by Terence Dooley

You do not play at boxing, according to common convention, and you especially don’t play games when it comes to coming back to the sport.  Unless there is good reason for it, many fans balk at the idea of a fighter coming back after a few years out, arguing that they are more susceptible to furthering the damage accrued during the first phase of their career.

However, boxers make the choice to go into boxing in the first place, and reserve the right to return to it further down the line as long as they meet the licensing criteria laid down by a reputable governing body such as the BBBoC.  Driffield's Curtis Woodhouse (23-7, 13 KOs) applied for his licence again earlier this year.  The former Premiership footballer and British light-welterweight Champion had not fought since losing his Lonsdale belt in his first defence against Willie Limond in June 2014, a Majority Decision.

Woodhouse, though, he feels that he still has something to offer the sport following a six-round decision comeback win over Lithuania's Arvydas Trizno (25-68-3, 7 early) at the Doncaster Dome on a Steffy Bull-promoted show [Bull also trains Woodhouse] on Saturday night.

“Initially, I didn’t intend to comeback at all, but my little boy is at Rotherham United Academy and he came back for preseason, he was getting back into training and said: ‘Daddy, do you want to come for a run with me?’” explained Woodhouse when speaking to BoxingScene after the contest.

“I said ‘Yes’ and I’ll never forget it.  I was sixteen stone six (lbs) yet still went for a run.  We got to the top of our road, and I genuinely thought that I was having a heart attack: I was hot, felt dizzy, and couldn’t get any breath in my lungs.  I’ve not had asthma, but it felt like an asthma attack.  It scared me.  I had to walk back home and said to my missus: ‘I need to get back into the gym’.  I lost my dad when I was young and if I’d have carried on the way I was going I think I’d have been dead within 12 months.

“The next day, I went for a run and then went back to the gym.  Everyone knows that the best way to lose weight is through boxing.  I ended up doing a bit of body sparring and all of a sudden that light bulb came on, I thought: ‘I’ve still got a little bit left here’.  The main problem was the weight.  I still needed to know if I could dedicate myself to the training, because once you get to fight night that takes care of itself—it is the training that is hard.

“I lost a stone a month for five months.  Once I got to in and around 12 stone, I thought about doing some open sparring to see how I did.  I sparred some good kids: Tyrone Nurse, Harlem Eubank and Anthony Fowler.  I wanted to see where I was at and how I would get on.  I was competing well for someone who had been out for three years.

“I thought I’d give it another go.  Since I left school at 16, I’ve been a sportsman.  I retired from football in 2006 and 10 weeks later was making my boxing debut, so I’ve never been in the real world.  I’ve never had to get a job.

“You just met my friend Adrian Tolhurst from [office and IT supplies company] Direct Imaging, who said: ‘Just come and get a job in our offices’.  Honestly, working a nine to five in an office is just not me—I’m an eagle, not a budgie, and you can’t put an eagle in a cage.  I broke the sales record in my first month, thought—I can chat sh*t with anyone.  But I had to get back to what I know, which is sport.”

Woodhouse’s post-boxing weight gain had left him more than just out-of-shape; it impacted on every area of his life and reached the point where it had become untenable.  “It was horrible and I was more angry with myself for getting into that shape,” he explained.

“I wondered what I was doing.  I thought I was never going to fight again.  I have had some dark moments in these past six-months, some tough times, times when I second-guessed myself after getting bashed up in sparring.

“I couldn’t put my socks on in the morning when getting up, I was that fat.  Everything I did was on three: ‘One, two—cough—and three!’.  I’d celebrate getting up because I was that fat, it was embarrassing.  I was walking through the village where I live and you’d kind of see people saying: ‘F***ing hell, have you seen the size of Curtis Woodhouse?’.

“The feedback has been unbelievable, having people saying I’ve inspired them to lose weight by putting my videos out.  Normally, I put Twitter on and hear ‘You’re a wanker’, and I think: ‘OK, I only said ‘Good morning, Twitter’.  To get the good feedback is unbelievable.  My journey has inspired other people.  I’ve not just said what I was going to do, I went out and did it.”

