A Family Affair

In the third instalment of a regular series, Ian Probert continues to follow the development of cruiserweight prospect James Branch. Here we meet his father, once a promising young professional himself, to get a bittersweet understanding of Branch’s route into the brutal world of boxing

- Ian Probert

JAMES BRANCH has come to see James Branch train. I look on as he ambles through the café area towards the gym. A tall, good looking man with short hair swept to one side. He’s here to see the punches that he was wishes he was still able to throw.

Like his son, James Branch Snr was once a boxer. Almost 30 years ago the ex-fighter was a hotly-tipped prospect who made his winning debut as a light-heavyweight on the Naseem Hamed-Manuel Medina undercard in Dublin. But then it all went wrong. In the following fight he could only draw and he would lose his next two before deciding to call it day. But you can see in his eyes that those hopes and aspirations from long ago are not completely forgotten.

“I had almost 90 [amateur] fights and I only lost four,” James Snr tells me later. “So big things were expected of me.

“I turned professional in 1996 with Frank Warren but when I left the Repton Amateur Club I was like a fish out of water. The Repton had been my home all my life. I bled green and gold. I went for a period of six years without being beat.

“Somehow it never materialised. I was expected to win all my fights but it just didn’t happen. After I’d been beaten twice I was only a shell of myself. My confidence was gone and basically I fell out of love with the sport. It killed me inside. From five years of age it had been what I’d been working for. I was in mourning.”