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Former world champion details 58 failures on the way to success
Former world champion Carl Frampton has detailed the lessons he learned over an extensive amateur and professional career, saying that he failed 58 times along the way to the top of his former profession.
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Former world super-bantamweight and featherweight champion Frampton, 28-3 (16), said that a fight loss in the quarterfinals of the Irish championships as an amateur gave him the impetus to focus on his training and diet for a year. The lost match, he said during his TEDx talk given in Belfast, came against Kevin Fennessy in the 2008 Seniors.
After losing the match, Frampton went home where his girlfriend – now wife – asked him if he had been giving 100% of his efforts to his boxing. It was then that Frampton realised that he had not.
He said: 'I had been training hard but could have been training a little bit harder. As an 18- or 19-year-old, I was giving in to peer pressure and maybe having drinks in the weekends with friends. I wasn't eating the correct foods, and obviously, in a weight-making sport, it's important that you eat the correct foods, because then I was having to crash the weight, and it was having a detrimental effect on my performance. I wasn't sleeping properly. So all these things combined added up to me putting in bad performances.'
It was at that point that Frampton says that he swore that he would live and train properly for a year in order to get his boxing back on track.
He added: 'I grafted, I made sacrifices. I put the head down and really just got on with things. The Irish championships come up again, quarterfinal stages again, and I meet my old friend and foe, Kevin Fennessy, at the quarterfinal stages. But this time, it was different. This time I was full of confidence because I knew I'd put in the effort required and the dedication and everything else that goes along with that.'
Despite feeling pressure, Frampton stopped Fennessy in the second round of the fight when the latter's corner threw a white towel into the ring.
After turning professional in 2009, Frampton would go on to win the Commonwealth, European, and IBF titles at super bantamweight. After losing to Leo Santa Cruz in 2017, Frampton moved up to featherweight where he won a unanimous decision over Nonito Donaire. After stopping Luke Jackson in Belfast, Frampton lost a unanimous decision to Josh Warrington in 2018.
The loss to Santa Cruz also prompted a change in his approach, said Frampton. After realising that many of the people around him were absent after the defeat, he reduced those in his inner circle
It was in the Warrington fight that Frampton once again came unstuck after believing that Warrington, 27-0 (6) at the time, did not possess the punching power to trouble him.
Frampton said: 'But I got this wrong. I didn't underestimate Josh in a sense of his whole package, but I underestimated one aspect of his game, and that was that he wasn't the puncher. And boy, did I get that wrong! He bangs me with an overhand right about 30 seconds into the first round of the fight, and I feel like the roof's coming down around me. I have no idea where I am, literally don't know what's going on. And the fight continues like that for quite a while. I do well to come back and win a few rounds in the middle, but Josh kind of wins the fight at a counter, really.'
The result of the fight, said Frampton, is one that still fills him with disappointment years later due to his mindset going into the bout. He believed, he said, that he could have won the fight.
Overall, the lessons he learned from his career, he said, were to be accountable and honest with himself, to ask and answer questions of himself, to put his head down to work, to tighten his circle of friends, and to never underestimate an opponent.
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