Part three in the series paying tribute to the fighters whose legendary careers deserve the spotlight.
The Man Nobody Gave a Chance
On 18 March 1986, at the Westfield Country Club in Hull, a young man from Sheffield climbed through the ropes for the first time as a professional. He had no pedigree, no reputation and no one in the arena truly believed he belonged in the ring other than the man in his corner. Six rounds later, he heard the decision go to Peter Brown.
It was the kind of night that ends careers before they begin. Most people who lose their debut in a small hall in Hull are never heard from again.
But Johnny Nelson was not most people. Nearly two decades later he walked away from boxing as one of the great world champions in British history. “The Entertainer” finished with a record of 45-12-2 (29 KOs). He held the WBO cruiserweight title for more than six years, and he defended it 13 times, a cruiserweight record.
This is the story of a fighter who lost his first three professional fights and still became the best in the world. It is a story about perseverance in its purest form: the refusal to quit when every sign, every result and every doubter said it was time to stop.
Losing His Way to the Top
Every young fighter that suffers a defeat should look up the record of the Sheffield man. Nelson lost his first three fights, including a defeat in Denmark to Los Angeles Olympian Magne Havnaa of Norway, a man who would go on to win the WBO cruiserweight title himself. Think about that for a moment. Nelson was a beginner with nothing behind him, and he was already being matched with Olympians who would be world champions. His first win finally came on 20 November 1986, a six-round points victory over Chris Little. One win in four.
1987 brought more wins, then another loss, this time to another Olympian, Brian Schumacher of Liverpool. Two years into his career the record stood at 8-5. Nobody looking at it would have expected great things. Many would have quietly suggested he find another line of work.
Yet a theme was already forming, one that would define Nelson’s entire career. He fought the best, and he went wherever he had to go to do it. There was no promoter to protect him, no carefully built record, no easy route. There was only a willingness to take the fights that his mentor Brendan Ingle told him to take. Johnny Nelson may not have had belief in himself but he had an unwavering trust in the Dubliner.
Crawford Ashley
On 4 May 1988, Nelson met Crawford Ashley, a future British and European light heavyweight champion, at the Midlands Social Club in Solihull. Over eight rounds, the young man everyone had written off outboxed one of the rising talents in the country and took the decision. Speaking to Irish Boxing Digest, Ashley to his great credit, remembers it clearly and with respect.
“I ended up boxing him, but I didn’t know I was going to box him till the time I was actually getting weighed in,” Ashley recalls. “And he taught me a very valuable lesson. He’s the only guy who’s ever gone inside my head when I was in the ring.”
Nelson was talking as soon as they met, and Ashley admits it worked. “He kept saying, ‘You’re f***ed now, you’re f***ed now’. And I said, yeah, I’m going to show you who’s f***ed, and walked straight on to a punch and he put me down, and I just thought, no. How did I let you get me?”
But Ashley understood what the night meant for the man who beat him. “I also think when he won that fight, it gave him confidence that he could go in and do it. And when he boxed Carl Thompson, I think he had more confidence because he’d now beat a man who beat Carl Thompson.”
Eleven years before Nelson would stand across the ring from Thompson for the world title, a win in a Solihull hall was already planting the seed. The self belief was being built one hard night at a time.
What stands out just as much is how Ashley speaks about Nelson now. The two traded words in the boxing press when Ashley wanted a rematch, and then met at a show and shared a laugh. “He says, I’m glad you understand boxing. And I just thought the only time I’ve ever got a problem with anybody is when that bell rings. Up till then it’s just words and just talking, and it’s good to have somebody you can have banter with and realise it’s just a game. It’s nothing personal.”
Fierce inside the ropes, warm outside them. It is a thread that runs through every story told about Johnny Nelson.
The Titles Begin
On 26 October 1988 Nelson won his first title, stopping Danny Lawford for the Central Area championship. The boy who had lost his first three fights was now a champion, however modest the belt. On 21 May 1989 he went one better, knocking out Andy Straughn in eight rounds to win the British title. He then defended it against Ian Bulloch in just two rounds.
Nine straight wins in 1990 earned him a surprise shot at the WBC title against the legendary Carlos De Leon of Puerto Rico. In front of his own people at Sheffield City Hall, with the whole city behind him, the fight ended in a draw. For a fighter written off so many times it should of been seen as a tremendous achievement. But Nelson did not see it that way and he heard the jeers from the crowd. He felt he had let his fans down with how he fought, and that feeling stayed with him.
But he didn’t hang around feeling sorry for himself and ended 1990 by travelling to Germany and beating the unbeaten local hope Markus Bott to win the European cruiserweight title. Alone, in a hostile hall, against a man nobody had beaten. It was a pattern he would repeat all over the world.