The post-Limond landscape was made all the more difficult by the events that had preceded the fight.  The 37-year-old’s split decision win over Darren Hamilton for the British belt in February 2014 was his top of the mountain moment.  He wanted to win his first defence—and annex the Commonwealth crown in the process—and worked hard in the gym, but was hit with a bankruptcy notice on the day of the weigh-in then floored twice en route to a Majority Decision defeat that ushered him into retirement.

“I found it hard, yeah,” he admitted.  “I started life as a non-professional as a bankrupt, which was really difficult.  I had a year, maybe 18 months, of some really difficult times until I could get back on my feet again, and I’ve got a wife and children to support.  Having boxing in my life again has been good.

“I got the bankruptcy papers at the weigh-in, they said they’d been trying to track me down, didn’t know where I was then read that I was fighting in Scotland so came up.  I wasn’t that hard to find, though, because I’d been in my house.

“That was a really tough time.  It was a tax bill, I hadn’t filled my returns for five or six years, so they estimated a bill.  I don’t know what they think I’d been earning, but they hit with me with a massive tax bill of 150 grand and I couldn’t pay it so they made me bankrupt.  That was two years ago.  I’m over it now and came out the other side—although if Steffy keeps paying me what he’s paying me I’ll go f***ing bankrupt again.

“I actually trained really hard for the Limond fight, and felt good, yet I think there is a difference between wanting to win and needing to win.  I really wanted to beat Wille.  I needed to beat Hamilton—that was the difference.  I hate to use the word, but for my legacy I needed to beat Hamilton.

“When my name comes up, it will always be ‘Curtis Woodhouse, the footballer who became a British Champion’.  I was not as disappointed after the Limond fight because I was at the end of my journey.  I lost to the better man on the night.  It hurt, but if I’d lost to Hamilton it would have broken me.  The Limond fight didn’t break me.”

With his career over, his finances in temporary disarray and his future uncertain, the former footballer turned fighter hit the bar, and the bar hit him back.  “My mum’s a landlady at a boozer, so I got a few free pints,” he said.  “Putting on weight isn’t so much the eating as the boozing, and the eating shit food that comes with it.”

Talk of a comeback sparked rumours of financial ruin and the need to earn some quick fire money.  Boxing doesn’t work that way, especially when you are not at world title level or one of the chosen few, so it is all about renewing the fire for Woodhouse rather than filling up the coffers.

He said: “People told me to play football as long as I could as I’d miss it and you don’t tend to retire from boxing, boxing retires you, but I kind of retired myself as I felt I’d got as far as I could go with the British and Commonwealth title fight.  It is important if you are going to do something that you love it.  I did kind of enjoy it out there tonight, which was hard to do as there was pressure on me over how I’d look and the fear of getting beat, so I’m proud of myself.

“It makes me laugh when people ask if I’m doing it for the money.  It isn’t there in boxing so I’m just doing what I want to do.  I’m getting paid by Direct imaging, I manage Bridlington Town, and hope to move up in football management, [he is taking the necessary UEFA badges] and I do this for cheap thrills—it is a hobby that I enjoy doing.”

Woodhouse is still immensely proud of holding aloft the Lonsdale belt, arguing that it is a defining achievement in not just boxing but his life in general, a moment that he dreamed about that became an unlikely reality.

“The best way to compare achievements is to look how often it has been done before and how often it gets done again,” he said.  “I don’t think anyone will do what I did.  It wasn’t done before me and I don’t think it will be done after me.  If people get annoyed that I keep going on about it then they’d better get used to it because it is a massive achievement for me.

“People normally have a wealth of amateur experience.  I left football, became a professional fighter and went on to win a British title.  One of my proudest moments ever was when I went on the Internet the next day and saw the list of people who had won that title.  There are some unbelievable names on there, mine stood out like a sore thumb but it is on there.

