Sam Gilley: “No matter what happens in my life I can always say I was good enough to be the champion of England.”

Sam Gilley: “No matter what happens in my life I can always say I was good enough to be the champion of England.”

By Garry White

With the words ‘Magic Man’ emblazoned across his trunks, Sam Gilley and his willing accomplice Drew Brown are about to send a packed York Hall into raptures. Shortly after the bell introduces the eighth round of Gilley’s first defence of his English super-welterweight strap, he lands with a right-hand over-the-top flush onto his opponent’s chin. For a moment Brown’s legs begin to buckle before he corrects himself as the 27-year-old champion paws away with a ramrod jab.

Gilley, and trainer Rod Julien in his corner, always expected Brown to tire as the ten rounds contest reached the hard-luck championship rounds. This must have felt like it was the moment that the deal would be sealed, victorious arms raised, and the overtime cheque not cashed. However, Brown improbably takes this moment to strike back. Letting his hands go he finds a chink in Gilley’s guard and hammers his way through. Like a slate falling off a roof, a further gap opens, and he lets both hands go in a prolonged attack. Not everything lands but enough of the ack-ack fire sufficiently finds its target and has the ringside commentators remarking frenetically: “Gilley looks like he is in survival mode here.”

But instead, he brings his body back under control, plants his feet, and a well-placed upper-cut and left hook stalls Brown’s momentum. There is now nothing left but for both men to move forward unloading single corkscrew shots roused from their bootstraps. Some find their target. Many more miss. They lean on each other, still exercising those arms; looking for that game changer that will neutralise the irresistible force in front of them. 

They back up. Each man presents an open, hittable target. They reach for the artillery again and it lands with alacrity. They exchange respectful, solid right hands; perhaps Gilley’s equipped with marginally more snap. Sensing this the Walthamstow man catches Brown in the corner and unloads with both hands. Brown is hurt but he counters. 

Gilley looks surprised. He takes a sharp intake of breath. Surely his night’s work must be done at last. Surely, he should by now be collecting his prized belt and taking it back to the little York Hall dressing room. As he looks quizzically on the commentator announces that the crowd is now “at fever-pitch.”

Gilley is by now bleeding from his heavily swollen left eye. Both men are willing the punches out on instinct. Muscle memory fired by a beating heart sends them both forward to centre ring again. Gilley lands an uninterrupted five-punch combination that proves sufficient to see Brown’s head propelled from side to side. Seconds later the bell goes, the ecstatic crowd takes a collective breath, and perhaps in its finality, this late flurry was the straw that finally broke the willing camel’s back. 

The denouement arrived midway through the next round. A big right hand sent the challenger ragdoll-like into the ropes and then another saw him finally topple to the canvas. Referee Kieran McCann had seen enough and waved it off at 1 minute 47 seconds of the ninth. For the few hundred packed in on this Spring evening at the York Hall, it was an exhilarating affair. 

The same goes for those that have since watched the combustible eighth round as it was bounced all over Social Media in the hours immediately afterwards. Many have described it as the ‘Round of the Year’ and it continues to be hard to disagree. That it deserved a television audience is undeniable when one considers the surfeit of pseudo contests for Silver and Intercontinental accolades that so often fill up the big-ticket schedules. 

Talking to FightPost on the phone from outside Rod Julien’s RJ’s Gym in the Essex enclave of Chigwell, Gilley is in a familiar ebullient mood. “It was a great round. Lots of fun. I really enjoyed it,” he says, in what may come as a surprise to some onlookers. 

“Those are the sort of rounds you want to be in; ones that everyone is speaking about afterwards. It gets your name out there and makes people start taking notice. You know there are not a lot of people who can come through something like that and come out on top.

“But credit to Drew as well. I hit him with some big shots, we thought he would tire. I definitely thought he was done, but then he kept coming back. When he came back [In the eighth] and hit me with about four shots; I thought: you’re joking,” ponders a laughing Gilley.

The Leytonstone battler understands that he is in the entertainment business, and successful eye-catching performances present the best way for him to graduate from the blood and sweat of small hall shows to the relative glamour of television. But participation in such rambunctious encounters comes at a cost. “You know when people say: It’s going to hurt in the morning? Well, it definitely does,” he reveals amidst more congenial laughter. “The next day I had a bag of ice on my face, and it was bent in all different shapes.

“But the adrenaline was still pumping for a couple of days afterwards. By Wednesday I hit the wall and felt so tired and just had to sleep. 

“Surprisingly, my eye went down after a day or so and I could see out of it okay. But for three or four weeks afterwards, I still had a lot of pain and was starting to get worried and I was thinking I might need to get it scanned. Luckily, it’s back to normal now though.

