Australia

the Australian lightweight boxing hero you’ve never heard of

On the evening of November 27 last year, George Kambosos jnr stood at the window of his room on the 20th floor of the New Yorker Hotel in midtown Manhattan. He fixed his attention on the large, circular, neon-lit arena across the road that New Yorkers call, without a hint of irony, “the most famous coliseum in the world”.

Madison Square Garden is where John Lennon last performed before he was shot dead; where Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier; where Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to John F Kennedy; where film director Spike Lee spits invective from courtside seats whenever his beloved New York Knicks basketball team plays.

On this night, it was the place where Kambosos was prepared to die.

In a matter of hours, the 28-year-old from southern Sydney’s Sylvania would walk across West 34th Street, down 8th Avenue and into the ring as the 13-to-one outsider against American Teófimo López jnr, the lightweight champion of the world. A renowned knockout specialist, López was considered one of the sport’s best pound-for-pound fighters.

Kambosos’s plan was to spoil the party. To shut up López and his mouthy father, Teófimo López snr, who had clashed with Kambosos’s father, Jim, at a sparring session days before the fight after bursting into the gym screaming, “Kambosos! You’re gonna get your ass kicked! First round!”

Kambosos in the ring last November with then lightweight champ, American Teófimo López jnr.Credit:Getty Images

Mostly, the plan was to change his family’s life forever with a $US2 million payday … But what if he didn’t? He shifted his gaze from Madison Square Garden towards his wife, Rebecca. “You know I’m prepared to die tonight,” Kambosos told her. “To win this fight, I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“You’ll be fine,” Rebecca replied. Then he shuffled through the contracts, the life insurance policies, the waivers he’d signed absolving the sanctioning bodies of liability if Kambosos didn’t make it back to the hotel room. “You know how much this means to me,” he explained. “If anything happens, I want every cent that’s owed to me to go to you and the kids.”

Tears welled in Rebecca’s eyes. She knew of her husband’s resolve, but this was different. In the dressing room before the fight, Kambosos FaceTimed their three young children in Sydney as his hands were wrapped to secure his bones and joints beneath his gloves. Weeks earlier, he’d hugged them before boarding his flight to the US, knowing “that could be the last time I see them”.

Before Rebecca left the dressing room to find her ringside seat, she had a statement of her own to make. “You are winning,” she said. “You are not dying.”

When the ring announcer declared Kambosos the winner by a split-points decision, the only person shocked by the result was López.

As it turned out, Kambosos didn’t need to die. He landed an overhand right in the first round that left López sprawling backwards. He won the middle rounds, firing off combinations, then moving out of trouble, just as he and his team had planned. In the 10th, López caught Kambosos on the back of the head and he crashed to the canvas, wobbling on his feet as the referee gave him a standing count. Instead of letting the world championship slip away, Kambosos regained his composure, did the sign of the cross and tapped his foot on the bottom rope, then won the next two rounds.

At the end of the fight, both fighters were covered in blood, most of it belonging to López. When the ring announcer declared Kambosos the winner by a split-points decision, the only person shocked by the result was López. Earlier in the night, the crowd had chanted his name. Now they were standing and applauding the unknown puncher from Sydney.

The New York State Athletic Commission insists boxers be taken to hospital after their fight for CT scans and a routine check-up. After making his way through the crush of reporters and spectators, Kambosos climbed into the back of the ambulance alongside Jim and Rebecca. The chunky doors closed and, suddenly, there was silence.

“That’s when it hit me – I’d won,” Kambosos recalls. “You can lose your life doing anything, but it’s different in the ring. I know it’s a sport. But in my head, I knew this fight would change everything. My kids would be set for life. I was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that happened. Losing my life was the sacrifice I was prepared to make.”

Kambosos left the hospital five hours after arriving, with a few stitches above his left eye. He had a burger and went to bed. López didn’t leave hospital for another five days.

 With coach Javiel Centeno.

With coach Javiel Centeno.Credit:Tim Bauer


Who the hell is George Kambosos jnr? I’m glad you asked. He’s the Australian sporting hero you may not know and, if you do, you don’t know the half of it. His victory over López was one of the truly great moments in Australia’s storied boxing history; a win for the little guy, struggling for recognition and sponsorship dollars against the lippy American. Kambosos is the type of unheralded fighter Sylvester Stallone had in mind when he wrote the screenplay for Rocky.

The alphabet soup of world boxing’s various sanctioning bodies is confusing and convoluted but, in basic terms, Kambosos’s win installed him as the IBF, WBA, WBO and Ring Magazine lightweight boxing world champion. It’s an achievement that adds his name to a pantheon of Australian greats including Jeff Fenech, Kostya Tszyu and Lionel Rose.

