The Review .
Book Review: "The Knockout" by Andy Clarke
Introduction:
"The Knockout" by Andy Clarke, a seasoned Sky Sports commentator, delves into the electrifying and definitive moment in sports: the knockout. Clarke's narrative captures the essence of this climactic event from a multitude of perspectives, offering readers a ringside seat to the most decisive moment in boxing.
Summary:
Through a blend of gripping storytelling and insightful interviews, Clarke explores the physical and emotional journey of delivering a knockout punch. The book also gives voice to those on the receiving end, providing a raw and often unseen view of the sport. Clarke extends his narrative beyond the boxers, drawing on the experiences of trainers, coaches, and referees to paint a comprehensive picture of the knockout's impact on all involved.
Analysis:
Clarke's expertise shines as he breaks down the mechanics and strategy behind a knockout, while also delving into the psychological warfare that precedes it. His commentary is enriched by firsthand accounts, making "The Knockout" a compelling read for both die-hard boxing fans and newcomers to the sport. The book's strength lies in its ability to humanize the knockout, transforming it from a mere sporting outcome to a profound human experience.
Conclusion:
"The Knockout" is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the raw intensity and drama of boxing. Andy Clarke's unique perspective as a commentator allows him to capture the essence of the knockout in a way that is both educational and thrilling. This book is a knockout in its own right, offering a deep and nuanced understanding of what it means to face, deliver, and ultimately rise from the sport's most decisive moment.
To listen to Andy talking about the book on the latest edition of the podcast just go to the podcast
"Latest Edition" on the homepage
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So, boxing literature is in plentiful supply, the key to actually getting the reader hooked is to offer something different, a new perspective, a different tale.
tim caple
where this book succeeds is because it's unlike anything else it's stripped down to what a knockout is, how it feels to land one, how it feels to receive one, and how it feels to officiate one. So it's a great take on this sport. So what drew you to taking this particular aspect of the sport
Andy
Well, the knockouts, this, it is this ultimate expression of victory and defeat, which we don't really have in other sports. You can have dramatic conclusions in other sports, but there's nothing quite like the knockout because you can be considerably behind and then it's not just an equalizer. It's this blow that turns everything completely on its head and it can come from anywhere at any moment. And then of course you've got the physical impact of it and how dramatic.
and how shocking that can look. So it's always been something that's fascinated me.
tim caple
Nobody's ever written about it in the way that you've done here, which seems like an oversight.
Andy
Yeah, and I was surprised by that, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that is the case, that nobody's really done it. I'd read the odd chapter in a book or the odd article where somebody was trying to drill down with a fighter a little bit about what it felt like. And it would usually be more in terms of how did you get over it? It's usually attached to somebody who suffered the knockout, but nobody really wanted to go there in particular detail. And when you've been around athletes for a long time, what you realize is that...
they are quite kind of philosophical beings to an extent. They understand the business they're in and they know that things can go wrong. You're not always going to win. You're going to suffer ups and downs, highs and lows. It's just the way it is. And it just occurred to me, would they really be that kind of touchy, if you like, about being asked about what it's like getting knocked out? And it occurred to me that they probably wouldn't. I mean, it would depend on the...
on their reaction to the defeat. And if you knew that they'd found it really hard to get over to the point where they hadn't really got over it, then okay, they might not want to talk about it, those kinds of individuals. But generally speaking, people were really open to it. I remember Amir Khan, I jumped on him in Saudi Arabia to talk about it. And he kind of knew what I wanted to talk about, but he gets a million and one requests and he says pretty much yes to all of them. So when I explained it again briefly, because I knew I didn't have much time and I needed to kind of cut to the chase.
.
Andy
I asked him about getting knocked out by Breidis Prescott, which wasn't him getting knocked out cold because he did manage to get back up, but he was knocked out because he couldn't beat the count. And he went into a little bit of an autopilot answer and I just stopped him because I didn't have much time and just said, no, no, no. I mean, in the ring, in the moment, what did it feel like? And he looked surprised and then just really engaged. He gave me a brilliant answer about it being.
like a jigsaw puzzle going smash and you're trying to get the bits back together in under 10 seconds. And people were just, were totally happy to talk about it because for them there is no shame attached to it. It's a very difficult thing to deal with or get over sometimes, but it's just an occupational hazard. If you box at the top for long enough, you're going to get beaten and in boxing, that means the chances are you may well get knocked out.
tim caple
You set your stall out here very early as a writer of significance, insight and knowledge as well, because I don't know any other book that begins basically 3 ,200 years ago with this mythological Greek soldier called Ipius who was said to have built the Trojan horse, amongst other things. So are you a reader of Homer?