Round the World and Back
The second world title shot came in 1992, against IBF champion James Warring at Hugo’s Nightclub in Bealton, Virginia. Nelson lost a 12-round decision, a long way from home, and again the world title dream just out of reach.
The next stretch would have broken most men. A defeat in France to Norbert Ekassi. Then a trip to South Africa, where Nelson stepped up to heavyweight to face the unbeaten Corrie Sanders and lost over ten rounds. Sanders would later destroy Wladimir Klitschko to win the WBO heavyweight title, a measure of the level at which Nelson was unknowingly operating.
Most people would have taken that as the end. Johnny Nelson thought otherwise.
1993 took him to Australia, Belgium and New Zealand, where he won and lost the WBF cruiserweight title and then won the WBF heavyweight title against fan favourite Jimmy Thunder, in front of Thunder’s home crowd in Auckland. In 1994 he was back in Bethnal Green, losing a ten-round decision to the British-Nigerian heavyweight prospect Henry Akinwande, before flying to Thailand to defend his WBF title against Kazakhstan’s Nikolay Kulpin. Bethnal Green one week, Thailand the next. This was the life of a fighter who had no safety net.
Then came 1995, and two fights in São Paulo, Brazil. Nelson lost both to Adilson Rodrigues, both controversially. Few would have blamed him for walking away. But his second defeat, on 3 December 1995, would prove to be one of the most important nights of his career. It was the last time Johnny Nelson would ever taste defeat.
The Turning Point
In 1996 Nelson dropped back down to cruiserweight and won both the British and European titles, the British crown coming against former world light heavyweight champion Dennis Andries. Something had changed. Over the next few years he defended his titles with growing authority, and a showdown with WBO champion Carl Thompson began to build. Thompson had become a big name in Britain after his epic wins over Chris Eubank.
On 27 March 1999 in Derby, Johnny Nelson produced the performance of his career. He stopped Thompson in five rounds and became WBO champion of the world.
The boy who had lost his debut in Hull, the fighter who had been beaten in Denmark, America, France, South Africa, Brazil and Britain, was a world champion. Brendan Ingle’s promise had come true.
Nobody knew it at the time, but it was the start of one of the greatest world title reigns in British boxing history.
The Reign
Nelson outclassed the best the WBO could put in front of him, among them Christophe Girard, Pietro Aurino and the tough Argentinian Marcelo Dominguez. Every defence added to a legacy that, at the time, almost nobody was paying attention to but he was quietly building something historic.
In 2002 came a classic against the big-punching American Ezra Sellers in Copenhagen. Sellers had just knocked out Carl Thompson and fancied his chances of taking the title. Nelson was down early, and for a moment it looked as if the reign might end. But this was the man who had been picking himself up since 1986. He climbed off the floor, took control and won by stoppage.
In November 2002 came his last fight in Britain, a contentious draw with Panama’s Guillermo Jones. After that, Nelson took his title on the road, as he always had. His final three defences were all successful, two of them in Germany against Alexander Petkovic and Ruediger May and final one in Italy against Vincenzo Cantatore.
Ruediger May: “I Have Just Good Things to Say about Johnny Nelson”
No account of Nelson’s character is more revealing than the one given to Irish Boxing Digest by the man he faced on 4 September 2004 in Essen, Germany. It is a story about two fighters, a fight, and a friendship that survived it.
It began in Frankfurt in 1993. May was 19, a young professional training alongside the top German names of the day, and Nelson had been brought over as a sparring partner. “He was put in a very shitty hotel and he was treated not so well,” May remembers. A European champion, far from home, put up in a poor hotel, hired to help other men get ready for their big nights.
May was young and hungry and Nelson was his first international sparring partner as a professional, and it was a shock. “I was very young, he was very experienced, and my trainer Manfred Wolke was screaming the whole sparring, and he was telling me what to do and what not to do. I just couldn’t do anything, because Johnny was just so good. He was European champion at that time already, and I couldn’t see anything he was throwing at me.”
When the session ended, the exhausted teenager broke down. “After the sparring I was really depressed. I was down. I was crying, and my coach was screaming at me how shitty I did in the sparring.”
This is the moment that stands out most for May. Johnny Nelson, the man who had just outclassed him in the ring, walked over and picked him up. “Johnny was telling me, ‘Don’t worry, Rudi, you are young, you will do it, you will make it, you are talented, just keep on going’. And he was very, very, very nice to me, and that was my first experience.”
