When Gary Sykes heads to the ring to contest the championship belt he once held, the one he promised his young daughter, Layla, that he would recover, he will do so unaccompanied by a national audience in this, the biggest fight of his life. Good looking, genial, accomplished, Sykes, a high-octane junior lightweight, has been hamstrung by his unassuming nature; he’s a nice guy in a sport that demands villainy from its main protagonists.
Boxing has grown increasingly marginalised in the national press. It began around the time Sykes, 30, first pulled on gloves. Cast into the margins, few avenues remain for those hoping to deflect attention away from the soap opera storylines top-flight football provides; controversy, though, remains a fetid lifeline. Yet here lies the problem: No-one has a bad word to say about Sykes – nor he of them. There is no gutter talk before he fights, no profanities, no aggressive posturing, simply a handshake and a smile — mere scraps for publicists struggling to make noise amid the clatter of thuggery and court jesting.
Sports fans gave up on boxing long ago; unregulated, inconsistent, indecipherable, it is virtually impossible to peddle a fight in any meaningful sporting context. Even the cognoscenti would struggle to name the champions and top contenders in each weight division. As a result, boxing’s biggest nights are marketed on malice and spite; rivals are contracted to produce infomercials that encourage them to trade insults. Promoters hope fans will buy into it, take sides and then pay to see them settle their “score.” “I think I’ve been a bit too quiet,” Sykes lamented last year. “But I’m a fighter. I don’t do all that stuff for the camera.” And what of those who can’t sing and dance, who refuse to eschew self-respect for a share of the King’s shilling?
“He’s a humble guy,” noted long-time coach and mentor Julian McGowan (also speaking last year), a cogent and frank father-of-four, who grew Sykes from a junior amateur, an angel-faced 15-year-old who fought like the devil. “Gary said to me: ‘I’d rather we didn’t act like a couple of knobheads, and people at least say: ‘He might not have a load of money but Sykes is a decent kid.’”
Sykes’ British title reign spanned March 2010 to September 2011 (Gary Buckland of Cardiff would usurp him after 12 nip-and-tuck rounds). He would clear around £9, 500 from a typical £18,000 purse during that period but such paydays were scarce. Though his maiden defence took place in May 2010, he would not secure a second until the following year. This was the apex of his career. He wound up sparring in order to make ends meet: £10 a round, £100 a day, black eyes, swollen lips. He chanced his arm in three-round tournaments (they account for two of only three losses in 29 bouts) as ill-suited to him as a distance runner in a 60 yard dash. Forced to lean on both McGowan and his girlfriend, Natasha, a pretty brunette who once boxed herself, it wouldn’t prove difficult to fulfill the first part of his wish.
Born and raised in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, a conurbation of mill towns once inhabited by the Brontë family (Charlotte depicted the nearby Spen valley in her social chronicle Shirley), Sykes is a popular kid. But everything is relative: Liverpool and Manchester, key metropolises in England’s North West, boast populations 10 times as dense. In addition to Dewsbury being economically deprived (most workers are forced to struggle close to the minimum wage), Sykes is a one man act; aside from novice Tony Aitcheson, there are a paucity of fighters orbiting him.
Sykes is naturally athletic, his weight stays down around the eleven stone mark in between fights (he fights at nine stone four). At 5’8″, his frame appears too stocky to be so light – as if made of titanium. He has features one would associate with a member of Union J or Emblem3 rather then a prize fighter — blonde-hair swept over to one side, blue eyes, a chiselled jaw and the requisite tattoos adorning each arm: three stars shine along his left, self-appointed medals that denote NABC, Junior ABA and ABA triumphs.
He hails from the notorious Dewsbury Moor estate, municipal housing green-lit as Homes for Heroes in the 1930s and later demonised as the domain of a dysfunctional underclass by the tabloid press, in the wake of the Shannon Matthews kidnapping scandal of 2008. Conservative leader David Cameron once accused its inhabitants as “having pillars which are crime, unemployment and addiction” – his opening gambit in a crusade against the welfare state. Feckless, feral and lawless, it was, as far as the Tories were concerned, personification of the ASBO generation, the fictional Chatsworth Estate from Channel 4’s Shameless, made real.
Sykes, though, never wandered off the beaten track. Why, he can’t say, yet he’s quick to refute the hackneyed assumption that boxing saved his life: “I’ve got a good work ethic. I think I’d probably have a good job [had he not boxed]. I’d have put my all into it,” Sykes insisted with a wry chuckle before shrugging: “Boxing might have been a bad decision.”
It usually is. “There’s a lot of untapped talent out there, people who haven’t had the opportunities”, noted McGowan. “There are some Central Area level [boxers], British Masters or journeymen who were good fighters but they’ve been matched tough or they haven’t had the breaks.”
McGowan helped ensure that Sykes didn’t fall through the cracks. Two days training a week would become three, five; he negotiated improved contracts and employed a tax accountant. Strength and conditioning coaches were assimilated alongside training partners, recruited solely for Gary, to help alleviate the tedium of camp. Saturday will be a celebration. A community will congregate at their local leisure centre in support of a sportsman that represents the best of them: modest, gregarious and hard-working.
The opponent standing in his way — the fourth Sykes has been scheduled to oppose since he was installed as mandatory challenger last summer — is Ashton’s Jon Kays (18-3-1, 4 KO). Sykes knows him well; he outscored the Lancastrian over 10 rounds a year ago. Kays, too, will have a story – most fighters do. There is a sense, though, that Saturday belongs to Gary Sykes and the team around him who represent resilience and community in their truest sense.
Dewsbury expects to win a Lonsdale belt outright on Saturday night.
