{"id":303373,"date":"2025-11-24T08:15:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T08:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/303373\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T08:15:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T08:15:10","slug":"what-does-the-future-hold-for-life-changing-government-scheme-which-led-fabio-wardley-to-the-top","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/303373\/","title":{"rendered":"What does the future hold for life-changing government scheme which led Fabio Wardley to the top?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is now nearly 17 years since Fabio Wardley<\/a>\u2019s journey to the world heavyweight crown started amid inauspicious circumstances on a football pitch in Suffolk.
It was there he first met Robert Hodgins, the man who would eventually lead him to his current position as the 11th world heavyweight champion in British boxing history following the news that Oleksandr Usyk had vacated his WBO belt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But this was not exactly love at first sight as the 13-year-old Wardley took exception to his future coach\u2019s decision to sub him off of a game he had been enjoying.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was my height back then when he was 13,\u201d Hodgins tells The Ring<\/a>. \u201cThe first time I met him I was filling in on a football session and I subbed him off.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe didn\u2019t like that decision too much. I said to him \u2018do you think you could take me, Fabio?\u2019 He\u2019s 13 years old and skinny as a rake but he replied \u2018I don\u2019t think I can, I know\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was not the first bit of backchat that Hodgins had experienced in his position as a coach, primarily boxing, as part of the Suffolk Positive Futures programme. To this day, the scheme\u2019s mission statement is to make the county ‘a safer place by diverting young people from anti-social behaviour and gang-related activity and providing opportunities that they may not otherwise have access to, to help better their life chances.\u2019<\/p>\n

As far as Hodgins could see, Wardley was not a bad kid, but he engaged with the opportunity to play sport instead of getting involved in less agreeable pursuits on the streets. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was strong-minded and did what he wanted,\u201d Hodgins says. \u201cI don\u2019t think the system gave him an outlet, he had to be doing something. With Positive Futures he did a couple of boxing sessions but really he excelled at football and he was a very good player.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe project was for kids who were misbehaving but he jumped on them as well. He wasn\u2019t the typical kid getting kicked out of school or anything like that but he was still a handful and wanted somewhere to channel it. He needed to do something instead of sitting around, he\u2019s a very clever man.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this was not exactly a Mike Tyson and Cus D\u2019Amato type situation. Wardley cared little for boxing in his early teens despite trying his hand at it a couple of times. It was not until he was in his 20s that he sought Hodgins for more regular work.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe disappeared for a while,\u201d Hodgins says. \u201cLike a lot of them do.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut then he walked back into my gym when he was 20 years old after he got injured playing football. We used to get 100 kids at the football sessions but then only five or six at the boxing, Fabio had been one of the football kids but when he came back he had his heart set on boxing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt had been a few years and when he came back in he\u2019s 6-foot-5, strong and athletic and it was like he\u2019d never left. You could tell straight away how much he wanted it and he wanted to do everything straight away.\u201d<\/p>\n

That included sparring, although he found out pretty quickly that boxing is not quite as easy as he thought it looked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember he had these big pink 16-ounce Winning gloves and he wanted to spar on the first session. He was like \u2018Rob, put me in, put me in\u2019, so I let him spar. I would like to say it was brilliant and he had the best spar in the world but it wasn\u2019t the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe sparred a top amateur and I think he took quite a lot of body punishment but he loved it, he got out of the ring with a smile on his face and that made him train even harder after that. He caught that bug.\u201d<\/p>\n

His meteoric rise from those early days, through four explosive white-collar wins, to the top of the heavyweight rankings has been well-documented but it was nothing like an easy road. He is often described as something of an overnight success but it is now a decade since Wardley, resplendent in pink gloves, walked through the door at Hodgins\u2019 gym.<\/p>\n

Given his background as an amateur coach, the door was open for the heavyweight to get carded and head down that well-trodden route until a professional manager made contact. \u201cI remember I sat him down and said that\u2019s what we should do,\u201d Hodgins remembers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said I thought he should go amateur because I was an amateur coach and I thought he would be very successful, we had that belief in him. But he said \u2018no, I\u2019ve got this opportunity and it may never come again. I\u2019m going to do it and I\u2019d like us to do it as a team\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that was really where the problems started. \u201cNo one would spar us,\u201d Hodgins says. \u201cI reached out to all my contacts about him but nobody would have us in their gym apart from Sam Sexton.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just couldn\u2019t progress because people thought Fab was a novelty act. I was an amateur coach who had trained national finalists and people were asking me what I was doing with this kid from white collar. The funny thing is, most of them now tell me they always knew he\u2019d do well.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there was still the small matter of getting a professional licence. These were still the early days of white-collar boxing and men with zero amateur experience were not exactly welcomed with open arms by the British Boxing Board of Control. In a bid to sweeten the deal, it was declared that Wardley had won 24 white collar fights by knockout, instead of the reality of his four quick wins.<\/p>\n

