A belt that would put Gucci to shame

● Everyone I tell that I am meeting Brian Mitchell for a hot brunch has a story to tell about him.

“That one time …” seems to be par for the course with the old-school undefeated boxing champion, who comes from a time when “champion” meant something very real.

Today there is such a proliferation of belts and world champions that the idea has become a little diluted.

“I mean yes, you could say we were a golden age of South African boxing, you had Gerrie Coetzee, you had Peter Mathebula, Dingaan Thobela, we had Baby Jake Matlala, we had a good era,” says Mitchell, who turned pro in 1981 and won the world super featherweight title in 1986.

“But when they say the golden days of boxing are gone I don’t agree, we are selling out professional bouts, filling arenas, young guys like Roarke Knapp, Brandon Thysse, and guys like Kevin Lerena doing right for boxing.”

Sitting with Mitchell at Aroma, the coffee shop in Glenvista that he likes to frequent because he and his fiancée live around the corner just above the golf course, I get an insight into quite how charming a boxing champ he actually is.

It is also clear how beloved he is to his immediate community in the south of Johannesburg. There is a quiet pride by association that seems to emanate from the patrons at the other tables on a recent Thursday morning when we tuck into scrambled eggs and avo for me, and a nice stack of bacon and banana flapjacks for him.

People stop to bask in his reflected glory. There is some joshing from a punter about the fact that he once shot three holes in one on the golf course. He laughs it off and says something self-deprecating about luck.

And then he shows a little of the grit and focus that got him to that undisputed world champion — immortalised in the Boxing Hall of Fame — place.

“I mean yes, there is luck involved but really if you want to be good at golf you have to practise every day. Like any sport.”

So what does it take to be a world champion, I ask, other than the benefits of the genetic advantage — his father was also a boxing champ, in 1962.

“I was in a boxing gym when I was a year old. But my dad doesn’t deserve the credit for my boxing career; my parents divorced when I was five. We were very poor and I was raised as an only child by my mom.

“She begged me not to box, but when she saw I was actually good at it, and I was working hard at it, she would become like a mad woman.” He laughs. “I’m from the Ellis Park Boxing Club, which was a very poor community (he grew up in Troyeville and Malvern and went to Jeppe Boys High).

“As kids we were like a family, so all the mothers and fathers that were part of the gym would come in and cook on a Saturday when we had tournaments. All the kids would get a free meal at least, and we would fight. And that is what we knew and that is what we loved.”

This is the thing he bemoans and stresses is really missing in the sport in SA. “It’s a big problem. We don’t have any guys representing us at the Olympics because there are no gyms for the underprivileged youth. The government and the private sector need to open boxing gyms in all the townships. Help the kids to have a place to go. I was fortunate we had a place to go. Millions and millions of kids would love to box but there is nowhere to go.”

He describes the difficulty of being a road warrior in his boxing heyday. He had to travel all over the world to defend his titles — it was the height of apartheid and he bore the brunt of the sports boycott as people picketed and stormed the rings where he fought.

He had to dig deep to win and come to terms with the fact that he did not really have a full understanding of apartheid. He took it hard when people called him a racist because he had close relationships with black boxers and had a black trainer in the US, Murphy Griffith.

“And I wasn’t doing it for politics that I had a black trainer, that’s who I wanted because he was the best trainer in the world.”

Things improved after Nelson Mandela was released from prison but by then he says he was ageing out of the sport. He was 30. He described how Mandela phoned him and invited him to Cape Town to the president’s office. “He loved boxing and we had a long conversation about my career. Just mindboggling. He used to watch me fight, it was such an unbelievable privilege and honour.”

I could sit here and talk boxing for hours, shooting the breeze about Sugar Ray Leonard and Mike Tyson, who are his friends. I ask him what happens to a boxer, who has been literally one of the most fit and powerful athletes in the world, after he retires.

He laughs and tells me that he went a little off the rails, drinking, carousing and other general naughtiness. It cost him his second marriage. But since then he has found his soulmate, two chihuahuas and a great Dane, and reconnected with his purpose.

He got off the booze, was invited into the Boxing Hall of Fame in the US, opened a gym, commentates for SuperSport, has his own promoting company, is on the speaker circuit and even put on a one-man show telling his life story.

What is the life philosophy of Brian Mitchell? “If you believe you can do it, you can do it.”