Although Jimmy Tibbs talks now with the gentleness of a vicar, he is not a man to mess with. But he knows someone harder to beat than even he was in his prime.
“I was brought up as a Roman Catholic,” he says, his deeply-lined, 67-year-old face a map of his own history, as well as that of his sport. “I went to church as a kid, and as a grown-up as well, but I really wasn’t sure about God. One day I had this experience – not flashing lights or anything like that ... I was living in a big bungalow, had four cars, plenty of money... think the wife [Claudette, whom he’d met growing up in Canning Town when he was 14] was just getting to leave me [she didn’t, although it was a close-run thing apparently]. I was always on the booze.
“I looked up in the sky and I thought, ‘I wonder if there really is a God? After the things that have happened to me in my life, why should I wonder about death? I wonder where I’m going to go when I die?’ That’s how it started.”
The “things” that happened to him, that turned him away from violence towards God, included incidents that gave him a deep appreciation of life and death. “It” was being born again – not overnight but after years of doubt.
Tibbs has a fighter on the undercard of Tyson Fury’s rematch with Dereck Chisora on Saturday night who will in all likelihood steal the thunder of the big men, when Billy Joe Saunders entertains the precocious challenge of Eubank’s son, Chris Jr, for his British, European and Commonwealth middleweight titles. Some reckon it is the bout that has saved the card, which is now a sell-out, probably more than half of the 20,000 fans coming from the champion’s travelling community. Fury, too, is a proud Gypsy, so the place will not lack for atmosphere at the ExCel Centre in London’s Docklands.
There are those who think Tibbs is a Traveller, a misconception he puts straight in his entertaining autobiography, “Sparring With Life”, although there is no reason he should have to. But there are a lot of things people think about Tibbs.
The “things” that Tibbs referred to when we spoke this week were not inconsequential. As for most East Enders of his generation, 1966 was the best year of his life. Bobby Moore and West Ham won the World Cup for England, with assistance from the likes of the other Bobby, Charlton, and young Jimmy, a rising middleweight of 166lbs, put Muhammad Ali (210lbs) on his backside in a gym in White City. The first miracle was genuine, the second a publicity stunt by the world heavyweight champion when sparring with Tibbs to prepare for his second fight with Henry Cooper at Highbury.
It made the front page of the New York Times – like a few of Ali’s capers – and Tibbs cherishes the moment still. “I hardly touched him!” he recalls.
Nevertheless, guided by Mickey Duff and Terry Lawless, the East End hero was going places – except he had no idea there would be bars on his windows when he got there.
A family feud not only interrupted Tibbs’ promising boxing career (he finished with 17 wins from 20 fights), it took four and a half years out of his life when he went down for attempted murder, gaoled along with his brother and his father. When he came out his fighting days were over and Tibbs was lost and angry. Then Lawless offered him a career as a trainer, and, at 35, he accepted gratefully and without much hesitation. In the intervening years he has been in the corner of a string of fine British fighters, some of them world champions, including Nigel Benn – who is also born again and has a ministry in Australia.
All of these experiences have made Tibbs the man he is now, a quietly spoken trainer who brings reassurance and discipline to the corner, qualities that Saunders much appreciates, but Eubank Jr derides. When Eubank said this week that his trainer was only there “to apply the vaseline”, he delivered Ronnie Davies (who also looked after his father) an unnecessary insult.
Tibbs in the past might have bridled at it. Instead he pointed out that, if Eubank thought he needed no trainer, he surely was “a fighter in a million”. And, he added later, “I did not mean that as a compliment.”
As Saunders and Eubank go their separate ways after an interesting press conference, Tibbs reflects on the path that led him back to God. If it seems odd that someone who has done time for a serious crime and inhabits the often rough-and-tumble world of professional boxing could go home each night to read his Bible, he sees no anomaly.
Did he find it tough, though? “I suppose some laughed. It’s not been an easy road. The Lord says in the Bible, you’ve got to go through hard times. I’ve had a good life. The Lord’s kept me in boxing because I was going to retire after Michael Watson got injured.
“I remember my wife was the first one I told I was born again and she went to me, ‘How long’s that going to last?’ That was 24 years ago.”
