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Two years after losing to Anthony Joshua, Wladimir Klitschko is considering a comeback, but why can the best never let go?

Few boxers have ever been able to leave the sport on their own terms, the Ukrainian was supposed to be one of them

Tom Kershaw
Friday 18 January 2019 14:12 GMT
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Wladimir Klitschko announces retirement from boxing

It’s the 14th November, 2013. Emerging from the York Hall dressing room to a full auditorium in Bethnal Green is James ‘Lights Out’ Toney. The all-time great; the three-weight world champion; boxing’s cartoonish villain who sat back and smoked cigars in the bubble bath.

Yet there he is, 45 years of age, waddling towards the ring in oversized black shorts with sagging pecs and a pork-pie midriff, trotted out as little more than a marketing gimmick to face Jason Gavern, a journeyman heavyweight who has lost eight of his last ten fights.

The first bell goes and, for a second, it seems as if the poise may still, somehow, be there. The swagger, the straight-armed jab, the caramba-like shuffle until steadily the hollowness prevails. Toney stumbles over his front foot, his hooks slap at thick air and the crowd go mute bar a solitary catcall.

Nine minutes of slugging and hugging later and Gavern is declared the winner. Toney won’t be seen again until he re-emerges two years later on the club circuit in St Louis.

James Toney was defeated by journeyman Jason Gavern almost two decades after facing Roy Jones Jr in Las Vegas

****

In a sport hallmarked by its leads rarely being able to let go at the right time, the chatter behind boxing’s dirty curtain is that Wladimir Klitschko is considering a comeback. Two years after being felled by Anthony Joshua, the 42-year-old Ukrainian was understood to have been involved in at least tentative negotiations for a fight with Dillian Whyte this spring, until ruling out the possibility on Tuesday.

Against Joshua, a fight in which he was already years beyond his prime, Klitschko came just a jab away from victory, and departed in a veil of glory. It was, if loss can allow, the perfect ending. For years, throughout his ten-year reign over the heavyweight division, there was a feeling that Klitschko had always held something back in reserve until, finally, in London he dispensed it all.

Few boxers have ever been able to leave the sport on their own terms, and the stories such as Toney’s are endless. There is something which lurks in the subconscious of boxers that never quite leaves; an addiction to the all-consuming lifestyle; the celebrity; the primal adrenaline of fight night fever. Every boxer you speak to will tell you a variation of those things and condense it down into the same phrase: “That there’s no other feeling like being in the ring on fight night.”

Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Evander Holyfield, Larry Holmes, even Klitschko’s older brother Vitali returned from retirement on at least one occasion. Lennox Lewis, hailed as one of the few heavyweights to unshackle himself, still put a $100,000,000 price-tag on his return. That figure would never be reached, but it still kept a relationship with lingering possibility, something to cling on to which kept him attached to his career. Even last summer, there were murmurings that Lewis, now 52, was considering featuring in a three-round exhibition bout in Kiev.

In Klitschko’s case, it is easier to sympathise with why a return seems feasible. He can still run the same inclines, leave his trainer with a dead arm when practising on the pads, lift the weights and do the diets like when he reigned over the division for a decade. His body may be reluctantly wearier, but he is still in every sense an athlete, and essentially still living the life of a boxer. The rest have returned after sabbaticals of booze and bingeing.

Then there is also, at least to Klitschko, a humdrum heavyweight triumvirate to be capitalised upon. Even in age, Klitschko shared the ring with two of them and feels as though he could have - and should have - beaten both. The third, Deontay Wilder, used to serve as cannon fodder in training camp.

And after tasting life beyond the ropes - the politics, the reading and writing, the mundanity - he has comes to the realisation that, like so many, it is not enough. That it might never be. Nothing is more appetising than that one last ring walk, and therein lies the double-edged sword dragged out by Toney to the darkest extremity

Klitschko left the sport with his legacy assured

The reasoning for a return is justifiable, even if the belief that he can do so with the same venom remains rooted in denial. He could still, even at this stage, feasibly defeat any of the current champions on a day where everything falls into place. Even for a man of his snoring sensibility, the temptation is so hard to resist that two years later Klitschko still wrestles with it.

That is the feeling shared by all fighters returning to the sport, that they can always win against time, always conquer the old.

Nobody can blame a boxer for considering a belated comeback. Klitscho’s coaxing is as valid as any before him. Yet the Ukrainian always gave the impression that he was that little bit smarter and wiser than everyone else. But that last lust for a dose of primal fear gets even the best of them. Almost all of them.

So when Klitschko took to Twitter on Tuesday to dismiss the possibility of a Dillian Whyte fight in April, first the Ukrainian insisted on adding one thing first: “I do really feel that I still got it”.

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