“But it was all worth it. I was in a slugfest at York Hall. It’s great to be able to say I did that!”

Of that tumultuous round, Gilley’s recollections are surprisingly hazy. “Barry Jones came up to me after the fight and was saying how great the eighth round was,” he remembers. “I was like: ‘Really?’”

“It just didn’t register at the time how much me and Drew were going back and forth. I remember at one point his fans going ‘Drew…Drew…Drew’ and mine were shouting back. I remember thinking how loud it was and then suddenly everything went nuts.

“Something just clicked in the middle of that round and the noise went crazy. Normally it’s just all zoned out.”

However, despite the positive attention this performance has provided, Gilley is still waiting for the phone to ring from the big promotors with the longed-for offer of a television gig. Previously with MTK, the 27-year-old is among a host of fighters suddenly unrepresented since their very public collapse earlier in the year. But Gilley reveals that his contract was due to expire just a month after his last fight anyway and he and manager/coach Rod Julien had no plans to renew it. “We are looking for a TV deal. That’s what we feel we deserve,” affirms the Essex puncher. 

“I am hoping we get a phone call soon for an opportunity. I’ve had 15 fights now and won the Southern Area and English [titles]. I’ve defended it in one of the fights of the year; so why not? I’ve come up the hard way and now it’s time for the promoters to do their job and give me a shot. I promise I’ll deliver in the same way I always do.”

“Even the fight that I lost; people were like: ‘What a great fight’. So, win, lose or draw I’m in exciting fights. Surely that has to be good for television?” he understandably wonders.

That defeat eighteen months ago at the hands of Danny Ball -who has since unsuccessfully fought Ekow Essuman for a British title- remains the only blemish on Gilley’s otherwise clean slate. He is sanguine when reflecting on it and maturely credits it with providing him with the necessary tools and spark to deliver his latest high-octane performance against Brown. “That fight taught me loads. I think without it I lose the Drew Brown fight,” he says. “The fight showed just how much I have learned from that earlier loss.” Chief among those lessons was the decision to move up to 154 lbs where Gilley concludes that he has a “lot more snap and endurance.”

But as much pride as Gilley takes in the recent defence of his English title belt, he is adamant that few things can actually match the joy of winning it in the first place. “It was so last minute. I was at a wedding -after beating Daniel Lartey the week before- and we get a phone call whilst I’m eating my cheesecake, asking if I want to fight in three weeks for the title. Rod [Julian] just grabbed the cheesecake out of my hand, and says: right, we’re off,” explains Gilley in his now familiar, honest, wisecracking style. 

“The next day we’re back in the gym and three weeks later we’re winning the title that makes you the best in the country.”

Gilley won the belt in style, knocking out opponent Evaldas Korsakas in four rounds in November of last year. It marked the next critical step on a journey that had already delivered a Southern Area title twelve months previously. But one that in reality had begun a good decade-and-a-half earlier when Gilley first stepped into a gym and laced up gloves. For a proficient, if unspectacular amateur, the unprepossessing silver plate on a brown strap that encompasses the Southern Area belt, marked Gilley’s first-ever title in the squared circle.

For the gilded, the Olympians, the show ponies, and those with name recognition, or media profile -deserved or otherwise- it is easy to deride these achievements. But within them there retains an undiminishable purity. Boxing’s soul has mostly been bent, subcontracted, and polluted by the nefarious machinations of the corrupt, myopic, or nakedly self-interested. Yet Gilley’s hard-won achievements reside above and outside of all that. In their own way superior and undiminishable. 

“It’s proper special,” he says of them, with evident pride.

“No matter what happens in my life I can always say I was good enough to be the champion of England. When I retire, I can be extremely proud and happy with that. You know, the boys fighting for these belts are hungry. They may not [mostly] be fighting on television, but they are fighting desperately to reach that level. 

“That’s why you see so many great scraps. The type you don’t see on the undercards of televised shows for International or Silver belts.”

It is hard to disagree with him or not to also share some of the frustrations of a talented and gutsy fighter, that has proven himself domestically, but is still searching for a bigger opportunity to showcase his talent. But he remains undaunted and his happy-go-lucky demeanor unruffled. “Of course, I can,” he says emphatically when FightPost dares to question whether he could one day be a world champion.

“I’ve just got to keep applying myself and make sure I get my preparation right. Look at Sam Eggington,” he says, in reference to an altogether fitting role model. “He’s come up short a couple of times, but he kept banging away, and now’s he’s the IBO world champion. 

“Anything can happen in this sport and I am good enough to beat any of them. All I need is the opportunities to arrive at the right time, and I’ll be ready.”