Some days Andy Lee, trainer of Joseph Parker, just wants to discuss ‘Nosferatu’ - Part 2
- Shidonna Raven
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
This Article has been curated by UDBN
February 19, 2025
Source: Boxing Scene
In 2014, Lee was living in rented accommodation in Purley, Surrey, a two-minute drive from the home of his coach, Adam Booth, and never more dedicated or bored. It was a place Lee shared with several others, each of them strangers, and his personal space was a box-room consisting of a single-bed and a small table.
On that table most nights he had two tablet devices, an Apple Mac computer, a pair of white headphones and a Kindle in a black wallet. There was also a television at the end of his bed and between training sessions he would hook up a tablet to the television and watch an American crime series. At the time, he was trying to persuade me to watch “Breaking Bad,” adamant that it was worth the investment and deserving of all the hype. He recommended, too, an abstract, independent film called “Upstream Colour,” which, upon watching it, was all the evidence I needed that Andy Lee was different from the many other fighters I had encountered. Unlike the others, his recommendations one was more inclined to listen to and act upon. Unlike the others, he had things to say about stuff outside boxing and himself. He even had an idea for a film script he revealed to me.
“There are two people in this place I still haven’t even seen yet,” Lee said in the communal kitchen one afternoon. “We all come and go at different times and nobody likes to spend time together in the kitchen. Each room is like its own little house. When you’ve got televisions, computers, phones and music, you kind of create your own little world.
“Weirdly, there were no checks done on me when I showed an interest in taking a room here. I could have been a serial killer for all they knew.”
Although not a serial killer, Lee, in the tradition of most serial killers, kept himself to himself and, like the rest, shuffled on through to the kitchen only when certain the coast was clear. It was then that he prepared his meal – that day pasta, tuna, olives, and garlic in tomato sauce – and during the cooking of it heard a noise coming from the bathroom down the hallway. “Ask him his name, will you?” he said to me. “He told me once but I forgot it.”
Into the kitchen a housemate soon arrived and a bowl of tagliatelle was shoved into a microwave. Before that, he reintroduced himself as Mark. “Bet you can’t remember my name, can you?” he said to Lee. “I remember yours. I knew we’d quickly forget names around here. We need name tags.”
Fighting the hum of the microwave, the two strangers now discussed a recent rugby match while Lee looked for a sieve. He eventually found one in Mark’s drawer. “Help yourself,” said Mark, after which Lee pointed to his own drawer and stressed that Mark was free to gorge on whatever food he found inside.
“There’s still one person in here I haven’t met,” said Mark.
“There’s two I haven’t met,” said Andy.
“The one person I’m talking about always has their door shut. I don’t know whether to knock and introduce myself or leave them to it.”
“There’s almost a silent agreement in place where we use the kitchen at different times and make sure we don’t overlap,” Lee explained once Mark had disappeared with his dinner. “Then we go to our rooms, sleep and go to work the next day.”
Work naturally meant a different thing for both men. For Mark, it meant working in Braintree, Essex, as an electrical engineer, whereas for Andy Lee it meant finishing his meal, resting for a couple of hours, and then travelling the five minutes it took to reach the boxing gym.
Mark, from what I could tell, had no idea what Andy Lee did for a living, let alone have reason to believe he would later that year win a WBO middleweight title. But Lee, of course, wasn’t there to boast, flex his muscles, or make friends. This, for him, was just part of the journey, a means to an end. Moreover, it was not something to which he was unaccustomed: the hard life, the shared life, downtime. In Detroit, in fact, which is where Lee previously roamed, he spent seven years with Kronk legend Emanuel Steward, with whom he not only trained but lived.
“Because of my upbringing there was no sense of being sheltered or protected,” said Lee, who for years lived in Steward’s home. “I didn’t mind travelling around and trying new places. When Emanuel and Detroit came about, I didn’t think twice.