One person who has known of Kambosos’s potential for some time is Manny Pacquiao, the 12-time world champion, now a Philippines senator. He engaged Kambosos as a sparring partner for three of his world-title fights. In a rare interview, he tells Good Weekend: “It’s been a long journey for George and he’s sacrificed a lot to get to the top. I don’t see him letting that go. How many world titles can he win? He’s only limited by his imagination and his ambition.”

Loading

Instead of taking the lucrative path of easy fights and early knockouts, Kambosos will attempt to become the first undisputed lightweight champion in three decades to win all four belts of boxing’s sanctioning bodies. On Sunday, June 5, he’ll face WBC champion Devin Haney at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne. Only in boxing can there be dispute about what “undisputed” means, but victory against the American will settle any argument about his place in the boxing cosmos – although he’s already the outsider with the bookmakers.

“I could’ve fought a no-name,” Kambosos says. “Made $3 million to $4 million. ‘Look at me, my first big defence in Australia lasts two rounds. Sorry, fans … ’ I can’t do that. I’m the top dog in the division but the underdog in this fight. It’s exactly where I want to be.”

At the time of writing, the bout was close to sold out at Marvel Stadium, with a crowd of more than 50,000 expected. Ringside seats were snapped up minutes after they went on sale. Many in the crowd will come from Melbourne’s sprawling Greek community, one of the biggest in the world outside of Greece. Kambosos has proudly wrapped the Greek and Australian flags around his shoulders after each of his 20 professional victories, and four bays of the stadium have been allocated to Greek fans.

After winning the world title, Kambosos has suddenly become “box-office” after struggling for years to gain traction.

The Hellas Fan Club, which describes itself as an “ultra-fanatical supporters’ group for the Greek national football team and all Hellenic sporting events”, will march through the streets of Melbourne before descending on the stadium. “His success means a lot,” says the club’s president, shopfitter Nick Zoukis. “Our parents left our homeland so long ago, leaving behind everything to give second, third and fourth generations a better life. When kids like George are still honouring that, it’s actually huge.”

Significantly, the fight will be broadcast on Main Event, the pay-for-view channel owned by News Corporation’s Foxtel, which has ignored all but three of Kambosos’s 20 professional fights. After winning the world title, Kambosos has suddenly become “box-office” after struggling for years to gain traction. Desperate for publicity, he was known to text boxing reporters asking if they’d write about him.

Why this is the case depends on whom you talk to. Doubtless, the decision from Team Kambosos to base themselves in the US in 2017, beyond the focus of Australian promoters and broadcasters, was one reason. The absence of a famous surname also hasn’t helped. While Tim Tszyu grumbles about constant references to his famous father, there’s little dispute being Kostya’s son has gifted him media coverage.

“We’ve done it tough since day one, with limited funds, with no famous surname,” Jim Kambosos says. “Main Event said, ‘George Kambosos jnr isn’t a sellable name,’ he’s not someone they can market on TV like Tim Tszyu, who has the history with his dad.” (A Main Event executive tells Good Weekend the network intended to broadcast Kambosos’s world-title fight against López before contractual wrangling in the US meant a different promoter took charge and awarded the rights to a rival streaming service.)

Kambosos is philosophical about being shunned. It’s perspective that comes with winning a world title, and now defending it in front of a home crowd while taking a share of the pay-for-view revenue. “But a lot of them stuffed up big time,” he says. “Somebody should have picked me up here. We should have had this world champion fighting out of Australia sooner. I’d be a megastar. Certain media guys kept telling us, ‘Nope, George is fighting overseas, we don’t have any interest, you don’t have a name.’ ”


You can smell old boxing gyms before you see them. They reek of sweat and blood and body odour; the intoxicating scent of hard work in the pursuit of dreams, big and small. George Kambosos jnr’s gym smells like a new car. It’s one of nine narrow warehouses in an industrial estate in Mortdale in Sydney’s south. They make kitchen cabinets in the warehouse on the left. On the right, security screens for banks. A mobile coffee van arrives out the front, its horn mimicking the theme from The Godfather movies.

The Art of War is Kambosos’s bible: “I’ll just get it out and randomly read passages. The passage about deception came in handy for the López fight.”

The Art of War is Kambosos’s bible: “I’ll just get it out and randomly read passages. The passage about deception came in handy for the López fight.”Credit:Tim Bauer

Kambosos started refurbishing his warehouse into a boxing gym weeks after winning his world title. The rubber floor, the walls and the ring itself are jet black. “FEROCIOUS KAMBOSOS” is written in gold on the floor of the ring, alongside a logo featuring the head of a Spartan warrior.

