Chris Adaway: “I reckon I really won about 40 of my losses. The game is so corrupt.”

Chris Adaway: “I reckon I really won about 40 of my losses. The game is so corrupt.”

By Garry White

It’s a Friday night on a summer’s evening at London’s York Hall, but it could be literally anywhere and any one of a near century of mileposts on Chris Adaway’s journey through boxing. The unknown prospect facing him in the ‘home’ corner carries a familiar single-digit unblemished record, whereas the notches in Adaway’s ‘L’ column would rival those etched into the wall of a ‘lifer’s’ cell in Parkhurst.

Yet the man from Plymouth is standing in the centre of the ring grinning. He is at peace because he has long since given up on statistics or the recording of points as an effective barometer to determine winners and losers in this toughest of sports. The in-built bias of officialdom towards the ‘ticket sellers’ in the home corner and the all-pervasive dead-handed corruption that permeates the game has long since removed the scales from his once wide-eyes.

The prospect moves forward looking to unload. To build out that longed-for knockout reel to splash from badly recorded iPhones across social media. His followers are noisy at ringside, the glare of phones with the red button hit and the video running; just waiting for their moment. 

Adaway waits, safe in the knowledge that what comes next is as formulaic as filling up his car with petrol or getting out the ladder to commence his window cleaning round. He takes a half-step back, amends the distance, and uncorks a jab straight into his opponent’s face. He follows it up with a soppy grin and rotates his other arm helicopter-like above his head in mock celebration. These moments are the only ‘wins’ that boxing is gracious enough to allow him.

This process is repeated perhaps a dozen times throughout the six-round contest until something snaps in his opponent, and he seeks to detonate a bomb that will wipe the annoying grin from Adaway’s face. But this just plays into the 29-year-old’s hands, who gets safely on his bike long before a wild right hand has passed the equator. For a moment he stops and puts his arm horizontally to his brow and looks far-off into the crowd as though he were Nelson on the bridge of HMS Victory or a golfer that has just creamed a tee shot straight into the heavy rough. ‘You missed’ his action seems to say, ‘and not just by a little bit.’ Some of the crowd heckle him but most just laugh. Why shouldn’t the Devonian window cleaner make his night shift fun?

In the closing moments, the prospect finally begins to close the distance, and for a moment Adaway looks like he might be in trouble. But he covers up, uses all that know-how from so many nights on the road, and sees it through to the final bell. The referee awards him one round, which although it represents a scant reward for his efforts is of absolutely no surprise to him, and he packs up his gear and begins the long drive back west to his wife and three children.

Yet there is a nagging doubt that he is now taking shots that he should be able to avoid. The face is swollen where once it would have been largely unblemished. He always knew how to keep the distance between himself and all but the very best of these kids, but now they were slowly and surely beginning to catch up with him. The goal of reaching the one-hundred-fight milestone was now so close, but Adaway [10-77-4,1KO] had already reached his own conclusion. 

“If it wasn’t for Covid I’d have got to 100 fights. It was always my target to get there,” he says, with no sign of regret. “After I came back [Following the lockdown that put small-hall boxing on lengthy hiatus] I had four or five fights in as many weeks. A couple of them were just little ‘walk arounds’ but in one of them I got hit with shots that I wouldn’t normally get hit with and I found that I was getting wobbled a bit.

“I knew then that it was time to call it a day. I can’t take the shots anymore; my punch resistance has just gone.

“I’ve got three kids and another one on the way in a few weeks – I was just taking a few too many shots. The sharpness isn’t quite there anymore. I’d rather get out of boxing with my health intact. I could have got to that 100-mark, but if it was to take even a year off my life to reach the milestone, then it wasn’t for it for me,” he adds.

Adaway formally bowed out of professional boxing on the BCB-promoted show in Wolverhampton last month. Prior to his ring entrance, it was announced that his four-rounder against unbeaten youngster James Scarrott would be his final outing under the lights. Often an away fighter’s entry from changing room to ring is met by disinterested silence or catcalls, but pleasingly Adaway recalls a decent ovation from the midlands crowd. 

For so long the loaded dice of boxing have forced him by necessity to become a pragmatist. One who is there to collect his paycheque and not to be lured by the uncatchable mirage of trying to win fights. But he does admit to really trying his darndest to win this final one. Not for the first time, the referee scored all four rounds to the other corner, but Adaway has no complaints. “I was a bit gutted, but I tried my best. The kid was just too good for me. He was only 18 years old as well,” he laughs. “But it just cemented what I already knew: that it’s just not there anymore.”

Those uninitiated in boxing’s dark arts would look at Adaway’s record and come to the immediate conclusion that he must be a near-hopeless boxer. But this would be a wholly unfair assessment of the 29-year-old, who reached an ABA Elite semi-final as an amateur and competed for England but was seldom able to register a victory in the paid ranks. 