In the end, it was actually the former England cricketer Andrew \u2018Freddie\u2019 Flintoff who helped Wardley\u2019s attempt over the line. Only a few years earlier, Flintoff had a professional fight under the guidance of Barry and Shane McGuigan with zero prior boxing experience for a television programme. He won his solitary bout in November 2012 on points.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could say, if you\u2019re willing to licence Flintoff, we\u2019ve got this kid here who has had 24 knockouts already,\u201d Hodgins says. \u201cThey made us have an assessment at the Peacock Gym in London but they quickly saw he was up to scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was not plain sailing from there however, and the early stages of his career were wrecked by a series of cancellations. On a couple of occasions, a coach load of friends and family made the trip from Ipswich to York Hall, Bethnal Green only to be told Wardley\u2019s opponent had pulled out hours before the first bell.<\/p>\n

\u201cI actually remember pulling Fab to the side and saying that we tried our best but this is not our time,\u201d Hodgins recalls. \u201cI thought it might be time to knock it on the head.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut Fabio said, \u2018let\u2019s try one more time, just one more shot\u2019, and I suppose the rest is history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Undefeated Wardley is now 21 fights in, with the only blot on his copybook the pulsating draw with Frazer Clarke on Easter Sunday last year. He then brutally knocked Clarke out in just 158 seconds of their rematch six months later.<\/p>\n

At the time of writing, Wardley is The Ring\u2019s No. 2-ranked heavyweight but he will be No.1 in time for Christmas when the retired Tyson Fury drops out due to inactivity in December. <\/p>\n

Put simply, Wardley has fought his way to the very pinnacle of the sport after having just 25 fights in his entire life, four white collar and now 21 as a pro. It would never have been possible without the Suffolk Future Positive Futures programme but, given youth services funding has been slashed by close to 75 per cent since Wardley first met Hodgins, the need for these schemes of this nature could not be more stark.<\/p>\n

It is estimated that government austerity measures since 2010 have led to the closure of 600 youth centres, and a loss of jobs for 1,500 qualified youth workers. The social consequences of these cuts are hard to measure but any would-be Wardley’s will have a higher barrier for entry.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not involved in Positive Futures as much any more,\u201d says Hodgins. \u201cFab was lucky to have the opportunity to come in and try those free classes back them, without them, who knows where we all might be.<\/p>\n

\u201cFabio is a clear example of what these youth schemes can do for people’s lives and we need them. Could we find another Fabio without that funding? No I don\u2019t think so. It just widens the horizon for a kid that may not want to take up boxing, or try sport, to come in and find out there is a natural talent for it. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s upsetting that schemes don\u2019t get funding like that nowadays because if it wasn\u2019t for Positive Futures and their funding, we may never have found Fab.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is now nearly 17 years since Fabio Wardley\u2019s journey to the world heavyweight crown started amid inauspicious…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,1151,1144,1150,1149,1142,711,1145,1146,1147,1148,1143,49,48,1156,1155,1138,1136,1137,1153,1139,1135,1157,1152,82,1154,1134,1141,1140],"class_list":{"0":"post-303373","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-boxing-community","10":"tag-boxing-fights","11":"tag-boxing-history","12":"tag-boxing-interviews","13":"tag-boxing-magazine","14":"tag-boxing-news","15":"tag-boxing-photos","16":"tag-boxing-rankings","17":"tag-boxing-results","18":"tag-boxing-schedule","19":"tag-boxing-videos","20":"tag-ca","21":"tag-canada","22":"tag-disqualification","23":"tag-draw","24":"tag-fight","25":"tag-fighter","26":"tag-fighter-news","27":"tag-knockout","28":"tag-latest-boxing-matches","29":"tag-ring","30":"tag-ring-magazine","31":"tag-split-decision","32":"tag-sports","33":"tag-technical-knockout","34":"tag-the-ring","35":"tag-top-fighters","36":"tag-upcoming-boxing-matches"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303373","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=303373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}