping on my bed and thought ‘ok, his hands are getting glued together’. Next time I’m going to glue his hand to the back of his head.

“He’s bleached my beard now but I can’t get him back straight away. It would be too soon. He will be expecting it so I need to wait, let him go on holiday somewhere and relax then get him when he least expects it.”

But Whyte insists there will be nothing stealthy about his assault on Parker, the former WBO heavyweight champion, who he knows stands in the way of a rematch with Anthony Joshua, the only man to beat either of them.

Whyte has set his long-term sights on Joshua (Getty)

Since that breathless December 2015 night, when Whyte was stopped by the now-unified heavyweight champion in the seventh round at the O2 Arena, the south Londoner has rebuilt with seven straight victories.

Three years on, he will earn a seven-figure sum for facing Parker, ‘life-changing money’ as his promoter Eddie Hearn puts it, for his part in the main event back at the dome on the docklands.

Boxing is full of rags-to-riches tales but Whyte’s could give any of them a decent fight. He doesn’t like to reveal too many gory details but in moments of solitude he still wonders how he made it to this point alive.

And, although the family home, where hands are regularly glued together, may sound like chaos, it provided the young, angry, confused Whyte with crucial sanctuary.

More to the point, it was the respect for his mother Jane, a nurse, which ensured Whyte never once allowed the trouble he found himself in to cross her threshold. Even after being shot, he refused to go to hospital to keep her from ever finding out.

“I didn’t go to hospital out of fear of disappointing my mum,” he said. “I was always the bad boy but when it came to my mum... she would shout ‘come inside’ and I would go running in.

Whyte needs to battle past Parker to stand any chance of a rematch against Joshua (Getty)

“My mum is my world, man. She left Jamaica when I was two to go and make life better for us. It was circumstance, it took me a while [to move to England] but I got here in the end. It’s a long story... It’s a long, hard painful story.

“Even now, in my whole life, I’ve only sworn twice in front of my mum. Once was by accident and one I got annoyed with my brother and called him something.

“She’s a very proud woman and she still works. I tried to get her to stop but she still wants to work and do her thing but that’s just who she is. She comes from hard-working stock, she will work until she can’t work anymore. She likes helping people.”

With that in mind, how did Whyte feel when he saw another heavyweight contender, the American Jarrell Miller, insult Joshua’s mother at a recent press conference in New York?

“If he said that about my mum,” Whyte started before shaking his head. “Where I’m from in Jamaica, people get killed for that. If you said that about someone’s mum, they will kill you, 100 per cent. As a child in Jamaica I’ve seen people get hurt badly for saying something bad about someone’s mum. You get killed for that, literally.

The two men go head to head at the O2 Arena in London (Getty)

“Joshua is a punk because if Miller had said that about my mum I would have just gone off there and then.”

For now, however, Joshua, Miller and all the other heavyweights have been put to one side as Whyte zeroes in on what is needed against Parker at the 02 this weekend.

He said: “I haven’t seen my kids in two months. It’s difficult, I’m a family person, but I know it is a necessary evil, I have to do it to get to where I want to get to.

“I’m a logical person too. If I do this for ten years, I can spend the next 50 years with my children doing what I need to do. I think of it that way.

“Right now I’ve got a good test in front of me; a tough guy, young guy, lot of experience, former world champion.

“If I get that done let me get on to thinking about Anthony. Anthony is doing good at the minute, I need to get to that level and Parker is a stepping stone towards that.”

Only then Whyte can start thinking about getting the revenge he really wants.