Sharon – who will be ringside in Riyadh alongside Noakes’ dad John – encouraged her sons to take up boxing. Noakes soon became a talented amateur at Westree Boxing Club in Maidstone and went on to win the ABAs in April 2019.<\/p>\n
A month later he was invited down to Billy Joe Saunders’ WBO super-middleweight title fight with Shefat Isufi in Stevenage and Francis Warren, the son of hall of fame promoter Frank, told him he wanted to manage his career.<\/p>\n
Noakes turned his back on the working life where he had jobs in a call centre, fast-food restaurant and as a roofer, to turn professional.<\/p>\n
“Thinking about those jobs is what keeps me working hard in the gym,” said Noakes. “I don’t want to go back to that.<\/p>\n
“The roofing was hard graft, but I was a fair-weather roofer. If it rained, you wouldn’t see me.<\/p>\n
“You can’t get out of the ring when it is tough – but you can get back in the van when you’re on a roof and it starts raining.”<\/p>\n
Noakes had three professional fights before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and had to briefly go back to work – helping out his brother as a ‘strapper’s assistant’ on the railway as they cut the power to allow work to be done on the electrical lines.<\/p>\n
“It was a lot of time in the van,” Noakes said.<\/p>\n
He would munch away on snacks and – after one night with a few too many treats – he hatched a plan to run a marathon the next day to burn them off.<\/p>\n
“I was going to run 20 miles because I felt bad after eating a load of rubbish,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Then someone said: ‘Why don’t you do a marathon if you’re going to go that far?’<\/p>\n
“So myself and a friend went out and did the 26.2 miles. I did it in three hours 40 minutes.”<\/p>\n
His run through the lightweight ranks had been steady – and Noakes has carefully navigated his way to the top of the division.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sharon – who will be ringside in Riyadh alongside Noakes’ dad John – encouraged her sons to take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-299379","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}