The logo also features on the three heavy bags hanging from the ceiling. A row of pictures on one wall showcases Kambosos in action, mostly from his win over a bloodied López. On the other wall are old fight posters featuring the likes of Roy Jones jnr, Oscar De La Hoya, Mike Tyson and, of course, Pacquiao. Many years ago, before people paid to watch fights in their lounge room, local pubs and clubs were filled at odd hours with boxing enthusiasts. Kambosos and his father would be among the first there to pilfer the fight posters from the walls.

Tucked away in one corner, above a rack of kettle-bells and hand-weights, is a whiteboard with a sentence written in black marker: “The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the integrity of our focus”. June 5 – the date of the Haney fight – is written in red marker.

I ask one of the young boxers in the gym on this Friday afternoon where the sentence comes from. “George’s crazy mind,” he laughs. It’s from American author Robert Greene’s book Mastery, although Kambosos’s preferred tome is Chinese general Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a copy of which is always in his gym bag.

Sporting teams have referenced The Art of War for decades. Former Australian cricket coach John Buchanan once handed a copy to Shane Warne, who famously tossed it in a bin as he left the meeting. It’s Kambosos’s bible. “I’ll just get it out and randomly read passages,” he says. “The passage about deception came in handy for the López fight.”

Kambosos is known for his attention to detail, his precision. He says he’s not OCD, although he displays traits of it, jumping around, looking at his phone, looking into the mirror, then looking at you. Before a recent media conference at the gym, he frantically swept the floor before anyone arrived.

He stands 176 centimetres and weighs about 65 kilograms. While some boxers struggle with weight, he says he has no problems getting down to the 61.2-kilogram limit to fight in the lightweight division. Despite spending years in the ring, he doesn’t exhibit the war wounds that interrupt the face of most pugilists. He’s never lost a tooth nor had his nose broken. His most distinctive feature: sparkly diamond earrings.

Loading

When he fronts media conferences, he wears fashionable, flamboyant suits and opaque designer sunglasses, but over the course of several interviews with Good Weekend he wears only gym shorts and T-shirts that hang loosely on a frame that wouldn’t look out of place in the jockeys’ room at Randwick or Flemington.

He removes his shirt to reveal a drum-tight body covered in detailed tattoos, mostly referencing Ancient Greece. There are two images of King Leonidas, who ruled Sparta, and Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War. Molon labe – the Spartan term “come and take them”, an expression of defiance to the invading Persians – is writ large on his right forearm, while “ambition” and “blessed” are in smaller type on his left hand. “Dream without fear” is daubed across the collar and he carries the name of his mother, Adriana, on his heart.

Now for the legs. On the left: FREEDOM. On the right: DEATH. “In the revolution of 1821, the Greeks were prepared to die for our freedom,” Kambosos explains. “In my career, I’ve always been chasing my freedom. In the ring and in life.”

“In the revolution of 1821, the Greeks were prepared to die for our freedom. In my career, I’ve always been chasing my freedom. In the ring and in life.”

Kambosos’s attachment to the creed of the Spartan warrior might seem trite, but he has the bloodlines to back it up; his paternal grandmother has Spartan ancestry. Spartan blood or not, you can’t blame a guy for latching onto anything when your opponent has the express intention – as they say in boxing-speak – to “f… you up”.

He picks up a neon-green skipping rope, stands in front of the mirror and stares into his own eyes as he begins to effortlessly skip.

Kambosos jnr as a kid, with father Jim.

Kambosos jnr as a kid, with father Jim.Credit:Courtesy of George Kambosos jnr

Jim Kambosos stands nearby, looking on. The 53-year-old is taller and heavier than his son. A pair of black Tom Ford sunglasses sits on top of his thick mane of greying black hair. Like his son, he loves to talk, the words rolling off his tongue in a lyrical, rhythmic manner.

Jim ruffles some people in boxing. They say he’s too hard to work with. I’m not so sure. Most sons could only wish to have a father who cared for them as much as Jim Kambosos cares for his. Then again, I’m not doing business with him.

“George Kambosos jnr will always have a chip on his shoulder, even though he’s world champion,” Jim says. It doesn’t take long to pick up on his habit of saying his son’s full name almost every time he refers to him. “I just do it because I’m proud to say George Kambosos jnr,” he continues. “I know the struggle, the journey. I put it in every email. I just feel great saying his name.”

