In the higher echelons of boxing, pre-fight press conferences tend to end in a more entertaining fracas than the actual bout. Remember when the president of the World Boxing Commission (WBC), Jose Sulaiman was knocked-out after becoming entangled between a Mike Tyson-Lennox Lewis melee in 2002? Tyson bit Lewis' leg, threatened to kill Sulaiman, and warned reporters he'd introduce them to the concept of "prison romance" if they printed bad things about him, and all this occurred in the space of about five minutes.
Well, it's fair to say a pre-fight catch-up between two White Collar Boxing foes in Dubai is an entirely more gracious affair. 4men was on hand to intervene should the moment Great Britain's Geoff "The Daddy" Upham squared up to Sri Lanka's Kushan "The Pitbull" Senaratne get messy. But we were to be disappointed.
"Hello there old chap."
"After you, kind sir."
"No, I insist."
This may as well have been the dialogue between the two archetypal Dubai city gents - Kushan a 26-year-old area sales manager at Iqdam Trading and Geoff, 47, a corporate development director at Planet Pharmacies.
Rather than fists, clichéd phrases like "give a good account of ourselves", "do the training justice", and "get out of it what we put in", were bandied around in earnest.
Eight weeks of training, one and half hour sessions, twice a day, three times a week, balancing the day job all the while getting up at 4:30am is enough to harden even the softest of the preferred-to-be-desk-bounds. But when it came to pre-fight mind games all they could stomach were shop-talk pleasantries. These guys weren't real fighters.
But that's the point of White Collar Boxing, first dreamt up by New York's most famous boxing gym, Gleason's, in the mid Nineties. The concept strives to make a man, or a woman (there were four female fights), out of a pencil-pushing office worker after just eight weeks of intensive training for the cost of Dh35,000 in sponsorship. It's all concluded by three, two minute rounds against a suitable match - provided the fight goes the distance.
Speaking of which, upon studying our nine-bout fight-card, speculation abounded among our dinning companions, during our three-course gala dinner, that the Upham-Senaratne bout could end in tears. It was widely believed that the 47-year-old would cop the worst of his younger rugby-playing opponent's wrath. This bout was encircled in red pen with a big fat KO and smiley face. Get the photographer ringside for this one, we thought.
But out of all the bouts, bearing in mind the two decade generation gap, this turned out to be the most toe-to-toe fight, much to our surprise. The tale of the tape suggested Kushan would nail it through age, weight and thus power, whereas Geoff only really had height and reach going for him.
However, when it came to it, the air of graciousness left both businessmen as they punched lumps out of one another. Now this was more like it, we said to ourselves.
Kushan was working the jabs at Geoff's midriff, while Geoff was timing his hooks to the head. Neither faltered for fitness, but technique towards the end had gone out of the window. There was never an indication that The Daddy was almost 50, and hardly any evidence to suggest Kushan would buckle under the surprise this had caused both him and his rugby club supporters.
Event director, John Alosina Mamea-Wilson, said, "Surprisingly it was the most tactical fight of the night. Credit to them both, it was well balanced and would have surely been a split decision." (No winners are announced in White Collar Boxing).
"The worst thing to have happened after all that training would have been to either face a weak opponent or get pummelled. Thankfully we both traded punches and put on a good show," said Geoff, whose wife and two daughters couldn't bare to attend for fear he'd get seriously hurt. "I don't think I underestimated him at all," said Kushan. "Geoff was a very good opponent and I'm thankful he put up such a strong fight. For his age he really packs a punch. I was warned by my trainers that he was performing really well in training and that I shouldn't get complacent so I expected him to come out strong and I did my best to contain him."
Both fighters are now experiencing a lull, long after the bright lights of the ring have faded and the tables have been cleared. Kushan, inspired by his father and corner man, who was the Sri Lankan National Boxing title-belt holder in 1967, 1968 and 1969, wants to hit the ring by the end of the year. But Geoff admits he's done all he set out to prove. "Age shouldn't be a barrier. I know some of the lads in their twenties will be looking for the long-term, but that's it for me, I took up the challenge and had a very positive experience.
"My daughters took the trophy into their school for show-and-tell and they were so proud watching the DVD.
"I'll definitely keep up the training three times a week through KO gym, because the wife likes the return of my washboard stomach after a 25-year hiatus but my fighting days have now been and gone."
