Dillian Whyte interview: ‘Without boxing, being behind bars wouldn’t be the problem - I’d be dead’

In the 1970s, there was the Rumble in the Jungle, on Saturday night it is the Rumble on the Rock.

Boxing’s first professional heavyweight bout on the island of Gibraltar will not inevitably turn heads in quite the same way, but the name is an obvious choice for promoter Eddie Hearn.

For Dillian Whyte, it is a step-up in location from his last fight in Hearn’s back garden, which left his career at a crossroads having lost to Alexander Povetkin.

Defeat, and it is hard to see what Whyte moves on to next. Win, and he’s central to the conversation for a future challenger to the winner of the Anthony Joshua-Tyson Fury double-header, when that finally materialises.

Whyte’s career has often been that of a waiting game. He spent more than 1,000 days as the WBC challenger without getting a shot at Deontay Wilder, he has waited a somewhat shorter seven months for a return fight against Povetkin, first scheduled for November and again in January.

For now, he has been on the wrong side of boxing history. “That’s probably the longest ever wait a No1 contender’s had in history and that’s history I didn’t want to make,” he said. “So, to say I’ve been hard done by is an understatement.”

Explaining the relative lack of opportunity, he said: “It’s just corruption in boxing really. I shouted long enough, I fought contender after contender. I fought more top-10 contenders than the champion fought at the time, and more undefeated contenders. But it’s just politics in boxing and sometimes you get on the wrong side of it.”

He still believes he will eventually get his opportunity to fight for heavyweight boxing’s ultimate prize, and retains a remarkably positive stance in the face of adversity.

Central to that is the fact he has been through considerably worse. Left behind in Jamaica as a two-year-old, he would go hungry for days on end before being reunited with his mother in London 10 years later. Within a year, he was a father at the age of 13 and survived stabbings and shootings before getting his life back on track with boxing.

He understandably calls himself a “survivor” but admits to being at a loss to explain quite how he’s still in one piece.

“Without boxing, being behind bars wouldn’t be the problem, I’d be being dead,” he said. “Behind bars sounds absurd to most people but rather that than being dead. Boxing 100 per cent saved my life.”

Explaining his strength at survival, he said: “Maybe I should take some time to start thinking about it - why or how it’s possible. Maybe I should start paying more attention and start digging deep to find some answer or reasoning.

“Life does one of two things – it breaks you or makes you a stronger person. My life experience has made me a stronger person. It’s made me very stubborn and determined. Honestly, I can’t tell you why it’s not broken me – that it’s because of this or that. I just don’t know, I have no idea.”

Aside from his own boxing career, Whyte likes to work quietly behind the scenes on helping those in a similar predicament to the one in which he previously found himself.

The Bodysnatcher is reluctant to talk about it. “I don’t like to publicise it as I don’t think you should,” he said. “I’m not a guy that does things for ‘look at me, I’m trying to help the youth’. There’s a lot of people that do that publicly but, once the camera goes, they don’t really care.

“I want to be involved and have a real passion for it. I do it because I know real suffering. I know what it’s like not having anyone to turn to when in need.

“I want to change as many lives as I can. A lot of them are involved in shooting, knife crime, gangs and stuff. Some are just hard workers who are just getting no chances in life.”

In terms of taking chances, Whyte readily admits he took one in first facing Povetkin, the threat of defeat potentially derailing that WBC title opportunity.

Despite dominating the fight and looking on course to finish it, he was felled by a surprise knockout moments later. In the aftermath and since watching back, his mantra has been that life goes on while also taking the positives from the latest setback.

Lose again and the prospect in the future of fighting either Joshua or Fury would seem further away than ever before.

Of Saturday’s fight, he said: “Regardless of it being a stepping stone, I don’t like losing. I won’t do that again, and what I do know is that my story’s not finished yet.”