Years later the roles were reversed. In 2003 and again in 2004, Nelson invited May and his brother, Torsten, to Sheffield for sparring and treated them as honoured guests. “He treated me and my brother so well. We had in Sheffield the best hotel. It was the Hilton, just right in the city, best hotel you can have. And he was inviting us to dinner. He was inviting us to his home. I was sitting there with his two girls on my knees, and we had fun.” Nelson, who had once slept in a poor German hotel, made sure that no fighter who came to him ever felt the same. He even shared his boxing knowledge freely. “He gave me advice how to do it and how not to do it.”
May became a top cruiserweight contender, and he knew their paths might cross. So he went to his management with a plea. “I am well-rated in all the boxing boards, and please don’t give me a fight versus Johnny for the WBO. I will fight WBA, WBC, or IBF champion, but don’t give me the WBO champion.”
Boxing does not work that way. May became the number one contender, and the fight had to be made. Within minutes of the news, the phone rang. It was Nelson. “Hey Rudi, it is just business, and we don’t talk till after the fight, and after the fight everything will be as before.”
In the build up they were cordial to each other until the first bell. May pushed forward on the front foot. In round six, with Nelson on the ropes, a light touch on the shoulder sent May through them and onto the photographers’ table. Lying there, May made a decision that tells you everything about him. “I thought: no, I don’t want to become champion as Max Schmeling because of a foul. I will win this fight fair.” He climbed back in. The referee took two points off Nelson for the foul.
In round seven Nelson landed a clean one-two, May went down, took the count, rose and fought on, but more good shots followed and the referee stopped the fight. “So I lost my only world championship fight by knockout in round seven versus Johnny ‘The Entertainer’ Nelson.”
Then came the moment May will never forget, away from the cameras, backstage “It was terrible to see because he had tears in his eyes, I had tears in my eyes. The first words he said to me was: ‘Never again. Let’s do this never again’. And I said: ‘Yeah, I promise, I don’t want to fight you again’.”
A world champion, with his title safe, shared a tear with the man he had just beaten. Two fighters who had given everything in the ring now promised never to fight each other again. After the fight Nelson told the BBC there would be no rematch “He is a good friend and fighting your friend is like stabbing someone in the back”
And life turned out the way Nelson told May “It was like before.” When May retired and began training fighters of his own, he sent them to Sheffield. “He just let them train in the Sheffield gym, and he had a few of my guys at his home and gave them a room and a bed and a meal, and he always was so nice to me, and I have just good things to say about Johnny Nelson.”
The man who knocked out a fighter and cried with him afterwards is the same man who consoled a crying teenager in a German gym eleven years earlier. That, as much as the 13 defences, is why Johnny Nelson is so loved in the sport.
Nelson’s final fight came on 26 November 2005 in Rome, where he beat Vincenzo Cantatore on points. A defence against the dangerous Welshman Enzo Maccarinelli was scheduled for 2006, but it fell through when Nelson injured his knee in training, and he announced his retirement.
He had lost his debut. He had lost his first three fights. He had lost 12 times in total. He had been written off in gyms, in newspapers and in the minds of almost everyone who looked at his record. But after that night in São Paulo in 1995, he never lost again. And Johnny Nelson became champion of the world.
Brendan Ingle: The Man in His Corner
It is impossible to tell Johnny Nelson’s story without Brendan Ingle. The Dubliner who made his life and legend in Sheffield, building the famous Wincobank gym that produced so many champions and more importantly saved so many young lives. Ingle was with Nelson from the first time he laced up his gloves to the day he retired, and the bond between trainer and pupil was one of the defining relationships of his career.
Ingle’s message to Nelson early on was simple, and he repeated it for years: “Just listen to me. If you listen to me, you’ll be a world champion.”
Think about how that must have sounded in the early days. A fighter with no confidence, no amateur background and a record that said the opposite. Yet Ingle never wavered. Through the setbacks that would have ended many careers, his gym was where Nelson came back to rebuild.
Nelson has never forgotten what it meant. “I know, for a fact, I’d never have boxed if I didn’t meet Brendan.”
Read that line again. A world champion, a record-setter, one of the most respected men in the sport, saying that none of it would have existed without the one man who believed in him.
A Legend Remembered
Today Johnny Nelson is one of the most respected voices in the sport, a Sky Sports pundit whose analysis carries weight precisely because of what he achieved against the odds. He knows what it is to be written off, to lose and to keep going. When he speaks about a fighter’s struggles, he speaks as someone who has been there.
His record of 13 successful WBO cruiserweight defences stands as a monument to perseverance. But the numbers only tell part of it. For every young fighter who loses early and wonders whether they belong, there is Johnny Nelson as proof that you do.
He proved the doubters wrong, and he did it with grace, with dignity and with a decency that opponents still talk about with tears in their eyes.
That is why he belongs in this series. That is why Johnny Nelson is a legend.
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