Nina Hughes: “The Matchroom deal changes things massively for me. Finally getting the big fights on the big stage and getting the exposure I needed.”

Nina Hughes: “The Matchroom deal changes things massively for me. Finally getting the big fights on the big stage and getting the exposure I needed.”

If anyone is living proof that age is just a number, it is Nina Hughes. The unbeaten Hughes turned professional in the final months of 2021, less than a year later and at the ripe young age of 40, Hughes is now the WBA bantamweight champion of the world. It is some story, a remarkable one in many ways.

The win over Jamie Mitchell in November has changed everything for the likeable Essex fighter. Hughes has been a fighter on the outside looking in, casting an envious eye on the fighters dancing on the bigger platforms, especially when she firmly believed she was better than those fighters. But courtesy of that upset victory over Mitchell, Hughes is now where she belongs. Over Zoom, just a couple of weeks removed from her famous victory, Hughes told me a fight with the former champion Shannon Courtenay could be next:

“Shannon will likely be next because Ebanie Bridges has had surgery on her hand so she will be out for a while and I don’t want to be inactive. It will be around the end of March or early April. I have had a few niggles, so I will have a rest over Christmas, let the body heal and start training again in the New Year.”

The win over Mitchell not only brought Hughes the world title, but it also landed her a multi-fight contract with Matchroom. Signing on the dotted line with Eddie Hearn gives the new champion options and plenty of them. 2023 will see the big fights, a win over Courtenay and unification fights will follow. The big platform and the big fights are a far cry from the reality of boxing on the smaller shows. Such shows are the bread and butter of the sport, but for the fighters, the process of having to sell enough tickets to just be able to fight at all is a side of the sport many don’t see. It’s not been easy for Hughes, but the Matchroom deal brings a little bit of security in a sport that rarely offers such luxuries:

“The Matchroom deal changes things massively for me.” Hughes told me. “Finally getting the big fights on the big stage and getting the exposure I needed really. I won’t have to sell tickets to pay for my opponent anymore. That’s what put me off turning pro five years ago. I was asked to turn pro then and I said I can’t be arsed to sell tickets and that was back in 2017. And when I did turn pro I was thinking I don’t know if I can sell that many tickets. I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to sell enough, you are expected to sell around 100 tickets. But I just thought sod it I am going to give it a go. There are times when you are thinking you are not selling enough or everyone is saying they want one but then you can’t get the money off them. But then in the last week, you suddenly get loads. You panic and then you sell enough in the last week.

“People don’t realise that defending my Commonwealth title was so expensive. You’ve got the opponent’s fee and travel costs to cover, the sanctioning fees and everything else. I think it worked out to around 10k, and I thought I am never going to sell that amount of tickets. I had to find 3k out of my own pocket, but luckily I had a couple of really nice sponsors who paid for it all. People don’t realise that side of it. I was boxing for no money and then I had to find the money just to be able to defend my title. But we knew if I defended my title we had the world title fight next, it was something we knew we had to do. Most of the time you don’t earn any money and the opponent earns more than you.”

A Twitter exchange in which Hughes offered to fight Mitchell because the American was struggling to find an opponent, eventually morphed into reality. But the British challenger was given little hope of victory against a champion who had beaten two other British fighters in Courtenay and Carly Skelly in her previous two fights. Hughes knew she was the betting outsider but it was only the night before the fight when she realised just how much some thought the odds were against her:

“I was definitely the underdog and people were expecting me to lose but I didn’t realise how much until I was reading all the comments the night before. I saw a poll and 96% of people had her winning. I was thinking, apart from people who know me literally nobody is giving me a chance. It just made me even more determined to win and prove them wrong. We’d had a good camp and we were confident we could beat her, and seeing that poll just gave me that drive to prove people wrong even more.”

Hughes is a world champion after just five fights and less than twelve months into her professional journey. Even on a side of the sport where things move a little quicker, it has come as a surprise to most just how fast her story has moved, and Hughes herself is amongst them:

“I can’t believe it myself. When I turned pro I did so because I believed I could become a world champion, but I probably didn’t believe I would ever get the opportunity. But I gave it a try and obviously the opportunity came up and a lot sooner than we expected.”

What makes the story even more remarkable is that Hughes is not a full-time fighter. A part-time administration job helps pay the bills, and it is a job, despite having a world title and a Matchroom contract to her name, that Hughes has no intention of giving up:

“I’m still going to work because unless you fight you don’t get paid and there are no guarantees in boxing. If the fight doesn’t happen in March or April I still have to find the money to live on. I don’t get as much rest as I would like, but luckily my work has been quite flexible. I work two days at home and I only have to go to London one day a week. I can work around it, by getting up earlier to train or training during my lunch breaks so I have managed to find that flexibility to work around it. But I do feel I have no time to do anything else.”

Hughes has fought many barriers in her life, including elements surrounding her age. Even ten years ago, Hughes suffered because of it, and resulted in her taking an enforced absence away from the sport:

“Nicola Adams got picked for the London Olympics and then Team GB released me because of my age. If I was younger they would have kept me on for the next Olympics, but as I was coming up to 30, they said I would be too old for the 2016 Olympics. I was released and there was no motivation in going back to boxing in the smaller club shows. I stopped boxing for three years then I had my first child and put on loads of weight so I started training again. So I set myself a target to have one fight and lose the weight. I had that one fight and I really started to enjoy it again. I was just doing it for a bit of fun really, just like a hobby, but I won another National title, boxing for England winning gold medals, but I was just enjoying it and there was no pressure.

“I then said I would do one more ABA title and then retire, but I lost in the final. If I had boxed my best and lost I would have been satisfied, but it was a subpar performance and I wasn’t satisfied. So I said do one more and then lockdown happened. So I thought it would be time to retire but there were a lot of female boxers on the TV at the time and I thought I could still do this and I thought I just have to give it a go. I would have always regretted it if I hadn’t tried, I knew there were world champions I could beat.”

In many ways, Hughes has backed herself, and an unlikely scenario is now one of fact. But it could just be the start of the story. Still harshly forgotten by some in the end-of-term fighter of the year polls, but that won’t be the case if Hughes builds on 2022 with a win over Courtenay and victory in a unification fight after that. For Hughes. life really does begin at 40.