Andy
Well, I studied classics at university. So that's always been kind of my world. When I was in academia, that was my world. And I knew about this knockout in the 23rd book of the Iliad. It's at the funeral games of Patroclus. So just to let people know roughly kind of what was going on there, basically right towards the end of the Trojan War, Achilles, one of the most famous, the most famous Greek warrior, had kind of sat the war out, basically. He was sort of sulking.
And he ended up getting back into it because Patroclus, one of his men, got killed by Hector because they thought he was Achilles because Patroclus was wearing Achilles' helmet, basically. So that's why this was a big thing, Patroclus' death. Anyway, they have the funeral and they have funeral games to kind of celebrate slash mourn, I guess. And boxing was one of them. I think it was chariot racing. There would have been a foot race.
There were other things, but boxing was one of them. And the description of the knockout, it just stands up. It stands the test of time. It's not that different to a description you might read now. Okay, it's quite florid, but at the same time, it's this thing that has existed for a really long time, since way before sport as we know it now, because sport as we know it now with team sports, et cetera. That didn't really exist until the mid -19th century.
But boxing has existed for much, much longer than that. And fighting, obviously, has existed forever. But I wanted to start there just to show people that this knockout, this thing, this ultimate means of winning, this has been around for so long. And it's been this thing that's fascinated people for such a long time. And I won't lie, it didn't entertain me enormously to finally get my degree into my working life, because that's not something that happens very often.
tim caple
So the first event that we talk about, which produced one of the great knockouts of recent times, it was almost 10 years ago, It's the 31st of May 2014, Carl Froch, George Groves, and not just the Froch punch, it's all the other ingredients, like you say, the rivalry, the stage, the knockout, the fairy tale, and it was Frosch's last punch.
So this is the first event we delve into.
Andy
And yeah, because it is for me, it is the perfect knockout. And the reason why it's the perfect knockout is all of the things you just mentioned there. And the crucial one as well is that George got up and he was OK. And everybody could see that quickly after the knockout, because what you often get with a knockout is somebody gets knocked out in that moment. There's a huge adrenaline surge in the crowd, in the ring, absolutely everywhere. It's this it's just this uncontrollable kind of vortex.
And then if the fighter who suffered it doesn't get up and they just stay on the canvas, then the mood changes very, very quickly to being one of deep, deep foreboding. Because in those moments, you don't know whether that fighter is alive or dead, quite honestly. Thankfully, the vast majority of the time, almost all of the time, they come out of it. They might not make a completely full recovery, but they will come out of it. I've seen a few over the last few weekends.
Andy
But with George, it was guilt free, you see. It was this massive stage, this massive spectacle, this huge rivalry, and then this fantastic punch, but he's back on his feet. He didn't beat the count, so he was knocked out and he was physically knocked unconscious as well, briefly, but he was, the referee could see that he was. But the fact that he was able to get back on his feet and take part in the post -fight interviews and all of that, it meant that everybody could leave Wembley without that horrible feeling in the pit of their stomach, that they enjoyed something that maybe they shouldn't.
Andy
And that's an interesting thing about it because you, you know, why do we like this? Should we like it? You know, it's a conflicting thing.
tim caple (08:30.3)
There's an extended piece with Carl, obviously, because you interview him in the book, and you said that Carl isn't the type of man that you meet every day. His personality defies description in many ways. How is that? What is it about his personality that defies description?
