First, Chris Billam-Smith was raised aloft. As Shane McGuigan hauled his fighter’s hulking frame into the air, for the adoring mass of fans to see, the cruiserweight’s face vanished behind his gloves. Somewhere under the battered leather, his left eye – swollen half-shut – closed completely. So did the right, trying to trap the tears. Inevitably, the dam broke.
The stream washed away his sweat, while his bawls were drowned out by the flood of noise around him. Then, the cruiserweight sank to his knees, all 6ft of him reduced to the stature of a boy who once dreamt of this very moment.
Or rather, this meshing of moments. To a young Billam-Smith, fighting in front of a sold-out crowd at the home of his beloved AFC Bournemouth would have represented a dream fulfilled; so would winning a world title. Doing both on the same night? If that plays like a scene from a Hollywood blockbuster, then it is the kind of moment that one would deride for stretching our suspension of disbelief a fibre too far. Boxing is not Hollywood. Boxing does not provide fairytale endings. Boxing is unforgiving, and cruel.
But if any boxer has earnt a mote of kindness from this sport, it is Billam-Smith. It was granted in the form of his decision win over former teammate Lawrence Okolie last month, but it should not be taken for granted. Nor could it have been when “112-112” was the first scorecard to boom over the PA at Dean Court.
“I remember listening and thinking... like frowning,” Billam-Smith, 32, tells The Independent, with stitches still hovering over his bruised left eye. “I wasn’t really listening to the [other] scores, but I just knew it was obviously a majority decision. If I had listened, I think I would have known [I’d won] because obviously one of them was a 107, and that couldn’t have been me because I had no points deducted and wasn’t knocked down or anything. Obviously I was just waiting for them to say ‘and new’. He said it, and a wave of emotion came over me. I was just thinking, ‘I’ve done it.’ I just couldn't believe it. It was such... it’s been such a long journey.”
As Billam-Smith knelt in the ring, his face soaked in tears, his mother came to his mind. Dedicating his victory to her, Billam-Smith revealed in the ring that she is battling cancer. “Obviously at the moment, with my mum being unwell and stuff,” he tells The Independent, “for it to be all worth it and worth all the hard graft put in over the years, the years of not earning any money as an amateur and even early on as a pro – not earning a huge amount of money and scraping by at times... To finally to do it and achieve my ultimate dream of winning a world title at the stadium, it was just... You can’t really put it into words to be honest with you.
“I had so many reasons to win; I had 15,000 people there that I couldn’t let down, my mum, my wife, my son. I was never going in there without giving it 100 per cent, because of all those reasons. And obviously for myself as well, with the growth through the years. Yeah, my mum obviously was a huge part of that as well.”
So was Billam-Smith’s son, Frank, as he says. “Having to miss my son’s first birthday the day before the fight, that’s a completely different emotion. It’s weird; he has no idea what’s going on, doesn’t know that I missed his birthday – thankfully – to stand half-naked in front of loads of people at Bournemouth pier. You know, it’d be amazing for him to grow up and hopefully be proud of his dad.”
These various factors, and the emotional weight loaded into each of them, had to be put aside for the sake of performance; so did the sense of occasion around fighting at Dean Court.
“On the Friday, I went and sat in my old season-ticket seat and just looked at the set-up,” says Billam-Smith. “I was like, ‘This is crazy.’ The ring-walk rehearsal was very important for me to visualise how everything was going to be, so it wasn’t overwhelming and I wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, this is actually happening.’ [During the actual ring walk], there’s a point where I sort of look around and just nod to myself. Like, I’m still very much in the zone and focused and staying calm, but I thought: ‘This is awesome.’
“[In the fight], I very much had blinkers on. All the visualisation helped. I was very calm in the ring and the whole time in the build-up, just thinking about those 12 rounds and how I was going to react – making sure I reacted logically to every situation.”
Billam-Smith did just that, capping off an eclectic trilogy of fights across the last 11 months. First, there was his war with Isaac Chamberlain, which ended as a points victory in Billam-Smith’s favour, then his knockout-of-the-year candidate against Armend Xhoxhaj in December, before this often-bitty bout with Okolie.
The 12 rounds against Okolie will not be what fans remember from this particular night, however. They will remember the aftermath – the stirring scenes of a dream being realised in real time.
“Now it’s about creating another dream,” says Billam-Smith, looking ahead to the future. “You know, I’d love to fight in Las Vegas, but most importantly I need to secure my family’s future financially. And I’m not the finished article as a boxer.
“In any sport I’ve ever played, I’ve always just wanted to give it 100 per cent and improve. That’s still the same me now.”
Lorton Entertainment’s“STABLE”, a four-part documentary series covering Shane McGuigan’s work with his fighters, will be released this Autumn.
