Two Yorkshiremen hoping to become boxing champions also share a name – Liam Walsh. Channel 4 News North of England Correspondent Morland Sanders describes his meeting with one of the future stars.
I’m late and Liam Walsh is giving me a hard time over the phone, writes Morland Sanders.
“We had an agreement, you said you’d be here to film before noon, what’s happening now?” are the sort of phrases I was hearing thick and fast as I tried to explain about our problems getting to West Yorkshire.
He is a man with little time for compromise, someone with no interest in the excuses of others, a bloke almost obsessed with achieving his goal of winning a title, a belt and hanging up his gloves knowing he’s made something out of his life.
And it’s his life outside the ring that makes this 29-year-old so much of a fascination. There’s a family history of serious drug abuse, a situation that became so volatile it culminated in Liam Walsh being shot by his mother’s dealer. The bullet was removed from his shoulder and the former rugby league player doesn’t offer to show me the wound, he now believes that’s a chapter closed.
He is a man with little time for compromise, someone with no interest in the excuses of others, a bloke almost obsessed with achieving his goal.
“I don’t like talking about it on camera,” is his simple reaction to my probes into this section of his life.
His father is slightly more open: “I think he’s lucky to be alive and everything he does he puts 100 per cent into it and I am proud of him for what he’s done,” said Pat Walsh.
Pat is now integral to Liam’s future, a former boxer himself, he’s now main trainer and he has invited me along to a session. I was expecting a hardcore gym, busy with fighters sparring and Liam to be walking around with some sort of power drink in hand. There was none of that. Into his dad’s terraced house on the outskirts of Halifax, down a flight of stairs and there’s a tiny cellar, flagged stone floor, bare pennine rock walls.
This is all they need. A piece of scaffold has been cemented into the ceiling, a punchbag is lifted on to the shaft and the tireless work begins, sweat shaken from his arms as the punches land seemingly quicker and harder as the minutes pass.
“Jab, right, jab, upper-cut,” barks his father, lightning-quick combinations now smack into dad’s pads. I’m seeing a boxer in his element here, focused, dedicated and incredibly eager – now I know why he doesn’t like people turning up late.
“I train hard, I get in that ring and make it happen, if it’s getting it on points or you knock them out, it’s about winning” Liam Walsh.
His record couldn’t be better, this light-welterweight is unbeaten, either in the ring or by the past events of his troubled life.