Moses Itauma Is the Future of Boxing
Moses Itauma emerges from his training session dripping in sweat and insisting it was easy. “Ahhh, bonjour!” he says, happy to see Eric, from Nike. Eric From Nike — which represents Itauma as an official sponsor — is French, and so represents an opportunity for Itauma to practice his new hobby. After a brief back-and-forth in Eric’s native language, they switch to English to analyze Itauma’s performance, diagnosing finer points of accent and pronunciation.
He still wants to say the H in “J’habite,” Itauma explains. And all other H’s for that matter, because if he put the French accent on too much, he wouldn’t be being himself. Moses Itauma always wants to be himself. And who wouldn’t want to be Moses Itauma?
The 21-year-old standing in front of me, in this gym on an industrial estate on the outskirts of London, is the heir apparent to boxing’s heavyweight throne, and it’s hard to think of another fighter in the sport’s history whose ascent to that throne has been the subject of such unanimous assumption. Fourteen professional fights, 14 wins, only three of which have made it past the second round. There’s talk of him having the fastest hands of any heavyweight since Mike Tyson. Maybe ever.
Watching him box feels a little like watching a video game character controlled by an inordinately talented teenager. His movements seem exempt from the fallibility of the human body. There’s no question of execution or non-execution, just decisions: “Do I want to get punched? No. Move. Do I want to punch? Yes. Punch.” Except it’s all much too fast to be the consequence of decision. Itauma moves on instinct, and his instinct is impeccable. “If” feels like a cowardly word when applied to his impending coronation.
After cooling off from his session — he was running through some tactics for his upcoming fight against fellow world title hopeful Filip Hrgović — he introduces himself individually to all 15-or-so people here to coordinate his photoshoot. He asks anyone with an unfamiliar accent or name where they’re from — “Saint Lucia? That’s Caribbean, yeah?” — and shakes everyone’s hand. When we finally sit down to talk, I ask Itauma why he wanted to learn French. He takes a thoughtful pause before responding: “To be free.”
**
Itauma was born in his mother’s homeland of Slovakia, but she and his Nigerian father moved the family to Kent in southeast England when he was three. “My mum saw how difficult it was being different. It’s a predominantly white country, and back then they weren’t as open to other cultures as they are now,” he says. “It was difficult to make a life for yourself, so she decided to go to the UK to give us a better chance. And I kind of am fulfilling that now. I’m giving her a reason for her sacrifices.”
The first place they lived was a two-bedroom house on Chatham’s notorious Luton Road. There were 10 of them. “Me, my mum, my dad, and my three brothers in one room, and my uncle and auntie and her two daughters in the other,” Itauma explains. When I ask if this situation motivated him to try and achieve something that would lift his family out of it — that might give him and them that kind of freedom — he shrugs. “I wouldn’t say I’m very motivated to do the things that I do.”
This takes me aback a little — that a professional athlete as prodigiously talented and successful as Itauma doesn’t appear to possess the drive that one might expect. Several times over the course of our conversation he responds to questions about his motivation, or some aspect of his temperament or personality, by saying that he simply doesn’t have an answer for me. “I literally never thought about that until just now,” he says, or, another time, “I feel like you’re trying to get me to overcomplicate myself. Boxing’s so simple: Try and hit them before they hit you.”
Basically, Itauma, who is still working his way out of a deep aversion to interviews, doesn’t do reflecting. He does boxing, and he does learning. Reflecting would require taking himself out of the present moment, retreating into his head. And what sets Itauma apart from mortals like you and me is that he never does that. He is always entirely within the moment, always present. Doing, listening. If he doesn’t know something about himself, it’s because he’s too busy being himself.
Karol — the second-oldest of Moses’ three older brothers, who’s now a professional boxer himself — took Moses to a boxing gym for the first time when he was nine. “I remember I wore a yellow polo shirt and some Slazenger jogging bottoms,” he says. “I didn’t like it. I threw up the first couple times. I was like, ‘This isn’t for me,’ and I quit,” he says. “But then I started playing football for a bit, and I realized I didn’t like team sports. I didn’t like the fact that I could be working really hard and we could still lose because other players didn’t want to work as hard. So I wanted to play a sport where my success was in my own hands.”
He tried boxing again and began to enjoy the sense of community the gym offered. From there, it was just a case of doing, learning, succeeding, and doing again. When I ask him why he stuck with boxing instead of trying other individual sports, he’s again surprised. “I never thought about [it],” he says. “I don’t even want to be paying attention to that. Now I’m like, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I should’ve done this sport or that sport.’ But boxing was what I was doing, so why change it?”
One person who does reflect on Itauma’s ways is another of his brothers, Charles, who’s 17 years his senior and manages the business side of his career. “I look after everything that happens outside of the ring, and that gives him the confidence to not really have to think about those other things,” Charles says. “He knows what he is; he’s a boxer. So that’s what he’s going to do. He doesn’t need to think about, ‘What am I going to be doing in five years?’ He’s going to be boxing.”
While Itauma might not have given much thought to why boxing was the sport for him, Charles has a theory: “There’s a thing that he says a lot of the time about how it keeps him attached to reality, and I understand what he means. There’s immediate consequences for things that you don’t do properly in boxing, and he quite likes that.”
