MAY 2024

Chasing his Mike Tyson’s life story, Dixon explained his move to the States was not simply a fortuitous move. “It was very much by design, but more specifically, having read a lot about Cus D’Amato. I always struggled with pre-fight nerves and always wondered, ‘Is this normal?’ Cus was the only guy who broke it down, so I guess part of what took me to America was wanting to improve the mental side as much as anything else.”

Dixon explained how his journey came to fruition as one of boxing’s most prolific scribes. “I can’t look at anything I write. I’ve never read an article or book I’ve done or listened back to any of my own podcasts, because you’ll find mistakes and wish you had time to do things differently. I still can’t think about what I write now, so I dread to think about what the quality of my work was like when I first started. In terms of the move into writing – I was on the East Coast in Atlantic City and was training with Matthew Saad Muhammad, the former world light heavyweight champ and I was in touch with someone from Salisbury ABC - but please remember that this was before the times of mobile phones and technology.

I was handwriting letters to this guy at Salisbury ABC and said, ‘I’m going over to train with Micky Ward,’ who I’d met at the Hall of Fame. He then sent my phone number in Atlantic City to Tony Connolly, who was the assistant editor of Boxing News. This was just a few weeks after the first Gatti/Ward fight and Tony called me and asked if I could do an interview with Micky. That changed everything.

“I already had a degree in journalism, so it was partly on my mind that I was going to end up writing, or something along those lines and when he said, ‘Could you interview Micky?’ the whole trip changed. I said to Micky, ‘Can I come up and do an interview?’ and he said, ‘Sure. Come up.’ Again, it was different times.

It’s not like I had a laptop on me. I had a Dictaphone, a pad and a pen. I travelled up from Atlantic City through the night on the buses, stopping in New York, before going on to Lowell, Massachusetts.

“Micky came and got me from the bus station, then we went to his house, where we watched his first fight against Gatti, which I’d watched in person as a fan. Then we did the interview and went out for a sandwich. Afterwards, he took me back to the bus station and I travelled back that night, again stopping at Boston and New York, on the way to Atlantic City. I was crashing at a place with Matthew Saad Muhammad at the time and the next day I went to the public library, which is where you had to go back then if you wanted to do anything online. I typed up the interview sent it over to Boxing News, which was actually my first feature for them. That was August 2002 and I’ve had a piece in Boxing News every year since and that was 22 years ago.”

Only five years after submitting his first piece to Boxing News, Dixon joined Boxing News as a full time employee. “It was great. I was kind of built for it. My first amateur report was in 1996, covering low level local stuff, then I had my degree in journalism, then after I’d travelled around America interviewing fighters around 2002-2003, I joined the Hampshire Chronicle as a senior reporter and sub editor. I was covering pretty heavy news, like court stories, then in 2007, two jobs came up at the same time. One was the bottom job at Boxing News as editorial assistant, based in London and the other job, was a top job, at my local paper, the Forest Journal, as the editor. I went for both and got both. However, the Boxing News one took ages to sort out, so I was editor of my local paper for about four weeks, before I got the Boxing News gig. From the highest position in one organisation to the lowest in another.” What Dixon failed to mention was that he became the thirteenth editor of the highly Boxing News publication by 2009.

cont...

The Hampshire colossus has been modelling the British Vintage Boxing threads and shared his thoughts on the brand. “I like the message and the marketing. I’m an old school guy and when you look at my journey, it was all built around finding the guys who had vanished, the cult heroes and also the guys who didn’t get the credit they were due when they were fighting. I always think there a niche for boxing clobber that goes beyond the training stuff and when you look at the message from BVB, it’s a nod to the history and to some of those guys who didn’t get the credit, and who might have otherwise been forgotten. There’s a nice healthy parallel with the brand in addressing this.”

Dixon possesses a physique which resembles a marble statue. BVB decided to probe possibly Britain’s fittest scribe the secret to his form. “I do CrossFit, but I’ve trained most days for the last 30 years. I would normally do a strength element to start with, which would be an Olympic lifting session and we’d do a MetCon, which is a metabolic conditioning session, which would involve gymnastics or body weight stuff and maybe some weights in between, with some running, rowing or skipping. It all mixes and matches and no days are the same.” With such an intense workout schedule, one has to wonder how many calories the Dixon machine burns and what fuels it.

“On a hard day, I burn about 4,000 – 4,500, whereas, on a normal day with a normal session, I’ll burn between 3,000 – 3,250 calories per day. I have a pretty boring diet to be honest! I burn roughly what I consume and I watch my macro nutrients, my carbs and my fat intake and I’m always very familiar with where I’m at. My ‘go to’ every morning is my electrolytes, which are flavoured by bulk powders and then I have a smoothie, which has frozen berries, a banana, a scoop of protein, scoop of creatine, almond milk, nut butter and some oats. That’s one of my favourite things to have and I’ll sometimes have a couple of them in a day if time doesn’t allow me to cook properly.”

Finishing in fistic fashion, BVB asked Tris which past boxing legend he would like to spar three rounds with. “I’ve said this before, live on Sky and said it to him. It would be Johnny Nelson! Two reasons – partly because we’re mates now and I think he’d take it easy on me and also, partly, because I’d hope he was that boring that he just wouldn’t come near me. Hopefully, either way, I wouldn’t be taking too much damage. On a serious note, I have loads of respect for Johnny as a fighter. I paid out my own money to go and watch him fight Adam Watt at the Doncaster Dome in 2000 and he stopped him in five rounds. If Johnny fancied it, he could actually be really spiteful in the ring, but hopefully he wouldn’t fancy it against me!”