Moses Itauma is the hot commodity in British boxing.
A rising star of the heavyweight division, many consider him to be the next face of the sport in the UK.
The 20-year-old has stormed through every opponent he has faced in the first two-and-a-half years of his professional career. 12 fights, 12 wins, 10 via knockout. He hasn’t gone past Round 2 since his fourth bout.
At one stage, there was talk of him beating Mike Tyson’s record of becoming the youngest-ever heavyweight champion. While that milestone slid past (he would have had to win a belt in May) Itauma has long been earmarked for greatness.
But, as impressive as he is, the young prospect’s career could have taken a completely different path. He has admitted he lost his passion for the sport at one stage after becoming stuck in a rut and not feeling like he was progressing.
“I just felt like I reached a barrier, and I was just unable to surpass that barrier,” Itauma told media ahead of his bout against Dillian Whyte in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Aug. 16.
“But being in the ring with all these heavyweights; Daniel Dubois, Joe Joyce, Tyson Fury, Lawrence Okolie, I know that there’s levels to boxing and I just felt like I was unable to learn anymore.”
It seems crazy to think now, but that was Itauma’s reality.
A young boxer unsure if he would reach the heights of his famous sparring partners.
As a kid, he grew up watching British idols like Whyte, Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury and Derek Chisora, dreaming of one day being on the big stage himself. But things weren’t clicking like they were supposed to. He tried different trainers and coaches, moved around to find something that worked. That’s when Ben Davison, widely considered one of, if not the best British coach in the business right now, came into the picture.
And even that almost didn’t happen. Itauma nearly didn’t go to the gym.
Davison, formerly Fury’s coach, has a host of stars under him including Joshua, Fabio Wardley, Leigh Wood, Shabaz Masoud and Pat McCormack, but each one gets everything they need to win.
“Sometimes you might just need a bit of change, and I tried out a lot of coaches and Ben Davidson was the last person I tried out. If I’d be honest, when I went to Ben I was like: ‘he’s got too many stars in the gym, he won’t really have time for me, he won’t give me the time I need from a trainer.’
“So I didn’t really want to go to the gym, but my brother [boxer Karol Itauma] was like: ‘there’s no harm in trying Ben Davidson.’
And that was it. A nudge from his brother proved to the sliding doors moment. If he goes on the be as great as many believe he can be, it could become the sliding doors moments.
Itauma is quick to point out he has nothing but love and respect for his previous coaches, but something with Davison just clicked.
“As I walked through the doors… there’s a glass window on the door where you can see inside the gym and Ben’s got all my fights up and he’s writing in his notepad and whatnot and he said: ‘look: you do this, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but you do this… now we need to make you aware of this and you need to do this.'”
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Fears he wouldn’t get the attention and time he needed vanished, and the pair were on their way.
“With Ben, he taught me a different side to boxing. He taught me there’s more to boxing than just punch, punch, get punched, punch back,” Itauma says.
“There’s a whole chess game to this. I’m not saying I’m the best obviously when I first joined the Ben Davidson gym, I was getting really frustrated in the first couple of spars because I was like, ‘there’s a lot there’s a to think about.’
“And then it’s like just driving, the more you do it, the better you get.”
