Only 3 years earlier, Sunderland fighter Tony Jeffries had signed a professional contract with former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis’s old manager Frank Maloney. He was basking in the glory of a successful Olympic campaign, having come away with a bronze medal from the 2008 Beijing games. Welcomed home as a sporting hero, the light heavyweight prospect was the first British fighter from those games to step through the ropes professionally amongst an impressive list that included James DeGale, David Price and Billy Joe Saunders.
Then, just 36 months later in 2012, things changed dramatically and despite remaining undefeated, after just 10 professional fights, Jeffries was forced to retire due to persistent hand injuries and found himself in the US, a place he had trained previously, looking for work. “I went to apply for a job in a gym, it was like a 24-hour fitness gym next to Beverley Hills.” Said Jeffries, “I went in there, I had a personal trainer certification and I had brought my Olympic medal. It was my first job interview ever, I was 27, I had put a shirt and tie on, trousers. I was used to boxing live on tv, but my hands were ruined, so I’m here and nobody knew who I was, the guy who interviewed us was a dick! He sat back on his chair, put his feet on the table with his hands behind his head and he said, ‘So, tell me about yourself.’
“It was my first ever job interview and I was shitting myself, so I told him about how I do boxing and that, I said ‘You know, I went to the Olympics’, and I got my medal out of my bag and showed him. He just shrugged it off as though it wasn’t a thing. Straight away I was thinking, ‘oh my god, the Olympics must not be anything or mean anything in America at all’.
“I didn’t get the job, ‘I thought oh god, I can’t even get a job at a little gym like this’. I was like, ‘shit, now what am I going to do?’ The unsuccessful encounter with the David Brent-like gym boss compounded Jeffries’ suffering, having had to navigate, and understand the ramifications of retiring from boxing and then being rejected after his first foray into the world of ‘normal working life’.
The physical and mental parallels of what he had gone through cannot be underestimated. Taking the decision to retire can’t have been easy and his dreams of professional boxing glory had been shattered, just like his hands, which were the very tools of his trade. Recalling the moment, he knew his career was over as a boxer, he said, “I had surgery on my hands, and they should have got better, but they didn’t. Nine months passed and they were no better, so I tried my hands on the mitts with my business partner. I was like, ‘nah, I’m done’. I announced it on Facebook, I wrote a big status and I remember sitting there on my computer and I just had tears rolling down my face and I started blaring (to blare your eyes out is a north-east term meaning to cry uncontrollably).”
The Sunderland man is nothing if not positive though, adding, “It was pretty heart-breaking, at the time it was horrible, but now I realise it was the best thing that could have happened to us.”
Refusing to let his initial negative experience deter him, he duly found a job in his newly adopted country that was befitting of his vast experience and knowledge. “I found a gym in Santa Monica that had boxing classes.” Said Jeffries. “They knew I wanted a job and saw my achievements, I got the job straight away, teaching boxing for fitness. It was funny because about 2 years later, I opened my own gym and we got named number one gym in California for men’s fitness, so I sent the same fella an email, the one who didn’t give us the job previously.
“I was like, ‘How are you mate, remember me?’ I sent him a link of Men’s Fitness and told him; these could have been the classes I would have put on in your gym. I think I finished the email by saying, ‘You dick’.”
Since moving to LA with his wife Sarah in 2012, Jeffries has continued to flourish in his newfound world of teaching boxing fitness and now co-owns Box ‘N Burn and Box ’N Burn Academy and has had celebrity clients like Robbie Williams and Jenson Button through the door. He also has a huge following on social media and now has over 700,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. The words that flash up on Tony’s website are ‘Punching your way to a more fulfilling life’, ironically even when he had to literally stop punching for a living, he kept pumping those metaphorical fists and fighting to succeed.
As we chatted about life, I couldn’t help noticing that he still had a very healthy Mackem twang as he told me how nice it was to hear my ‘proper British accent’. Though he did admit he had to slow his distinctive regional accent down and speak correctly for natives who didn’t understand a word when he arrived in LA. I wondered if the American dream that he had built was enough to quell the feeling of missing home, but as he drove through Calabasas- home to many of America’s rich and famous - soaked in sunshine and describing the panoramic mountainous views that flanked him, he couldn’t have been clearer when I asked if he missed the UK. “Nah, not one bit, I don’t miss it at all.” He went on, “I never thought I would be able to do this, I never really thought it was an option. You know where you’re from (We share a north-east connection) you don’t ever think ‘oh, I could move to another country and start a big global business’, especially with no qualifications or anything. All I really did was box.”
The man they used to call ‘Jaffa; The Mighty Mackem’ has built an impressive empire, the way he navigated the disappointment of retirement is commendable. There are plenty of examples of high-profile boxers who have historically found retirement difficult. The deep-seated depression, the struggle to replace the buzz of walking out to packed arenas, and when the adrenaline and adulation dissipates, it leaves a gaping wound in the fighting pride of a pugilist. Jeffries was different, there were circumstances that helped that process and he had words of advice for those in a similar position. “Because we came to America, that was great. If I was still in Sunderland where everyone is like ‘Oh, when are you fighting again’, or ‘sorry about your retirement’, It would have been different because I was really well known in Sunderland, but here nobody knew us, so we were able to try and live life as normal.” Regarding other retired fighters he added, “All I did-and I don’t know why other boxers can’t do this-is I just focused my attention on something else, if you’re a boxer at a decent level, you obviously have so much dedication and discipline, why can’t boxers transfer that dedication and discipline into something else that they do? When you do that, you have success in other things.”
The Olympic Bronze medallist was destined for great things as a professional boxer, but at the core of his values are honesty and integrity. ‘No BS’ was something that Jeffries was keen to tell me throughout the interview, being real and a nice person is how he lived his life. That straight up temperament was on display as he gave me an unequivocally honest answer when I asked if he believed he could have gone all the way if it wasn’t for the hand injuries. “I don’t think about what might have been, maybe at first I did but when I did really think about it, I don’t think I would have made it at the top level as a boxer. I don’t think I had it in us and for someone to admit that, you know, no boxers would say that. I didn’t have it in us to go all the way, I didn’t truly want it enough, you’ve got to really, really want it and I can admit that now.”
There is something incredibly powerful about a boxer who can comfortably admit that. It would be easy to just say ‘Yes, I would have made it’, after all, nobody can ascertain as to whether that would be true, Jeffries could just try to save face and talk himself up, but it is the measure of his state of mind and how comfortable he feels at this current stage in his life that he can say that. He has found his calling in the boxing fitness world and is teaching people how to teach others, an art that the sport could benefit from as there are plenty of trainers who are former boxers and don’t necessarily know the correct way to impart their knowledge. He was effusive in his praise of one of his own former coaches at amateur level and the lasting impact boxing has had on his life. “I remember the year before the Olympic qualifiers, Terry Edwards, who was our performance director, he said to us all, ‘Listen, if you qualify for these Olympics, your life will never be the same again’ and he said, ‘You’ll probably not understand it until you have been and come back, but just believe me, it’ll never be the same again.’ “He was totally right. The moment I got off the plane from Beijing to this day, it has changed my life. It has helped me create opportunities that has given us the life I’ve got today, which is a pretty good life.”