Formerly known as Prince
YOU can always tell a buffoon, but you can't tell him much. After beating a willing if hapless Spaniard, one Manuel CaIvo, in the London Arena last Saturday, Naseem Hamed turned on those members of the audience who were less than enthralled by his performance. 'They just don't understand the craft of boxing,' he said. But I would love to come back to London to entertain them again.'
How's that for effrontery? Not only would Master Hamed like to entertain the knownowts (a group that includes, to a man, everybody who observed the fight from the press seats) but he'd love to entertain them again!
For the time being, named, the Sheffield-based featherweight of Yemeni parentage, holds the International Boxing Organisation title. As there are almost as many boxing federations as there are government departments, it's pretty small beer, and nobody knows it more than the fighter, which is why he has started to talk like a man who knows he is wrong.
Harned's problem is that he always overrated his talent. He is not the only boxer to hold an inflated view of his ability, but his arrogance, while making him 'marketable' in the tainted world of boxing, has also appalled people who wonder what all the fuss is about.
A promising young man can remain promising only for so long, and 13 months ago, in Las Vegas, Hamed was pummelled into silence by a vastly superior opponent. Marco Antonio Barrera of Mexico did not just beat Flamed. In the words of James Lawton, the Independent's superb chief sports writer, who observed the Docklands debacle, he exposed 'all his foibles and deceits' on that night in Nevada.
Hamed, who used to box under the absurd sobriquet 'Prince', was really a commoner all along. And, although 28 is no great age, it would be unwise to expect a sudden flowering. He has taken a fall and nothing — certainly not the honeyed words of promoters, managers and hangers-on — can put Humpty back together again.
Before Saturday's fight, Flamed had to remove his shorts to make the nine stone limit. As a strict Muslim (at least that's what he tells us) he claimed to be appalled by the request. For everybody else it was a terrific joke. The self-styled emperor was finally seen as others had regarded him from the very first bell: completely naked.
Defeat and disappointment have brought no humility_ 'Who gives a f— about the crowd?' he mouthed to the cameras last Saturday. As that crowd, egged on by television, had enabled him to become a millionaire, perhaps he should have spoken more carefully. Or perhaps not. When you are as fine a boxer and man as he imagines he is, you don't find it necessary to answer to anybody.
It doesn't help when television commentators take him at his own estimation, Ian Darke, working for Sky, told viewers, 'Boxing needs stars — Hamed is certainly that.' Not by any rigorous standard he's not. He was once promising, yes, but he never achieved a level of performance that conferred genuine stardom upon him.
To believe that you are a chosen one, to be encouraged in that belief by a battalion of well-wishers, and then to discover that you were never cut-out for greatness is a terrible thing to befall a man of such infinite selfregard. It brings to mind, of all people, Professor Higgins: 'Poor Naseem, how simply frightful, how humiliating. . . how delightful.'
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