4 hours ago
5
“Nigel’s here,” Derek Chisora says as he gives me a nudge when we walk into a restaurant called Boisdale in Belgravia. The great old warhorse of British boxing and I have been ambling around this stretch of London in search of a place where we can sit down and talk. He settles on Boisdale, which tags itself as “a British restaurant” and “a carnivore’s delight”.
Even though we are not dropping in for lunch Chisora has enough of a swagger to blag us a private room to chat. We look more ragged than the diners, including Nigel Farage, and I’m not sure that the seemingly bewildered staff have a clear idea who Chisora is but we sweep through the restaurant, climb the stairs and find ourselves in a discreet room. After Chisora orders a bottle of water for us to share he asks the waiter to let Farage know that he is here.
Chisora is deep in training for his fight against Deontay Wilder on Saturday night, what will be the 50th and perhaps final bout of his career. “I think everybody fears the end,” Chisora says when I ask if he worries about life without boxing. “Let’s be honest. Everybody fears the end of their marriage, the end of their life. Everybody’s got an end.”
Chisora knows many us were urging him to retire more than three years ago when it seemed even then that he had shipped far too much damage in the ring. But his popularity has surged and he is on an impressive run of three straight victories against credible opponents including Joe Joyce and Otto Wallin. Wilder is a former world champion, who is also entering his 50th fight, and Chisora could end his career on an incredible high at the O2 in London.
Wilder looked a shell of the fighter he once had been when losing badly on points to Joseph Parker and then being stopped in the fifth round by Zhilei Zhang in 2024. He has fought only once since then, beating a journeyman, but Chisora cautions that “right now he’s very wounded and that’s a very dangerous man to fight. He’s desperate.”
For many years Wilder was described as the hardest-hitting heavyweight in history. He lost twice to Tyson Fury, and drew their first fight, but Wilder dropped the King of the Gypsies four times. Fury has never been the same again and so Chisora needs to be careful. “It’s going to be electric,” the 42-year-old says. “It’s going to be amazing.”
Wilder has always been prone to suspect pronouncements. In 2018 he said “I want a body on my record” and when this fight was announced he told Chisora: “I want you to kill me.” Chisora snorts: “It’s boxing bullshit. Nobody wants to kill anybody.”
How will this fight end on Saturday night? “I’m going to knock him out.” What does his wife, Emily, think of him facing Wilder? “She don’t like it, but it is what it is,” Chisora says.
Do they discuss the dangers? “No, we don’t. Life is dangerous already, my friend. You wear a nice watch and you get stabbed for it. Boxing is not dangerous. Boxing is fun.”
Chisora argues that “a true warrior knows when to stop”, and says: “I’ve had so many friends who stopped boxing and they’re not happy. They’re depressed. I’ve been doing this since I was 16. Is it time to stop just because somebody says [retire] for your health? It’s quite hard.”
Chisora once said that giving up boxing is as hard for a fighter as getting off heroin is for an addict. “It is,” he says quietly. Why is boxing so addictive? “Without it you have no routine. But if you have a fight then for two months you come on a routine. It don’t matter what goes through your mind. The routine is there. So the drug in boxing is the training. It keeps you going through the ups and downs.”
Does Chisora try to avoid head shots in the gym? “Yes. Most people use 16- or 18-ounce gloves [in sparring whereas sanctioned heavyweight fights feature 10 -ounce gloves where there is less protective cushioning]. But I use 22- to 24-ounce gloves for sparring. I don’t try to put on my macho. We’ve got big sofas in the gym.”
Does he think about brain damage after all the heavy blows he has taken to the head during his 19-year professional career? “No. What will be, will be.”
But does Chisora accept that boxing can cause brain damage? “It does,” he concedes, before shrugging. “I’ll be fine. Do I look and sound bad to you? I am fine.”
I explain to Chisora that Barry McGuigan, the former world champion featherweight boxer who is now 65, once told me that he made sure to test his mental faculties every day in retirement – whether that meant spending time on a crossword puzzle or some other brain teaser which tested his cognitive function. Does Chisora do anything similar?
“Yes. If I leave my house and come back home then I’m fine,” Chisora says with a laugh. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, Farage slips into our room. “Derek,” he says softly, holding out his hand and beaming.
“Hello mate,” Chisora says.
“Are you busy?” Farage asks me.
“Yes, we are,” I reply, “but that’s OK.”
“How are you?” Farage asks Chisora.
“Can’t complain,” the fighter replies. “It’s going well.”
Farage chuckles and says: “He never stops, this bloke.”
“How was America?” Chisora asks, in reference to Farage’s recent visit to Florida.
