Daniel Dubois: ‘That first fight against Usyk is behind me – I'm a man of the future'

The Guardian

6 days ago

'It's definitely the biggest fight of my life,' Daniel Dubois says of his world heavyweight title unification bout against Oleksandr Usyk at Wembley Stadium on Saturday night before, following a slightly deflated pause, he highlights an unusually downbeat buildup. 'It's strange but it feels like it's been going under the cover, like it hasn't been really hyped‑up as I would have thought a unification fight will be. But maybe that will pick up on the night.'
Sitting in the July sunshine outside his gym in Borehamwood, with the Wembley arch clearly visible through the haze of heat, Dubois looks a little hurt when I ask if he can explain why there has been such limited fanfare around an interesting rematch between two contrasting heavyweights who own all the world titles between them. 'I'm not sure,' Dubois says in his role as the IBF champion. He then laughs ruefully.
'It seems as if every fight I'm in, there seems to be a little bit of funniness going on. I can't quite put my finger on why.'
Dubois is a deeply reserved world heavyweight champion who still lives with his formidable and mysterious father. He is 27 and a wrecking force in the ring, as he proved when knocking down Anthony Joshua four times during a one‑sided beating last September, but Dubois often appears more like a shy teenager who is still tentative beneath the giant shadow of his domineering dad, Stan. Could it be that Dubois is simply too quiet to generate outrageous headlines and soundbites before a fight?
'I don't know, mate,' he says, before comparing himself with Joshua, who has been such a consummate publicity machine throughout his long career. 'AJ don't trash-talk really, either. Every fight he's doing sells out and it's all big hyper stuff. But with my fights it always seems to be something …'
Dubois trails away before he returns with a more defiant response to his low-key profile. 'But, after this fight, I want to clear up and move forward as a legit world champion. The undisputed world champion.'
Did his destruction of Joshua receive the acknowledgment it deserved? 'No, I don't think so. I think people are talking more about AJ's loss rather than my victory. It don't hurt me but it's unjust, isn't it? I've got to put that right.'
Dubois sounds more hopeful. 'It looks like it's going to be a sellout which is good, innit?' he says, stressing that he will be even better against Usyk. 'I'm a different fighter now. There have been real improvements. I'm doing things I've always done but I'm doing them better. Maybe I just want it more now. I'm setting out to do what my dad talked about in the beginning, before I even was a real fighter. He always said I would win a world heavyweight championship and then I'd win it outright and become a legend like Frank Bruno, Lennox Lewis and Nigel Benn [from] that era of fighters where there were real fighting men.'
Last year Usyk became the first undisputed world heavyweight champion this century when he defeated Tyson Fury. Matching a feat that had been last achieved in 1999 by Lewis, Usyk is the best heavyweight of the past 25 years. He defeated both Joshua and Fury twice and his intelligence, technique and resolve are, until now at least, unbeatable assets which have allowed the Ukrainian to win all 23 bouts since his professional debut as an Olympic champion in 2013.
Dubois concedes that Usyk is, by some distance, the best fighter he has faced. 'He's done it all, really, hasn't he? I just have to break down whatever he's good at.'
Usyk was in trouble when he and Dubois fought for the first time in August 2023. A heavy punch from Dubois landed on the beltline and, as it was ruled controversially as a low blow, Usyk stayed down for four minutes. He was canny enough to wring as much time as he could on the canvas before rising and eventually stopping Dubois in the ninth round. Dubois now stresses that Usyk has a weakness 'to the body, to the head, wherever a shot can land'.
He says: 'I don't want to keep going back to that [2023] fight because that wasn't me at my best. I landed one good shot but that weren't my best shot. You're going to see the difference on 19 July. That first fight is behind me now. It's just a memory and I'm a man of the future. I've got to stamp my authority on this division.'
His father always told him that he would become the undisputed world heavyweight champion, and Dubois says: 'I believed everything he said – the words, the way he said it. He was so sure about it that I believed and thought: 'Yes, I'm going to do this.' It's not just talk. We've been working really hard from when I was seven years old. I was grinding my fists down to the bone for it.'
Dubois holds up his bunched fists to show me again the deep scars that pockmark his knuckles. 'They were made from all the push-ups I did [with his knuckles pressed down against the floor]. I can be proud of these marks. They've got me out of trouble a few times.'
