Arriving in England last year to take his career up a notch, Rishi Gurung was immediately dropped into a boxing ring with heavy-hitting local welterweight Alfie Winter.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you imagine? The first guy I had to face, he tried to kill me,\u201d Gurung said. \u201cHe was trying to destroy my will.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Nepalese immigrant to Hong Kong when he was 10, Gurung was initially drawn to boxing because \u201cyou\u2019re all by yourself \u2026 and I enjoyed people punching me, and punching them back\u201d.<\/p>\n
As the blows rained down from Winter, a sparring partner for Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jnr, Gurung drew on his earliest experiences of the brutality of his chosen sport.<\/p>\n
Already showing promise at 13, but unable to gain permission to fight at under-18 level, he boxed against a 23-year-old on an open card in Sham Shui Po.<\/p>\n
\u201cI broke my nose in the first round and was reeling for the rest of the fight,\u201d Gurung said. \u201cMy towel was soaked with blood, when I took it home and my parents saw that side of boxing, they didn\u2019t want me to do it any more. I stopped for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arriving in England last year to take his career up a notch, Rishi Gurung was immediately dropped into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":445630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[208435,208429,208433,208437,208432,444,208430,3448,208428,85,46,208431,126416,208438,208434,170715,105,208436],"class_list":["post-445629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-alfie-winter","tag-british-boxing-board-of-control","tag-camberley-boxing-club","tag-chris-eubank-jr","tag-conor-benn","tag-england","tag-fonz-alexander","tag-hong-kong","tag-hong-kong-police-boxing-club","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mark-leighton","tag-portsmouth","tag-rishi-gurung","tag-ryan-garcia","tag-sham-shui-po","tag-sports","tag-steven-wallace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}