GIANT IS SHORT OF KILLER INSTINCT
Top dog: Audley Harrison enjoys dishing out the punishment during his super-heavyweight Olympic semi-final against Italy's Paolo Vidoz. Photograph: Rick Bowmer
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IT MIGHT be a compliment to Audley Harrison, the Londoner who in the early hours of this morning fought for Britain's first boxing Olympic gold medal for 32 years, to suggest that he lacks the primeval instincts necessary for the real world of professional pugilism. But there were voices in his ear, authentic voices from entrepreneurs who manage the three-ring circus around Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson, suggesting obscene swags of money are there for the taking should
Harrison say the word.
Harrison, however, would have to put considerably more at risk than most heavyweight prizefighters. He is not a fugitive from the mean streets. He holds a degree from Brunel University in sports science and leisure management, and has a loquacious way of putting things. "I've got lots of different gears," Harrison said before stepping in against his gold-medal rival from Kazakhstan. "I study my opponents, and change my style to take advantage of their strengths and
weaknesses. Basically, I figure out how to take them out in the nicest possible way."
Nice guy, Mr Harrison. I mean that sincerely, and not just because I have some sympathy with fighters I saw at the Commonwealth Games who were visibly intimidated by his 17st 11lb physique and his aura of self determination before they stepped inside the ropes. He is a a big man with the strength of purpose to ignore promoter Frank Warren urging him more than a year ago to forget the Olympic dream and start earning some of the supposed £60m that the circus promises to build him
up to.
With due respect to the Khazakstani, Mukhtarkhan Dildabekov, who hails from the tough army school of a former Soviet state, the professionals would of course expect to make more of a westerner following the path of Muhammad Ali, Lewis and Holyfield and even the beast Tyson from Olympic glory to hyped up gore. They can spell his name in lights, for a start. And Harrison's perfectly weighted one-liners, his rainbow platted short curls are box office material.
But he knows, this articulate and fairly worldly man, that the perils of the Las Vegas Hilton are another world to the Olympic heights around Darling Harbour in Sydney. He hears, from Holyfield and the self-promoting former British heavyweight Joe Bugner who have sought photo opportunities around him at these Games, that his method would be unacceptably passive for their business.
Harrison is masterly at working the amateur scoring system. In his corner, Ian Irwin, a whole hearted amateur boxing coach with over 30 years' experience in Cumbria, could regularly be heard, from the Commonwealth gold medal in Kuala Lumpur to the Olympics, urging Harrison to finish off a man while he can. Harrison has a long left lead beyond the reach of most, and when the mood takes him a destructive heavy artillery to hurt and concuss.
With rare hand speed he can pick off opponents with five, six, seven scoring shots in a matter of seconds, and then stay out of range while the minutes tick away. Not, you will gather, the murderous brain damage of which Tyson boasts, and for which the discredited American has twice recently been allowed to con the British public for millions at a time by knocking down sacrificial heavyweights.
Harrison talks a much nobler fight. Born of Jamaican parents, raised close to Wembley Stadium, he took to boxing relatively late, at 19. He is now a full decade on from that, and he brings to it phrases like "in the ring you entertain, outside it you educate".
He travels the world prepared. Outside the Shah Alam arena during the 1998 Commonwealth Games, he studiously led 21 British boxers, many of them from under-educated backgrounds, to call for reasonable Lottery funding for their "art". Boxing, he convincingly declared, has a social purpose for youngsters who have very little else; it channels their unspent energies, their aggressions, their sense of injustice.
It was while taking that lead that Harrison committed himself to the Olympics first, a possible pro career afterwards. He completed a 100,000-word dissertation on amateur boxing, and in his own words told us: "I'm unusual in boxing. I have my speed, my power, and most important my senses."
Evander Holyfield, a multi-millionaire still addicted to the fight and fame game, told Harrison on the eve of the final: "You have to be a bit more aggressive, man. Don't expect your height is going to be an intimidating factor - you've gotta put punches together."
This, after with seemingly no trouble at all and with a minimum of exertion, the Briton broke the nose, split the eye and subdued the spirit of Paolo Vidoz, his Italian semi-final victim. Vidoz was forever game,
Harrison was content to keep him at bay in short bursts of superiority. Back home, they watched at Repton, the amateur London club that first schooled him. Chris Finnegan, the last British fighter to win a gold, at middleweight in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, raised a toast to Harrison. "He's a thinking fighter," enthused Finnegan. "He's got a brain. He can move and jab, but can give it a bang when he needs to."
ROB HUGHES
Sunday Times
