The summer of 2018 was drawing to a close and a 23-year-old recruitment consultant called Fabio Wardley was beginning to wonder whether his boxing career was ever going to work.
He had crushed four white-collar opponents and then another four more as a professional but to say things had been stop-start would be an understatement. At that point, one of his ambitions was to simply appear on an undercard at the O2 Arena before his career was over, just so he could say he had done it.
It is not to say he was unable to dream big but between boxing, sparring, training and the world of recruitment in the City, he did not have enough time to get his head down for a nap.
He didn’t know it at the time but a strange Facebook message from a man called Vlad, delivered in broken English, was about to change everything. “Hello Mr Fabio,” it started. “Come want to sparring Ukraine Oleksandr Usyk. Four weeks. We pay.”
On another day, he might have deleted it straight away. Although he was almost certain it was someone on the wind up, Wardley took a screenshot and sent it to a member of his close-knit team and asked him to look into it for him. The offer, it turned out, was genuine and Wardley would soon be sharing the ring with the undisputed cruiserweight champion of the world as he prepared to take on Tony Bellew in the following November. But there was a problem.
“I had to work,” said Wardley, when he recalled the situation during an interview with this writer in 2022. “That was the turning point really for me because he wanted me to go for a month but I was still working in a job at the time. I told them I’d need a month off but they said they couldn’t give it to me so I just said ‘see you later then, I’m off’.
“At that point I thought to myself that I guess I’m all in then with my boxing because if it doesn’t work out I have no money basically. But I thought let’s take the jump, I might as well give it a go.”
Now, 17 professional outings later, Wardley has booked himself a real fight with Usyk, who has since moved up from cruiserweight to become two-time undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. The reality is, without that sparring enquiry, he might never have taken the leap out of the corporate world.
“Within about five days of that Facebook message I was flying to Ukraine,” Wardley says. “It was funny because I thought there would be cameras everywhere and they’d probably pick me up in a limo. I thought he’d train in state-of-the-art facilities.”
As all of Usyk’s sparring partners quickly find out, the Ukrainian great keeps things spartan during camp.
“I landed in Ukraine with my bag and there’s a guy stood there with a sign that said my name,” Wardley says.
“So I walk over to him and he just grunts, he doesn’t speak a lick of English. I’m looking around for a nice big car but, no, I’m in the back of a rusty old van with all the windows blacked out.
“My seatbelt buckle is barely in place, there are holes in the seats and then it dawns on me I’m just a man on my own who has responded to a Facebook message, he could be taking me anywhere.
“But then he took me to the hotel and it all seemed OK. I hadn’t met anyone so I didn’t really know what I was doing. The driver just told me to be there again at 4pm. Next day, there he was and I went and met Usyk and his team.”
For a part-time pro, Wardley acquitted himself so well that he was kept on for the whole four weeks. He would go on to spend another month with Usyk for a later fight too.
“They couldn’t be more accommodating,” he adds. “After sparring we all went and had dinner together, we sat and ate. It was a great experience.”
On returning home from that trip, the first away sparring experience of his whole life, he was jobless, not happy with his management situation and in need of advice. He phoned up Dillian Whyte, another experienced pro he had shared the ring with, and they had a long conversation about who might be a good option for him moving forward. Suddenly, Whyte hung up.
After 10 minutes, the Body Snatcher phoned Wardley back and suggested he could be the man to manage him. Once everything was agreed he asked when his new client would be ready to fight. Luckily, on account of his month sparring Usyk, Wardley was good to go immediately.
Incidentally, his first fight under Whyte would be at London’s O2 Arena, which had been the end goal for Wardley only a few months before. Not only that, it would be on the undercard of Whyte’s second fight with Derek Chisora and, in a strange twist of fate, the two heavyweight veterans all but agreed to their trilogy fight during the broadcast of Wardley’s stunning victory over Joseph Parker at the weekend.
The win means Wardley will be taking a step into the unknown by challenging for a world title for the first time but, in Usyk, he will be facing a man with whom he has already shared many rounds. Now, almost exactly seven years on from that Facebook message, Wardley knows the size of the task ahead of him.
“When I’m going to spar Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua or Usyk my brain is working at 100 per cent,” he says. “But actually when I’m sparring Usyk it’s working at 250 per cent.
“I’m really having to stay focused, switched on and pay attention to everything. I’ve done two camps with Usyk in Ukraine and I’d always say he was the hardest spar because you have to be so switched on. Not that you don’t have to be switched on with Fury and AJ because they could spark your lights out in a split second.
“And it’s not to say Usyk can’t do that but it’s a different threat. Usyk can hit you with eight different punches in eight different places and you don’t know what’s going on, then he’s behind you and you’re thinking ‘what’s going on here?’ You have to be switched onto what he’s doing; his movement, his head, his foot, his front hand, where he’s going, where he’s not going.
“He’s also going at a relentless pace as well, he’s on you the whole time. With a lot of heavyweights you can take little breathers but Usyk doesn’t care if you’re tired or not, he’s on you always. He’s the hardest I’ve ever sparred.”
Sparring, as the old saying goes, is sparring and if Wardley shocks the world to dethrone Usyk for real, the Ukrainian will only have himself to blame for opening the door to him in the first place.