Boxing: Ellcock driven by desire to put wild past behind him

Birmingham fighter has graduated from gang warfare to the ring but faces against stern test against durable Russian next Saturday

In Gordon Ramsey's fancy restaurant at Claridge's, Britain's most successful – and enduring – boxing promoter, Frank Warren, was recently telling a bunch of Fleet Street sports editors that no other "game" could begin to rival his own in stories dealing with the intriguing matter of the human soul.

Meanwhile, in another eating establishment – a fast-food joint in the Old Kent Road – Wayne Ellcock was endeavouring to support the point.

He was, as boxers of all shapes and styles and life experiences tend to do, making quite a fist of it.

Ellcock is a 27-year-old survivor of Birmingham streetgang warfare. His best friend Leroy, irretrievably wounded by bullying in younger days, said goodbye one night – without his usual, "see you tomorrow, Wayne," just "see you" – and hung himself. Another friend is in prison because a man who produced a large knife during a street "rumble" is dead, his life having drained away on a pavement.

Ellcock confesses that around about this time he was, by any standards, running wild. A good amateur boxing career, which had brought him Birmingham and Midlands ABA titles and an appearance in the national finals, was in abeyance and, after a dispute with his girlfriend, he had only sporadic visits to his six-year-old daughter Chelsea. "I was working in the day as a telephone engineer," he said, "but all the time I was thinking about the night – the drinking, the fighting, and the girls."

Then his father David – a former NCO in the Royal Signals – returned to his native Barbados to live. Soon after arriving, he was killed in a car crash.

"My father," says Ellcock, "had tried to keep me on the straight and the narrow. As an ex-army man, he was saying I needed discipline. If I didn't get some, I was going to ruin my life. He got me in the gym in the first place and he came to see my fights.

"The terribly sad thing is it took his death to get through to me all the things he had been telling me. When I went over to bury him, it was a kind of natural break in my life in the streets. I thought about how I was wasting my life. I thought about everything, the way Leroy went like that, and how easy it would have been for me to be in prison – or dead. I came back from Barbados determined to make myself a fighter – a real one."

Every fighter has a story, but does Ellcock have a career? Having just given up his job with BT, it is imperative that he knows sooner than later.

In the next few days he will have more of a clue. With a record of 9-0 as a pro, Ellcock, a middleweight, goes into his most important fight at the Wembley Conference Centre on Saturday night. His manager, Lennox Lewis's former mentor, Frank Maloney, has put him in with a durable Russian, Yuri Tsarenko, who has won 24 and lost five of his previous fights and is designed to give Ellcock his most serious examination.

"If he comes through this successfully," says Maloney, "he will get a contract with Frank Warren. There is no doubt about his potential as a crowd pleaser. He looks like John Conteh and fights like Nigel Benn."

Genetics being what they are, it is surely a matter for gratitude, though the boxing cognoscenti would no doubt say that he would have been better served as a potential world class fighter had he inherited both the handsome Conteh's looks and his boxing ability. Still, the Dark Destroyer Benn knew how to fill a hall and he showed, for all time, his ferocity in the tumultuous title fight which ended in the tragic wreckage of his opponent Gerald McLellan's life.

"The point about Wayne is that he is one of a whole crop of new fighters in Britain," says Maloney. "People talk about the sport being shot here because Lennox Lewis is so close to retirement and Naseem Hamed has disappeared from the scene. In fact there is tremendous growth and some young British fighters are very close to making the jump into genuine world class status."

Over Ramsey's pots of foie gras and delicately cooked salmon, Warren told the sports editors that he wasn't scratching around for the publicity required to move a few tickets.

He quoted from an impressive battery of statistics that said British boxing had never been economically healthier. Venues were sold out as a matter of course. Local heroes were beginning to dot the landscape. No, he wasn't hustling, this man who survived assault by Mike Tyson, legal mugging by Don King and several gunshots fired close in by an unconvicted assailant, he just wanted boxing to regain some of its old lustre on sports pages which, as in America, had a dwindling population of dedicated boxing writers.

What is needed now, everyone agrees, is for one of Joe Calzaghe, Scott Harrison and Ricky Hatton to effectively cross the great Atlantic divide.

Warren is working to put all three on to the brink of that achievement. He continues in his attempt to lure the formidable Bernard Hopkins into the ring with Calzaghe and has plans to match the featherweight hope, Scott Harrison, with Naseem's conqueror, Marco Antonio Barrera, if he retains his World Boxing Organisation title against Wayne McCullough in Glasgow next month.

Hatton's reward for beating the experienced Vince Phillips and then Sheffield's Junior Witter – before an anticipated huge crowd of his own Manchester people at Maine Road for the last sporting night at the famous old football stadium – will be Warren's attempt to get him in with Kostya Tszyu, the Australian-based Russian who in the eyes of some is arguably the world's best pound-for-pound fighter at light welterweight.

Ellcock knows that he faces much work if he is to put flesh on such dreams. "I know what is involved – when I gave up my day job it was my way of saying, 'this is it, this is the way I'm going to make a new life for myself.' I'm very aggressive in the ring – I was a great fan of Nigel Benn – but I know I have to slow down. I've seen tapes of John Conteh, who Frank says I look like, and I can see the brilliance of his technique. I'm using Conteh as a good example of what I have to aim at."

Maloney is optimistic. "The good thing is that Wayne loves to fight. If you offered him the choice between a big win on the lottery and a fight, Wayne would choose the fight." He will earn around £5,000 for fighting the Russian.

Barry McGuigan, the Clones Cyclone whose formation of a boxers' trade union, he always conceded, was an attempt to perform the near impossibility of getting fighters to think of the future as much as the burning relevance of the moment, was at Warren's lunch table and he nodded in agreement when the promoter said that the appeal of boxing was based on the eternal lure of one man pitting his talent and his courage against another in an enclosed space.

"People love a boxer," says McGuigan, "because no other sportsman gives the world a window on himself which shows, in three minutes, everything he has... all his courage and his fear, all his nerve and all his uncertainty. Boxing is dying? Are you kidding."

Certainly the serious intent, or otherwise, of Wayne Ellcock, will be revealed soon enough. So far he is from boxing's central casting with a more or less standard script. On Saturday the shooting begins for real.