The New Prince

It all went wrong for Charles Martin and it plagued him for a long time. But now he’s back and, with the help of the man who plotted the recent downfall of Anthony Joshua, he outlines his route to the top to Thomas Gerbasi

- Thomas Gerbasi

"HE had soft eyes,” said Charles Martin when discussing Anthony Joshua’s June loss to Andy Ruiz Jnr. “He didn’t have that eye of the tiger.”

No one knows that look better than Martin, whose history with Joshua was assumed to be over the moment the Brit knocked him out in two rounds in April 2016.

That night at the O2 Arena in London, a new era in heavyweight boxing was expected to begin when Joshua took Martin’s IBF title by force. As for Martin, it was a reign that began in questionable fashion and ended with even more questions after just 85 days.

The St. Louis native seemingly had all the tools to be more than just a footnote in championship history. At 6-foot-5, he had the size, he could punch, and he could seemingly take one. And though winning the vacant IBF title – stripped from Tyson Fury – due to a knee injury suffered by Vyacheslav Glazkov was anticlimactic at best, Martin’s willingness to fight the unbeaten Joshua in his London backyard did earn “Prince Charles” a measure of respect.

Then the bout happened, and Martin went away without much of a fight.

“I was always taught you hit me, I’ll hit you right back,” he said. “But my head wasn’t in there. That’s what made it look so bad. It was a new place, I was hurt and my head was not in the fight. That was not me.”

Martin’s team won’t disclose what he was physically dealing with on fight night, only to say it was a reoccurrence of a previous injury. And even with the injury, the then-champion felt he had what was required to win. As for everything else, Martin knew something was off the second he made the walk to the ring. “You could feel that tension,” he said. “Everybody’s for him. That whole energy in the room was different.”