Andy
Well, he's first of all, he's not really what people think he is. He plays up to it a lot, this idea that he's just this incredibly bulletproof, tough guy, the Cobra, arrogant, aloof, all of those things. He can be that, but he does that generally to entertain himself. And he's not that bothered if people think he is that because he's one of these people who outside of a relatively small circle of people, I don't think concerns himself overly with other people's.
opinions of him. But what's really interesting about him, and this is true of pretty much all fighters, is that you would look at him and you might think he'd be the kind of person who was never subject to self -doubt, would never display any kind of weakness, that he's always been bulletproof since the days of the school playground. He would just be the king and all of these things. But he's really, really willing.
to admit, now he's retired, it probably would have been more difficult to get him to talk about it when he was fighting. He's perfectly willing to admit to all sorts of doubts and fears and fragilities and vulnerabilities and things that he used to think and things that he used to worry about. And he completely accepts that he could have got knocked out. It just didn't happen. But it could have.
tim caple
he comes out with a great quote. If you want to succeed in this particular job in this particular life, get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Andy
Yeah, that's it. That's exactly it. And all of the fighters I spoke to, they all say the same thing. You have to have this realism of what can happen in there, of what can go wrong. Because if you're not, if you don't have that, you won't be almost afraid enough of it happening because the fear of it happening is a good thing. You know, the nerves and the fear, you know, you make them, you make them your friend. As a lot of them said to me, you need that in the pit of your stomach.
and you need to use it. If you're gonna walk around with your head in the sand feeling like it can't happen to you, then it's definitely going to happen to you. So it's this kind of gallows humor almost to an extent with them at times that, you know, the knockout is this thing that is most likely in the post. It never happened to Froch, but that's just because that moment as the doctor described it to me where everything lines up, that didn't quite happen to him.
And for whatever reason, physiologically or spiritually, you could argue, he was harder to knock out than your average fighter. And that's, you know, that's just kind of him. And...
tim caple
best punch he ever threw. The body coiled, he said, on the right side exploded like a golf swing or a tennis shot. But literally the best thing he ever threw.
Andy
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it was the last thing he ever threw as well. And that's just what made that so, just so mega because boxing is actually a high failure rate sport. Most of what they throw doesn't land, but they keep doing it and they keep observing that technique and trying to get their feet in the right place and using their instincts and using their reflexes and just doing it and doing it and doing it because they know that at any given point, if you catch somebody right, then that can be the, that can be the result of it.
tim caple (12:07.036)
Now, here's the thing. If you ask this question to everybody, they would come up with the same answer. And you say, so what did you do after you've knocked out George Grove, you've retired on a high, this is it must have been a great night, you must have partied until the middle of the next month. But there's a real mix of emotions, not until the next day he said that you realize what you've done. He appears very briefly, the party that they'd had in the rented house.
couldn't sleep, got up at five o 'clock and drove home. And there's a sense of almost anti -climax. And another quote, a standout quote there was, the joy of winning is almost the relief of not losing. So you're not actually sure whether or not he's feeling great elation because he's just won or huge relief because he didn't lose.
Andy
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And they all kind of say the same thing on that front because you work so hard for something. And this is why I think that although the knockout is this thing that is unimaginable to almost everybody who will read this book, apart from people who have boxed or who have taken part in some kind of professional fighting, it's actually a lot more relatable than people think because what they're really afraid of...
is this ultimate humiliation as they would see it of getting knocked out. That's what they're afraid of. It's this gunfight that they're in and one of them is going down. That's probably what's going to happen when you get to a high level when you've got two people who are committed to winning by knockout. And when you knock them out, you're just relieved it isn't you. That's what a lot of them said. They're not afraid of physical pain. They're not afraid of the physical consequences of getting knocked out. Maybe they should be.
bit more than they are, but they're not. What they fear is the embarrassment and the humiliation as they would perceive it. That's what was so difficult for Ricky Hatton after he got knocked out by Manny Pacquiao. It took him an awfully long time to get over it, but mostly they don't really know what to do. When you look at this picture in the ring, it's not jubilation normally. Often that is because they knock somebody out and they're not getting up and then they'll celebrate, they'll jump onto the corner post and they'll be told, you need to just kind of...
take it down a notch. I mean, that's exactly what happened with Jamie, Jamie Moore against against Matt Macklin with Tony Bellew. He just completely admits he almost just went blind or made no what to do. He's just running around the ring screaming. But but he says the same. He just said it was a relief. It's a relief that I'm not a bullshitter, that all the things. Yeah, that all the things I said I was going to do. And I've been telling people I was going to do since I was 10 years old and everybody thought I was incredibly boring and sick of hearing it.