George Kambosos does have a name and it belongs to his grandfather. George Kambosos snr immigrated to Australia in 1965, spending time in the Bonegilla refugee camp near Wodonga on the NSW-Victoria border before moving to Sydney. Jim never saw much of his father growing up as he worked three, sometimes four jobs to care for his family. He vowed to never be the same absent father to George jnr and his younger sister, Joanna. He worked hard during the day as an electrician but knocked back Saturday work to make sure he was always present in his children’s lives, especially when it came to sport.

Like many young kids who take up boxing, Kambosos was an overweight child who was bullied at his school, Bexley Public. Jim took him to Rockdale Police Citizens Youth Club simply to lose some weight. Soon enough, 12-year-old Kambosos had shred so many kilograms he was unrecognisable at training for his rugby league team, the Gymea Gorillas. He went from finishing last when running laps around the oval to coming in first.

As a child, Kambosos took up boxing to lose weight.

As a child, Kambosos took up boxing to lose weight.Credit:Courtesy of George Kambosos jnr

Boxing for fitness became boxing for competition. “He won his first Golden Gloves tournament and didn’t take his gloves off for a week,” Jim recalls. Kambosos’s football improved, too, and he was picked in a development squad for the Cronulla Sharks. Head coach Ricky Stuart handed him his new training gear and told him to front training on Monday. It was a defining moment: football was going to clash with boxing. Kambosos returned the training gear the following day and never played rugby league again.

He was a good student but, in his final years at Endeavour Sports High, Kambosos’s mind was stuck in the fight game. He was regularly busted in class looking at boxing videos on his mobile phone. “Boxing will take you nowhere in life, George,” one teacher advised.

“Ferocious” Kambosos quickly rose through the amateur ranks but, after narrowly missing out on Australian team selection for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, he decided to turn professional at the age of 18. He won the NSW state title in his third fight and the Australian title in his sixth.

After 10 pro fights, Kambosos and his father made the decision that changed all their lives. Moving to Los Angeles in 2017 would allow him to spar against quality opponents and get in front of promoters and coaches who could put him on the path to a world title. He was receiving some financial support from Sydney businessman Nick Politis, the billionaire chairman of the Sydney Roosters, and entrepreneur Mark Bouris, but they were tough days. A glance at the bank balance gave Kambosos a cold sweat.

Rebecca had just had their first child, daughter Evaliah, and they lived in a tiny shack in Hollywood that wasn’t so Hollywood at all. Jim, who had quit his job as an electrician to become his son’s full-time manager, slept on the couch.

“It was so hard,” Rebecca recalls. “It got to a point where we could only buy day-to-day. If George got paid from sparring someone, we could purchase something. We were staying in this little room which basically had a toilet and a light bulb. It was like living in a jail cell. We couldn’t cook, so we ate out, looking for the cheapest place to eat out. We didn’t have a car so we had to use Uber, which was expensive.”

A 25-year-old with a Portuguese background, Rebecca talks as quickly as her husband throws a six-punch combination. She met Kambosos before he fought for his Australian title at Club Punchbowl in 2014. Her future husband was so broke on their first date he had to sell three tickets to an upcoming fight and collect the cash before taking her to a sushi restaurant. She was studying to become a primary school teacher but quit university to help her husband follow his boxing dreams. Life was tough, but giving up wasn’t an option. “It was very stressful but there had to be a better day,” she says. “His dad was always telling him, ‘There’s no plan B, George.’ That was always in everyone’s mind: no plan B.”

Kambosos with wife Rebecca 
and their three children. She quit university to help him follow his boxing dreams.

Kambosos with wife Rebecca
and their three children. She quit university to help him follow his boxing dreams. Credit:Getty Images

One morning, Kambosos was sparring at the famous Wild Card Boxing Club in Los Angeles when Manny Pacquiao’s similarly famous coach, Freddie Roach, spotted him. He threw him into the ring against Pacquiao and Kambosos rarely left his side for the rest of the Filipino legend’s career. “He wanted to be the best and he treated his sparring sessions with me as part of his education,” says Pacquiao, who sparred more than 250 rounds with Kambosos. “I never saw the same fighter twice.”

They’d run the streets of LA together with hordes of people running alongside them until Pacquiao nodded to Kambosos and they sprinted away. If not LA, they’d be pounding the streets of Manila, or the mountains of General Santos on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, getting dropped off at 5.30am and running for hours before arriving at Pacquiao’s beachside resort for a thousand or so crunches before breakfast, then more training in the afternoon.

In 2017, Pacquiao was preparing for his fight in Brisbane against Australian Jeff Horn when he started receiving death threats from Islamic State, the terror group that had claimed more than 1000 lives during conflict in nearby Marawi. “We just ran faster,” Kambosos says.

