On 30 June last year Jordan Gill drank a litre of vodka in a field in Cambridgeshire as he contemplated ending his life. It was the night before he turned 29 and earlier that Friday morning it had been, in his own words, "just a normal, sunny day. I woke up and didn't know what to do with myself".
We sit a foot apart on a very different Friday morning in a boxing gym in Harlow. Apart from a few weights and pieces of apparatus, the room is empty. Gill and Zelfa Barrett step into the ring for a compelling super-featherweight contest in Manchester tomorrow night. But, now, he pauses before going back into the darkness and despair.
He is an intelligent man, who was offered a place to study at some of the UK's most prestigious universities, and it feels briefly invasive to revisit such distressing memories. Gill, who has a Sikh heritage, would love to become the first fighter of Indian ancestry to win a world title as a professional boxer. I've thought that he is a special fighter ever since I saw him win the European featherweight title after an unforgettable battle against Karim Guerfi in February 2022. Knocked down heavily in the seventh round, with his face swollen and barely able to move his legs, Gill produced a stunning knockout in the ninth.
I ask if he minds talking about that terrible night last summer. "No, it's all right," Gill says. "I live in Chatteris but I was spending time with a girl in Ramsey, which is nearby. Everything just hit me. I'd lost my European title [in a shock defeat to the veteran Kiko Martínez in October 2022], split up with my wife and things weren't good. I'm getting an earful from the girl I'm seeing, I'm not training, not eating well, not feeling good. I've got no trainer, no promoter, no manager, no prospects of a fight. I hadn't got anything to show for my career apart from a few shiny belts. And I'm 29 tomorrow. So it hit me like a ton of bricks."
Esta historia es de la edición April 12, 2024 de The Guardian.
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