Andy
I knocked Makabu out and all the things I said I was going to do, I'd done. And it was true. And that's how he described it.
tim caple
Well, you talk about the mental pressure there with him, and that again was in May of 2016. He'd known what it was like to lose by the TKO to Adonis Stevenson for the WBC title. And now he'd ramped up the pressure even more on himself because he's come home to the spiritual home of Everton football fans. He's got Goodison Park
It's impossible to make it any more of an event and then he goes down. He's the first one to hit the deck in this fight. So, you know, you can't imagine what's going through his mind at that point. Although he does say, doesn't he, that he was having a reoccurring dream for months, that he'd get knocked down first.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's kind of like the weirdest type of visualization you can have, isn't it? Because you're absolutely prepared for that happening every single time. Sometimes, he said to me, sometimes it didn't always happen the same way, but every time I got knocked out in the first round. So when he got knocked down in the way that he did, it had happened to him before and it kind of helped him in a weird way. But he did, he heaped pressure on himself. He absolutely heaped pressure on himself. And Belle was interesting as well because...
One big thing that came out of the conversations I had was that, as I said previously, they all say that you need to accept that it could happen to you, but then you have to, at some point, whether it's halfway through camp or the week of the fight or the night of the fight, you have to perform this switch where you then decide that it's definitely not going to happen to you because it can't be in your head going to the ring. Some people will do that during camp. As I say, some might do it during fight week. Bellew
would do it pretty much, you know, in the seconds leading up to the first bell, he told me he'd be walking to the ring and did walk to the ring against David Hayes saying to himself, you need to switch on here, stay switched on here or you will get knocked out. And so he would use that kind of, that cautionary tale, that fear right up until the last second. And Johnny Nelson was kind of the same. He said that every fight he had before he left the changing room, he'd clear everybody out, he'd go and literally look himself in the mirror and say to himself,
you are not going to get knocked out tonight. And just those kind of techniques that they use to try and guard against it, I found fascinating. And just that whole, what psychologists would call, compartmentalization is really intriguing. Because again, this is something that anyone can really relate to. It's this, you have this fear of something happening and you know that it's possible that it could happen, but then you have to decide that it won't happen. You know, you...
It's just something as simple as going for a job interview that you really, really want and it's really important or an interview for a promotion that could be pivotal to your career and everything that you've worked for. You know that you might not get it, but when you go walk into that room in front of your boss, you have to decide that it is definitely going to happen. The life of the fighter is it's a really extreme one, but in lots of ways they, and this is why it's lent itself to film and stuff, so readily, they face these challenges.
tim caple
Well, he was cast, wasn't he, by Stallone. Ironically, as Pretty Ricky.
Andy
Yeah, that's it, they face these challenges. Pretty Ricky Conlin, yeah, they face these challenges in a really extreme setting, but when you strip it back, it's actually the same kind of stuff that people have to face up to all the time.
tim caple
And he did say, didn't he? He said, look, I can't lose it. I'd never have been able to go back to Goodison Park again and I'd been going there since I was 10 years of age, It just couldn't happen. I wouldn't have been able to go. And you think, well, that's ridiculous if you came back, people would still put their arms around you and just go, never mind, mate, you know, good job Nobody would pillory you for losing, but they build it up inside their own head
that that would be the case and they would be an object of fun. It's almost like the whole of Goodison would stop, look at him and go, God, there he is, the bullshitter.
Andy
Yeah, but that is how they look at it. And that is what they're afraid of. It's the shame, it's the humiliation, it's the damage to their ego. So many things are about ego and this more than most things is about ego because it's your ego that will make you train hard. You want people to think you're a winner, you want people to think you're the best. But it's also a very fragile thing. So if it doesn't work out, then it's the damage to that ego that...
really causes you, in Ricky Hatton's case, to literally just hide away. He felt like people were walking down the street looking at him and kind of sniggering and talking about him and laughing at him. And Amir said he experienced something similar within his own community. Whether it's real or not doesn't even matter because perception is reality, isn't it? And if that's in your head, then that's in your head. And I believe him when he says that if he'd lost, he'd never have gone back to Goodison Park again in his life.
or at least it would have taken them a really long time because it's not just the fact that you think people might be laughing at you, it's just, it's the scene of your greatest disappointment. So choosing to put it on that kind of stage, it's easy to look at that and feel like it would be a big advantage because it's your home turf, but equally, it depends how you manage to handle it equally, it could be paralyzing.
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