I can’t get John Crace’s sketch in the Guardian out of my head – in which he lampooned the Reform leader’s apparent failure to spend any time with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago after Farage had boasted of the visit before flying to the US. Farage’s answer is blustery: “America was good. It was short, only there 30 hours, but it was all right and I’ve been doing rallies and God knows what round the country. So it’s all good, it’s all good, it’s all good. It’s all good.”
By the time he has uttered that last phrase a fourth time it’s obvious that Farage has clocked the fact my phone is recording our conversation. I can imagine his reaction if he hears that Chisora is being interviewed by the Guardian, following this newspaper’s claims of his alleged historical antisemitism, which Farage denies.
“Listen, you crack on,” Farage says before, looking at me, he says of Chisora: “I shall be there at his next fight, his last professional fight.”
Chisora looks at his friend: “I might hire a tank and then you roll up in it.”
“Someone suggested this,” Farage replies with a cheesy grin.
I say that, before we know it, Farage will be appointing Chisora, whose boxing nickname is War, to his shadow cabinet. The politician and the boxer roar with laughter. Farage quips: “There’re lots of skills left, but …”
“Not those skills,” Chisora says.
“Horses for courses,” Farage says. “Listen, lovely seeing you.”
The pair shake hands again and Chisora says: “See you, mate.”
When we are alone I ask Chisora how he first met Farage. “Years ago, through a mutual friend. We do so much together.”
I tell Chisora that I’m confused by their friendship. He is a black Zimbabwean, who has lived in Britain for decades, and Reform are smeared by allegations of racism. “When you say racist, in what sense?” Chisora asks.
I mention just one example – at the Gorton and Denton byelection last month when the Reform candidate Matt Goodwin’s interim campaign manager in Tameside, Adam Mitula, was found to have posted social media messages which used the N-word and accused Black fathers of being “the best in leaving muims [sic] with no support”. He also posted about “Muslim no go ghettos in the UK”.
Chisora knows I come from South Africa and he shifts the focus. “You’ve got the same thing in South Africa right now. They don’t want more Africans in the South. They don’t want Nigerians. Listen, you’re always going to find people trying to fight for what’s theirs. I don’t call it racism. I call it politics. If people support Trump they’re told: ‘Oh, you’re a racist.’ Nigel’s come up with his party and now it’s: ‘He was a racist.’ Everybody who’s not with the left? You’re racist.”
What about Reform’s policies on immigration? Will Chisora, and other black Africans, ever truly be accepted in Britain by Reform voters? “I’m Zimbabwean. My [three] kids are British.”
Is he still a fan of Trump? “I was a fan of Trump, but not this latest stuff [in Iran]. He stopped seven wars and started another one.”
What does he feel about the current state of the world? “The ones at the top are making money and the ones at the bottom are not. We’ve got war in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa. Nobody wins. Not us. People die, people are burying their kids.”
I point out that populists such as Farage and Trump always talk about helping “ordinary people” but they are obscenely wealthy establishment figures. “Who are the good politicians?” Chisora asks. “I’m friends with Nigel. His politics are his politics, it’s nothing to do with me.”
Last year there was talk that Chisora might run as a Reform candidate for London mayor. “No, no,” he says. “It was a joke.”
He still wore a Reform hat at his press conference before he fought Wallin last year in Manchester. “Do you see me wearing Reform colours right now?”
We finally change the subject and Chisora says: “Boxing is a dirty business, like politics, bro.” But there is speculation that, should he beat Wilder, he might have one more fight. “You’re guessing too much. This is it.”
Headlining the O2 and beating a famous former world champion in Wilder would be, Chisora believes, “a sweet way to go out – bye, bye, Miss American Pie”.
That was a song Tyson Fury often sang after a fight. Might he do the same? “I can’t sing. I can’t dance.”
Yet, as he has done for years, Chisora can order burgers for himself, his opponent, and their entourages after the bout. “It started after the second Dillian Whyte fight [in 2018],” Chisora says. “Every time I finish fighting I want a burger. So after that fight [which he lost on an 11th round stoppage] we got 50 burgers and, when I came back to the dressing room, they’re all gone. None for me and I wanted it bad. At the next fight I ordered a hundred burgers, and we shared them. It became a very good, positive thing to do.”
Will he do the same after the Wilder fight? “Oh yes, we will be sharing Five Guys. It’s amazing. Food unites everybody.”
Once the fight is finished, the burgers have been eaten and his career as a fighter is finally over, will he want to remain in the dirty old business of boxing? “100%,” Chisora says. “I love it.”
