Jessica Barry: “I just want to entertain. People pay a lot of their hard-earned money to watch us, and I want to entertain them.”

Jessica Barry: “I just want to entertain. People pay a lot of their hard-earned money to watch us, and I want to entertain them.”

It seems a familiar story of late. Many a fighter has found a route into boxing from football, a desire to get fitter or a need for something more. Jessica Barry is another on that seemingly ever-expanding list.

“I’ve always played football since I was about eight or nine,” Barry told me over Zoom. “When I was about twenty, I used to play on the wing, I was very unfit, and I used to go out drinking as you do at that age. I just decided I would do some boxing just to get a bit fitter and lose some weight. That’s just how it started, and from there, I did a few white-collar fights. It went from there, and I just stuck at it. At the age of twenty-one, I joined an amateur club and went on to have nineteen amateur fights. But then Covid hit, I came back and had a few more amateur fights, and that’s when I decided to turn over and box professionally.”

There is that theme that boxers demand more of themselves and from people around them. The frustrations of their fellow players not giving enough have pushed plenty of footballers into another world. Barry was one such fighter.

“I love football, I prefer it in terms of watching it. A lot of the time, I still choose to watch football over boxing. What I like about boxing is that I used to get really frustrated on a football pitch. I would always work my socks off in every single game. I might not have been the best player on the pitch, but I always gave 120%, and I used to get so frustrated because I could see that not every player in my team was doing the same. So I used to get hot-headed when I played football. But in boxing, if I did bad, that was all on me. If I didn’t train hard enough, that was on me. But if I did train hard enough, then that was also on me. I think that was where the love for boxing came from. I never ran before I got into boxing, but that got me into running. That in itself is a solo sport, you are always in competition with yourself. It’s kind of like that with boxing. Boxing makes you so dedicated. you have to get up and train before work. You have to train after work. You have to do it. You can’t cut corners. I have always loved having a routine and structure. And boxing has given me that. I kind of became addicted to that, really.”

The ‘addiction’ morphed into something a little more. “I was shaking. I was throwing up loads,” Barry said about her first fight. A white-collar experience that was the catalyst for what was to come. “That happened for three or four fights. I was so sick with nerves.”

It was the lockdown period that led Jessica Barry into the world of professional boxing. “In Covid, I was sparring a lot with Rachel Ball before her fight with Shannon Courtenay,” Barry relayed to FightPost. “That’s when I started to get into those types of gyms. The pro-style was always more suited to me. So that’s when it all started to click, and I started to think that I liked the sound of this. But I still never really started to think about turning pro. After that, I was asked to go up to Sheffield for the Elites for a trial. But it was really hard because I was doing my degree at the time and working full-time as well. So, I was trying to manage all that as well as my GB trials. I was having to take two weeks off work, and it just wasn’t my dream to get on the GB squad. I was getting married the year after, and I remember thinking I didn’t want to live in Sheffield four days a week. I loved the training in Sheffield, training three times a day, but the whole living up there and living that lifestyle just wasn’t for me. But working boxing around work and training at a gym near me was what did it for me.”

Boxing on the smaller shows can be beyond hard. If you don’t sell enough tickets, you don’t fight. It is a simple cold, hard fact that many fans won’t be able to comprehend. Barry, despite being a big enough ticket seller herself, has still suffered because of the realities of her sport. “I have always had a big enough following to pay for my fights. So I have been lucky with that because I know a lot of the girls struggle because the opponents are really expensive, if you have to fly them in, and the ones over in the UK just charge silly money. I am not a massive ticket seller, but I have sold enough. It means I don’t get paid, but that’s ok. As long as everyone else gets paid, that’s all I am bothered about at this point.

“But I have been really unlucky with fights falling through, with girls pulling out and shows getting cancelled because other fighters can’t sell enough tickets. My manager said I am one of the unluckiest fighters he has had.”

After two wins, Barry suffered a shock points defeat at the hands of the underrated Vaida Masiokaite in 2023. “I never ever want to feel like that again,” Barry says of that experience. She vowed to learn from her first professional reversal. And she has. Four wins since, including winning the Midlands super-featherweight and England featherweight titles, are proof of her progress.

Barry is ambitious. Those ambitions are ever-growing as her career advances. But equally, there is that need to bring a little more. “I just want to entertain,” Barry told me. “Every boxer should want to entertain. It isn’t always about winning. I would rather lose and be the most entertaining fight on the card rather than win over someone who isn’t very good. People pay a lot of their hard-earned money to watch us, and I want to entertain them.”

Linzi Buczynskyj, an old amateur opponent, is next up for Barry. Next month, Barry and Buczynskyj will clash for the Commonwealth Silver featherweight title. It was always a fight Barry wanted in the professional ranks. “I fought Linzi as an amateur, and we got the Fight of the Night,” Barry told FightPost. “Since I turned pro, I have been asking to fight her. I know she won’t pull out, and I know she’s had a lot of bad luck as well. I am not in boxing for the money, I am in it just to have good fights like she is.”

Jessica Barry has stated her intention to entertain. But I think there is a little more to her story than that. A win next month will add another title to her resume. You suspect, more will follow.