However, Adaway’s role as an away fighter, road warrior, or journeyman to coin all the trade parlance is one where winning the fight is never the ultimate goal. Men and women like him are employed to develop young prospects, to put them through their paces, and most importantly to help these ticket-sellers build up their records so that they can obtain more lucrative fights and ultimately compete for titles. 

It takes a rare level of domination for fighters of Adaway’s ilk to ever get the verdict that they deserve. Officialdom has a natural slant towards the lads that sell the tickets, to such an extent that the records of Adaway and his brethren are almost meaningless. “I reckon I really won about 40 of my losses. The game is so corrupt” he asserts. 

“A lot of my results I lost by a point. There were others where the scorecards were 40-38, and they only gave me a share of rounds that I obviously won. I just never really knew how corrupt boxing was till I got involved with it. Honestly, it probably took me 50 fights to properly accept it.”

Eventually, the frustration of trying his hardest to win and yet rarely ever getting his arm raised by the referee become too much for the Plymouth window cleaner. “I ended up walking away from the sport. I thought ‘Why am I going out there trying my best to win and just getting shafted every time?”

By the time Adaway returned a year later he did so with a very different ethos. “Yeah, I just thought I’ll play the game now. I’ll never be a world-beater, so let’s just make the best of it. There’s no point in doing anything else. If I get a result: great. If not, then so what. I’ve still got a nice family and a nice house out of it. Those are the things that count.”

It is a strategy that has worked well for the Plymouth resident as he has spent his weekends over multiple years travelling up and down the country. A regular night’s work of four, three-minute rounds, has typically come equipped with a £750 pay cheque, but he has earned as much as £2,000 for the toughest eight-round contests. He laughs about a provincial promotor who once promised him an extra £200 to essentially not throw a punch against their very limited ‘prospect.’

“He was crap,” remembers Adaway. “But I gave him a little move around. As long as I am getting paid well, I do whatever I have got to do,” he says matter-of-factly.

However, amongst all the gigs in small halls and leisure centres, not only against a list of opponents that included the likes of Zelfa Barrett, Lewis Ritson and Jordan Gill; Adaway has also appeared on the undercard at some iconic venues. “I’ve boxed at Wembley,” he recalls. “But the best has to be the Albert Hall. That was an amazing place to box. There has been nothing quite like it; it was really something special.”

He readily confirms that perhaps not surprisingly, reigning European and Commonwealth super-featherweight champion Zelfa Barrett is the highest quality opponent he has faced off against. “He was so sharp,” recalls Adaway of his Mancunian foe. “It was my first time on television, and I planned to really go for it.

“I was doing okay in the 1st round and then my right hand just dropped forward a little bit. He capitalised straight away and dropped me with an overhand right. I didn’t see it coming. His sharpness was something else.”

Yet despite this short night’s work against an elite-level opponent, Adaway only failed to hear the final bell nine times among his 77 career reverses. The ability to soak up punches, and not take too many shots has been key to his ongoing durability over these past eight years of professional action and placed him in high demand on the small-hall circuit. 

Adaway, for his part, quickly realised that if he wanted regular paydays, he needed to do more than just stay out of trouble in fights. He needed to give something back and most of all from the outset determined that he needed to provide the crowd with entertainment. “That’s what boxing is at the end of the day. It’s an entertainment business,” he says. “If you’re not entertaining the crowd then you won’t get the work.”

But with a little chuckle, Adaway provides some further insight into another reason for some of his more outlandish antics. “It winds them up and then they try and smash my head off,” he smiles. “But, you know, I can see those punches coming a mile off. It just makes for an easier night’s work.”

For the 29-year-old former fighter, those days are all behind him now. The sweat, beer, and testosterone of the packed small hall shows and the cavernous rows of empty chairs that awaited him deep down the undercard at the big, televised venues all belong to another life. With his fourth child due in a matter of weeks, his focus is now on getting everything ready at home. Then it’s back to the ladders, bucket, and shammy that await him on his window-cleaning round. This time of year, is the hardest he admits as the sun starts to disappear and the cold begins to bite. But he is grateful for what he has. Although boxing rarely bestowed on him the opportunity to win, those extra Pounds collected travelling up and down the country have done their bit to provide a settled life for him and his family.

But they’ll always be that nagging doubt of what might have been. Of how much he could have wrung from a talent that he thinks could have been sufficient to see him to an Area or maybe even an English title.

“It would’ve been nice to see how things could have panned out,” he admits. “To have got the chance at the start of my career to really show what I was capable of. But in the end, because of bad decisions, I just lost momentum, I didn’t train as much and just coasted; I did just enough to get through.”

Those of us that saw Chris Adaway from the haven of ringside would argue that he did considerably more than that.

Photo Credit: Mark Robinson/Matchroom Boxing