Boxing, in other words, suits someone so consumed by what’s right in front of them. As a child, Charles says Moses was “very observant. Very much keeping an eye on everything, watching everything, seeing how things go. He wouldn’t talk too much; he’d listen more. I think that comes across in how he boxes. A lot of the earlier rounds of his fights, he’s just taking in information about the fighter to see who is in front of him.” This is a slightly intimidating idea when you remember how quickly most of his fights tend to end. He’s knocked out men with 15 years’ experience on him while he was just trying to figure them out.
Charles says that if there was a moment when he and the rest of the family knew Moses was the real deal, it was at the Youth World Championships when he was 17. He stopped every opponent early. “Then for the final, he was sick, he had the flu. He was close to not being able to fight,” Charles says. “And the way he performed in that fight… it was the best we’ve ever seen him.”
Not long afterward, Itauma was picked up by his current trainer. Ben Davison has trained Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury — the two titans of recent British heavyweight boxing history — and several other world champions. Davison watched Itauma at a European Youth Championships and then at Worlds, and after inviting him to come to the gym and train with him a few times, Davison decided Itauma was ready.
“Sometimes you see guys who are winning and think, ‘Yeah, you might be brilliant at three three-minute rounds. But the professional sport is 12 three-minute rounds, and that’s a completely different ball game,’” Davison says. “It was the things he was doing: giving himself control over his opponent when they were attacking, picking up on what they were doing, and making them pay. He showed such a high level of IQ. It’s rare to see that in amateurs. It’s rare to see that in boxing.”
When he got Itauma to his gym, Davison was baffled to learn that Itauma didn’t seem to be doing any of this consciously. “He looked like he was thinking about it, but we showed him some clips of himself, all these examples of him already doing what I wanted him to do, and he was shocked. The job we’ve done is just to make him more aware of the things that he was already doing.”
Davison doesn’t mince his words when it comes to Itauma’s potential. “I think he’s got the capabilities to be the best heavyweight that’s ever been,” he says. “I’ve worked with some of the best boxers this country’s ever produced, pretty much all of the current ones. If he becomes everything he could be, he should be eclipsing those guys. And I think they’d say that themselves.”
You’d imagine the main challenge coaching a 21-year-old with such potential might be keeping his feet on the ground. Boxing is, after all, a sport built on egos. To win, you have to believe you can beat an opponent in a fight, and it helps if you can make them believe it, too. But the level-headed Itauma refuses to participate in his sport’s increasingly contrived attempts at manufacturing animosity between opponents. Unusually for a boxer, he doesn’t do trash talk.
“I just stay out of it. If it got to a point where I had to do it, I’d probably just knock you on the head,” he says. “It’s not me. It’s not natural. I’m not here to trash talk anyone. I can’t be arsed with that.” Davison says that if anything, Itauma’s refusal to trash talk can work to his advantage. “People come up to me and are like, ‘Who the fuck is this 20-year-old that just turns up, fucks people up, and walks off like he don’t give a shit?’” he says. “He doesn’t need to talk.”
There is one kind of interaction Itauma likes to have with an opponent before a fight. He likes to look them directly in the eyes. “I remember when I was like 14 or 15, and I was boxing a Ukrainian guy. I looked in this guy’s eyes, and they just seemed dark,” he says. “So now, when it gets to the face-off and I look in someone’s eyes, I’m not trying to intimidate them or anything. I just want to see what’s in there. If you’ve seen some stuff, if you’ve been through some stuff, you have that look in your eye. And if someone’s faking confidence, you can see it. They might be shaky, jittery. It’s all in the eyes.”
I ask him what an opponent might see in his. “I’m chill,” he says, and I believe him. “When I get nervous is like eight to 10 weeks out because I haven’t done the work yet. Once it gets to fight night, I’m ready to rock and roll.”
I get the impression that doing the work is the bit Itauma likes the best. The one-foot-in-front-of-the-other. It’s a form of freedom — just like learning French will, he hopes, give him the freedom to travel across Africa one day. Working day after day at his boxing gives him the freedom to not have to worry about anything else. He can stay in his favorite place: right where he is.
After his last fight, Itauma came back to training the Monday after — far sooner than most boxers would — and discovered it was too soon. He had injuries to his elbow, hand, and shoulder. So he started running every day because his legs still worked fine. When asked what he’d like to achieve in his career — seasoned commentators have pointed out that not even the likes of Ali, Tyson, or Joe Louis were being so universally tipped for the heavyweight title after 14 fights — he’s predictably dismissive. “I’m 21,” he says. “The world titles are gonna come. I’m not in a rush. I don’t mind moving slow; I just wanna move right.”
You don’t think big-picture? I ask. Like, not at all?
“This is my work, innit?” he replies. “It’s my lifestyle, and I like the lifestyle. I’ve got an opponent, and Monday to Saturday I’m at work to defeat that opponent. Sunday’s a rest day, and Monday we go back to work. Then there’s the fight. Then a little break. Then on Monday, it’s back to work again.”