“In the future, when people look at the list of British Champions at light-welterweight my name will be there with Ricky Hatton, Junior Witter and future world champions who had won that title.  It was my proudest achievement.  It meant everything to me.

“You’ve got all these international titles, they are easier to fight for and people go that route because it is an easier route than the British title.  You can’t blag the British Boxing Board of Control.  You can only fight for the British title if you are top ten in the country.  International titles can be given away or bought—you can’t do that with the British title.

“My aim was to win the British title.  Do you think I wanted to box Dale Miles in a British title eliminator (L KO 5 in June 2012)?  Did I want to fight a big southpaw who hits like a f***ing mule?  I wasn’t asking for that fight, the Board made it.  I had other options yet went that route because I wanted the British title.  People are ducking and diving to go a different route for the easier fights, I didn’t do that.  I may have got beat a few times but I can go home to my kids and say I never ducked anyone in my life.”

The Miles fight looked like the end of the road at that point in Woodhouse’s career, a bad knockout loss in a fight that he had felt was in the bag when he saw his opponent on the scales.

“Dale looked like a bag of shit at the weigh-in, so I told him I was going to break him in half,” recalled Woodhouse.  “He just looked at me and smiled as if to say: ‘What is he on about?’.  I walked away thinking: ‘F***ing hell, that was a bit eerie’.  I remember walking to the ring, seeing him in the opposite corner bouncing up and down and thinking someone must have got a pump, stuck it up his arse and pumped him up—he was massive.

“I’ve never been hit like that in my life.  The only way I can describe it is when I was a kid in Driffield and there was a load of countryside and farms.  To keep sheep in the fields they’d have electric wires.  As a kid you’d get dared to touch it, grab it and get that jolt.  Getting hit by Dale took me back to 1988, touching that electric fence and getting buzzed.  I’d never been buzzed like that in sparring or anything.

“Every time he hit me he shook me down to my boots.  I don’t even remember getting knocked out.  I asked [former trainer] Ryan Rhodes why the ref had stopped it and he said: ‘You do know you went down, don’t you?’.  I couldn’t believe it until I watched the fight back.  It was a sickener because if I’d have won that fight I’d have been fighting for the British title next.

“My next fight was Dave Ryan (W MD 10 in September 2012), one of the hardest men on the circuit, just twelve weeks after fighting Miles, which had left me with a double fracture to the cheekbone.  I was asked if I wanted it, said my face was a bit sore and then said ‘Yeah’.  I went straight back in.  Real fighters fight real fights.

“I’ve fought some good kids, I came here and boxed Steffy in my 15th fight (in July 2010), it was his 36th fight and I stopped him in nine in his own town, it made people think: ‘That was a good win’.  I said to him tonight: ‘The last time I walked in there I knocked you out!’.”

A long-time boxing fan, Woodhouse also basks in the enjoyment of winning an award from the BBBoC for services to boxing, another indication that he had been accepted into the community.

“The biggest acknowledgement I ever got was a reward from the Board for my services to boxing.  I thought that was brilliant, to get recognized by your peers.  Anthony Joshua was in the crowd, Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn too, all clapping for me—it brought a lump to my throat.

“I look at boxers as superstars.  If David Beckham walked in here I wouldn’t be bothered.  If Naz walked in I’d be like: ‘Fucking hell, it is Naseem Hamed’.  To get that reward was a beautiful thing.”

Now, though, he is firmly on the comeback trail and hopes to secure a fight with former Commonwealth light-welterweight holder John Wayne Hibbert either later this year or early in 2018.  The Trizno outing was a chance to shed some rust against someone brought in to give him rounds.  With that accomplished, the target is another fight followed by a fan-friendly showdown against Hibbert.

“I’ll fight again in November then look at the Hibbert fight, our teams are talking,” revealed Woodhouse.  “Ideally, I’d like another training camp to get that firmness and fitness back, but if it was offered to me now I’d take it.”

 Please send news and views to @Terryboxing.