As he emerged through the curtain on Saturday wearing a bulbous Juggernaut helmet, it was apparent once again that Joe Joyce is a little different. The 35-year old heavyweight contender doesn’t fit into any existing archetype of a boxer. Both as a person and as a fighter inside the ring, Joyce is a truly unique character. 

The 2016 Olympic silver medalist scored his latest win this past weekend, stopping former title challenger Carlos Takam in the sixth round at the SSE Arena in London, England. 

After weathering some early success from Takam, Joyce had a dominant round in the fifth to swing the bout’s momentum in a direction from which it would not return. Seconds into the sixth round, Joyce wobbled Takam with a left hook. With his opponent hurt, Joyce capitalized with a finishing flurry that simply overwhelmed Takam to the point that the referee was forced to jump in.  Joyce didn’t land any one punch in the ambush that was particularly concussive. In fact, many of the punches looked like they were just being thrown from his forearm or pushed ahead like he was sliding something across a table. But there were so many of them, and so many of them on the target, that Takam was unresponsive for long enough that the referee deemed it fitting to end the bout. 

The way the bout ended was in step with the reputation Joyce has garnered, particularly after his stoppage win over Daniel Dubois, as a breaker of wills. His nickname “The Juggernaut” suggests that he is a durable, indefatigable fighter who eventually breaks his opponents down through attrition.  

That is an accurate assessment of how he wins, or at least, has won the two biggest fights of his career. In speaking with IFL.TV following the bout, Joyce summed up his best traits similarly: "My talents, they work obviously, I've got a chin, engine and a bit of power, and it all goes into the cooking pot."

But stylistically, Joyce doesn’t fit the blueprint of what we typically think a pressure fighter is, or what a fighter with a 92% knockout ratio fights like either. There’s a little more in the cooking pot he described. He’s not a swarming hooker like a Dereck Chisora, nor is he a defensively porous bomber like Dominic Breazeale. Joyce’s style in the ring doesn’t look exactly like anyone else’s in high level boxing right now.

To understand why that is, and to better grasp Joyce’s true strengths beyond his physical gifts of strength and resilience, one must understand his background. Joyce’s goal was always to get to the Olympics, or to reach the pinnacle in an athletic pursuit. As a child, he was a competitive rugby player and swimmer, and also dabbled in ballet and gymnastics. He missed his university graduation because he was in China studying kung fu and Wushu with Shaolin monks and took up the Brazilian martial art capoeira, which he has shown off in the boxing ring following victories in the past. 

Eventually, he decided his path to the Olympics would come through track and field, where he excelled in shot put and triple jump, before an Achilles injury thwarted his dreams. At the age of 22, he picked up boxing with the specific goal of making it to the Games.

Joyce’s athletic journey is similar to those profiled in David Epstein’s 2019 book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Among other things, in his book, Epstein writes about the benefits of delaying specialization for athletes, using Roger Federer—who played dozens of different sports and didn’t take up tennis until his teens—as a prime example. 

“If you have been boxing since you were a kid, then you get to 16 where girls and parties come about, you feel like you’ve had enough of it. So many throw it in at 16 because the distractions come in. I got all my distractions out of the way early," Joyce told the The Sun last week.

Joyce has sampled widely—and continues to, with cycling and rollerblading as two of his main athletic hobbies—but has now focused narrowly. He has carried the wide-ranging athleticism and problem-solving from various high-level pursuits into the ring. 

There have been a few constants in his life. Mainly, his mother and art. Joyce’s father is an art teacher and works in gilding and art restoration, and his mother a potter, so art was always in the household. However, his parents split up when he was young, and Joyce took on the role of helper and caretaker for his mother, Marvel Opara, who is blind. Joyce became incredibly observant at a very young age, as he would have to read signs on buses and trains and help with family shopping. Marvel balanced her love of art with her own extraordinary athletic pursuits too—including climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, kickboxing until she became pregnant with Joyce’s younger brother, and riding a tandem bicycle with Joyce across Thailand. 

Joyce earned a degree in fine art from Middlesex University, and specializes in abstract oil paintings. He’s said in the past that Picasso is as much a hero to him as Muhammad Ali, his fighting idol. For his final project at Middlesex, he painted people he deemed to be “his icons,” Ali, Bruce Lee and Beyoncé. He was recently commissioned by Purplebricks to create an original piece in support of Team GB at the Tokyo Olympics. 

In an interview with British Boxing News in 2020, Joyce’s university tutor Steve Mumberson, who is now an associate professor of Fine Art Printmaking at Middlesex, described how he believes Joyce’s acuity from his artistic pursuits have been transferrable to the squared circle. 

"Boxing like many sports requires awareness and coordination, learnt by acquiring skills, attention to obscuration, full commitment and good ability to be self-critical and learn from those observations. From boxing history, the fighter who loses concentration, who is not a keen-eyed observer of the other fighters’ every move will lose the fight within seconds,” said Mumberson. “Making visual art requires the same heightened, visually aware eye for details and editing, knowing what is important and seeing several steps ahead. For if you don’t the art work can be lost in a moment, often completely. Making a painting or any other work of art demands a full commitment but can be easily lost in an idle moment. Art, like boxing, is unforgiving.”

Perhaps due to his late start in boxing, Joyce doesn’t have what one would consider a slick boxing gait in the ring. His punches can feel a little unorthodox in their delivery, they’re not delivered with the trademark fast-twitch snap we’re used to seeing, but their cadence, frequency and accuracy have all proven to be disruptive for opponents who have been boxing much longer than he has. 

His ability to adapt and thrive has been aided by his varied athletic pursuits, but his x-factor may lie in what Professor Mumberson described, his heightened awareness. Joyce’s stoppage win over Dubois was unorthodox in that it came almost exclusively due to jabs, left hands which ultimately broke Dubois’ orbital bone. Joyce found one specific thing Dubois was unable to defend, and rather than succumb to the urge to start getting playful with his offense with a wounded opponent, just continued pecking away until the fight was over. 

Against Takam, Joyce revealed that he had taken clues from a source other fighters either ignore, or claim they ignore. 

"His team had been working on some stuff, they were shouting out things for him to do. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. I used my boxing skills and my footwork to try and time him, and not take the power as much full-on so much and land my own shots,” Joyce told IFL.TV.

This is perhaps the most glaring example of Joyce’s lack of tethering to boxing convention actually aiding him—and also making him a fascinating character. Most fighters claim to hear nothing but their own corner, which may be true or not. Boxers are taught to have tunnel vision during fights and to hear just one voice, that of their trainers. To admit anything otherwise would signal a lack of focus to boxing purists. But Joyce, who joked last week to The Sun that he “doesn’t know much about boxing,” heard important information from Takam’s own corner on the fly that could help him win the fight and saw no reason why he shouldn’t both use it and later reveal how it helped him. 

For all that’s been made about Joyce’s brutish strength and toughness, it’s what’s underneath the Juggernaut helmet and the corresponding in-ring persona that is what’s most interesting about him, and perhaps most useful to him in his latest pursuit.

Corey Erdman is a boxing writer and commentator based in Toronto, ON, Canada. Follow him on Twitter @corey_erdman.