Dubois once told me that, when he was a kid, his dad made him do press-ups for hours. What was his record? The big man grins. 'We never counted the push-ups. We counted the hours. Maybe four, five hours? We did some crazy stuff.
'We mix it up now as it's all about maintaining what you already have. So I still do the push-ups but not to that level I was doing then. I'm reaping the benefits of it now.'
Dubois and six of his siblings were kept at home by their father, and never went to school, and he still seems stunted outside the ring. When I ask if he is finding a way to be his own person while still listening to his dad, Dubois looks confused. 'I don't even know what you mean by that question.'
I talk again about the deep influence his dad exerts over him and his boxing career. It has helped in the ring but surely he wants to make his own choices away from boxing? 'I guess you could say that. But, in the boxing sense, we're a team.'
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Since he swept aside Joshua and proved himself a renewed force following his earlier defeats by Joe Joyce – when he suffered a badly broken orbital bone in 2021 – and Usyk, Dubois has cut a much more confident figure. In beating Jarrell Miller, Filip Hrgovic and Joshua, and becoming a world champion after boxing politics gifted him the IBF belt from Usyk, Dubois has new conviction. He now presents a serious challenge to Usyk which is bolstered by the decisive backing of his trainer Don Charles – the veteran cornerman who joined the Dubois camp in 2023. Whose idea was it to approach Charles? 'My dad's. My dad contacted him.'
Did Dubois know much about Charles? 'I didn't need to. My dad gave me the go-ahead. I think I sparred with Derek Chisora [whom Charles used to train] but it just happened. It's just fate.'
Charles is an intriguing figure – a strict disciplinarian with a layered personal story from being a child soldier in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war to homeless in Britain, cleaning toilets and sweeping streets before he reinvented himself as a successful florist and then the owner of a large security business. How does Charles calm him during the last hour before a fight in front of 94,000 people at Wembley?
Dubois shrugs. 'You'd have to ask him. He holds it together pretty well but my dad has a good stern talk with me. Don leaves me alone until I need to be spoken to when he pulls me aside to tell me a few things.'
How has Charles helped Dubois? 'I think we've helped each other. I've helped him get success with a world champion, while he's been there for me as a constant old‑school man that's always on time and brings old-school values and that's a major thing.'
Dubois points out that, until they began working together, Charles 'hadn't cracked it before' which seems to imply that the trainer's hunger matches that of his fighter. 'I think so,' Dubois says. 'He's hungry and I really am hungry. I'm glad we've done it together and I've become world champion. We need to push on now.'
Kieran Farrell, who works on the pads with Dubois and as Charles's assistant trainer, has made a remarkable recovery since he lost around 30% of his brain following an acute subdural hematoma suffered during his bout with Anthony Crolla in 2013. Dubois's insular character means that he has little interest in Farrell's backstory. When I ask him if he knew much about his co-trainer's past he shakes his head. 'Not really. I've heard a little bit and I think I read about him in Boxing News, way back then [when Farrell was hospitalised]. But my dad reached out to him to get him involved. So it's been all put together by my dad and it works.'
Dubois also dismisses the idea that Farrell's fate as a fighter might sometimes make him consider the dangers of boxing. 'No, not at all. I'm on my journey and these are the risks I take. I know what I'm doing. We're in this to win and that's part of the game – the hazards of being a boxer. I've just got to make sure it's not me [who is injured], I guess.'
The heavyweight's limited outlook is perhaps understandable. He was vilified on social media after losing against Joyce, and accused of being a coward and 'a quitter' even though his injury could have left him blind if he had boxed on, and he suggests that such difficult experiences have shaped him into the more assertive champion he is now. 'Yes, yes,' he says. 'I like Joe a lot and I've got a lot of respect for him. Without Joe I wouldn't be where I am. Setbacks always make way for a good comeback.'
Joyce's career has since plummeted while Dubois has finally soared. 'It's fate,' Dubois suggests, 'and not being denied, working hard, having a good support network and a good dad. I never doubted it. I just was like, how are we going to come back now? How are we going to be better? Those moments, they pass like nothing. They're just moments. Everyone has them. If you're doing anything worthwhile that's hard, you're going to have these moments and you've got to push through them.'