“A lot of the things the guys in Detroit faced I’d also faced within communities in which I’d been raised. I’d experienced prejudice and isolation, so I had some kind of common ground with a lot of the black guys there. Ultimately, though, I think they appreciated me because I’d made such a sacrifice to be there. Most of the guys didn’t know what Ireland was and certainly couldn’t have pointed it out on a map. They’d ask me, ‘What state is that?’ They respected the fact I went all that way to train with them all.”
The first time Lee met Steward, the coach was on a speaking tour in Belfast with Thomas “Hitman” Hearns and about to officially open a Kronk gym in the city. “I didn’t say much, but I studied him,” Lee recalled. “He was always a talker and he talked a lot that day. But everything he said I agreed with. He wasn’t someone who just talked for the sake of it. He talked because he was passionate.”
By March 2006, the month of Lee’s pro debut, Steward was in the Irish southpaw’s corner and allowing him to live in his house rent-free. Together, in an effort to whittle away the hours between sessions, they would often discuss boxing. They would make plans. They would dream of world titles.
When eventually winning one in 2014, Lee did so without Steward by his side but was watched and supported that night by Marie, Emanuel’s widow. He also wore trunks with colouring synonymous with the Kronk gym and paid tribute afterwards to both Steward, his first coach, and Adam Booth, his latest one. From both he had learned plenty; for both he had sacrificed so much.
In 2012, after watching the Paul Thomas Anderson film “The Master,” Lee gave me his thoughts on the film and said that the film’s main character, Lancaster Dodd, an L. Ron Hubbard archetype, reminded him of Adam Booth. He possessed, he said, the same magnetism and ability to make one believe whatever it was they were being told and I, having recommended the film, couldn’t help but be impressed by his reading of it.
Five years later Lee was still working with Booth but no longer a world champion and not entirely sure how much longer he had left in the sport. Thankfully, by then, in 2017, he had made enough money to retire comfortably and had already made a start on his family. He also continued both offering me and asking me for recommendations; things to either watch or read to break up the monotony of the days he spent away from the people he loved.
Weeks before meeting him again, this time in Merstham, I had recommended a novel, Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout,” and Lee had actually gone and read it. Not only that, he said he enjoyed it, this biting satire about race relations in America, and expressed the extent of his enjoyment while in the gym, warming up ahead of a sparring session. It was at that point I remembered how he was different from the rest and why his words, whether recommendations or boxing-related insights, carried a greater weight than any of the others I listened to, wrote down and recorded as part of my job.
“Once I come home from a fight it takes me a week or two to decompress,” Lee explained when I asked how life had been for him in the wake of a recent defeat. “My wife and I will go for a nice meal and I’ll sit there and eat it quickly. I won’t enjoy it. She’ll say, “What’s the point in us doing this?” You just become so self-consumed. You need humanising after a fight just as you need to dehumanize before a fight.
“People think I’m this nice guy and this well-rounded individual, but, believe me, it was one of the hardest things I have had to go through [a 2015 defeat to Billy Joe Saunders]. It won’t be until I win another significant fight that I’ll be at peace with it, you know? I just know with the boxing landscape and the politics that there won’t ever be a rematch with Billy Joe Saunders. I’ll never be able to put that right. The only way I can put it right is by going on and maybe winning the title again. Other than that, it’s just something I have to live with.”
If defeats help to humble and, yes, humanise, the same could be said for the nomad lifestyle and the kind of arrangement Lee had in both Detroit and London. These things were not enough to soothe the pain of defeat, no, or for that matter the fear of The End, but a firm grasp on reality, and an ability to rub along with civilians in the real world, no doubt left Lee better prepared for disappointment and change than most.
“It’s easy to forget those times,” he said. “It’s a lofty goal, becoming world champion, so to do it you have to have that next level dedication. I had to do what I had to do. It was tough, but in some ways it was a pleasure. I learnt a great deal with Manny in Detroit and I learnt a great deal when I hooked up with Adam Booth and was living in rented accommodation over here. I was learning every day and coming home, no matter where I was living, buzzing. I was excited by my career.
“My circumstances have changed and I’m older now. I don’t think I could go back and share a kitchen with half a dozen people. But I’m not satisfied or the finished article yet. There are a lot of ways I can still improve and that makes me excited.”
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