Not fast enough to ignore the scene on the side of the road. “People would come outside of their huts that don’t have running water or electricity, cheering every morning. “Manny! Manny! Manny!” To see the world like that showed me that if I do the right things, I’ll get respect from people in and out of the ring.”

Pacquiao saw a future world champion running alongside him. “George worked harder than anyone in the camp,” he says. “That’s why we got along so well. He would be right there with me running the hills every morning, doing sit-ups next to me after the run, full workouts in the gym every afternoon. He was always doing the extra work. He never cut corners on himself, and it was that work ethic that showed me he had the drive to do what so few in boxing can – become a world champion. He took the fight to Teófimo López. I don’t think anyone else could have done what George did that night. He showed that not only can he give out punishment, but he can also take it, and that comes from working hard every day in training and staying fit between fights.”

Kambosos doesn’t know how to cut corners. He admits to feeling guilty if he thinks about missing a session, even on the weirdest day of his life.

George Kambosos snr was diagnosed in August last year with stage-four stomach cancer. The 83-year-old was desperate to travel to New York for the López fight but, after contracting COVID-19, his condition quickly deteriorated. On September 24, at about 11.30am at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney’s Camperdown, he took his last breath. As he did so, Kambosos jnr’s third child, Santiago, was taking his first as Rebecca gave birth. “They swapped sides,” Kambosos smiles as he tells the story.

What would you do on a day of such emotions? George Kambosos jnr went for a 10-kilometre run. The next day, he was back in the gym. “If I didn’t put in the work that day, or the next, if I didn’t train, then maybe I wouldn’t have got up in the 10th round,” he says. “Because I wasn’t broken on that day, López wasn’t going to break me. Devin Haney’s not going to break me. They will have to kill me.”


It’s a brisk Saturday morning in early May and Kambosos’s gym is filling up with young fighters and onlookers. For someone who has fought for most of his career in relative obscurity, Kambosos is now mobbed by fans wherever he goes.

“No cameras!” Jim Kambosos bellows, fearing someone will post something on social media they don’t want the Haney camp to see. “We’ll be shutting it [the gym] down from next week,” Kambosos promises as his coach, Javier Centeno, rubs Vaseline into his eyebrows before slipping on black headgear that does, indeed, make him look like an extra from the movie 300.

Kambosos gets to work. He does eight three-minute rounds of sparring against two boxers, followed by eight rounds of pad work with Centeno, then a further six rounds on the heavy bag, then 10 minutes without stopping, bombing the bag with left and right punches, screeching “Rrrrraaaark!”, like an angry seagull. Sweat drips off his nose and steam rises from his shoulders.

“I don’t think it’s selfish,” Kambosos’s wife Rebecca says of his comment about being prepared to die. “He’s thinking about his legacy, what he’s done, what he’s sacrificed.”

“I don’t think it’s selfish,” Kambosos’s wife Rebecca says of his comment about being prepared to die. “He’s thinking about his legacy, what he’s done, what he’s sacrificed.” Credit:Tim Bauer

The office above provides a sanctuary from the torture and testosterone on the ground floor and it’s here that Rebecca reveals Kambosos wants his children – Evaliah, 4, Leonidas, 2, and Santiago, 10 months – ringside for the Haney fight. “I’m not sure about it,” she says, “but George wants them there.“
The conversation eventually drifts towards the López fight at Madison Square Garden and that conversation hours beforehand, when Kambosos told her he was prepared to die. I ask her if such a move is selfish. What use is a world championship if it costs the world champion his life?

“I don’t think it’s selfish,” she says firmly. “No way it is. He’s thinking about his legacy, what he’s done, what he’s sacrificed. He’s not saying it for attention, because it’s the truth. It happens. The odds against him were so big. Nobody thought George would be what he is. If anything, it’s more selfless.”

Loading

The sparring session ends and long after the other fighters and onlookers have moved on, Kambosos puts on his shoes and goes for another 10-kilometre run. He pulls down his hoodie so he isn’t recognised by passing traffic but at one point, glances up. An image of himself on a giant billboard punches him in the face.

“It was like the billboard of López at Madison Square Garden,” he says. “López showed me how quickly it can change if you don’t keep working. Knowing how hard this road has been, knowing how much we were denied from every angle, from every journo, every promoter, we kept knocking on the door, kept doing it our way, being in their face until they couldn’t deny us any more. Now I’m here, I’m not giving them a reason to deny me again.”

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

The best of Good Weekend delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Sign up here.

the Australian lightweight boxing hero you’ve never heard of Source link the Australian lightweight boxing hero you’ve never heard of

Back to top button