Life’s breaks: ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed, the flawed world champion boxer with a love for fast cars and snooker

Chances are there will be no celebrity car parked in the junction box outside The Crucible in Sheffield, where the Snooker World Championships begins this weekend.

In the latter half of the 1990s, when Ken ‘The Darlin’ of Dublin’ Doherty was one of the masters of the baize, it was not uncommon to see a Mercedes Benz with a registration plate beginning NAZ left at the front door of the theatre.

Somebody would always sort it out. The car belonged to boxer Naseem Hamed.

The WBO featherweight world champion loved snooker and cars. He’d regularly abandon the Merc and slip into The Crucible to a seat at the front of the press area away from the audience, to watch Stephen Hendry and Ronnie O’Sullivan. He was friends with both.

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At the time he was one of the most recognisable faces in sport, but the crowd couldn’t see who was there because of the dim lighting around the auditorium, with only the table and players illuminated.

Afterwards, unnoticed, he simply ghosted away through the narrow corridors of the backstage and out by a side door.

Brendan Ingle was raised in Dublin’s Ringsend but lived in Wincobank in Sheffield. He picked the strays and disadvantaged off the streets and taught them how to box.

Of the four world champions he trained, one was a seven-year-old Muslim boy with roots in Yemen whom he called Naz and who lived above the family corner shop with eight siblings.

The local vicar had asked Ingle to open a club in the St Thomas’s church hall because kids in the area were “running wild”.

An intelligent man, Ingle’s home spun philosophies, left-leaning politics and keenly developed social conscience were always baked into his coaching cake.

He also enjoyed hearing about Ireland first hand and would sometimes, if he liked them, invite visiting journalists to tea at his modest house just up from the gym.

Ingle taught his boxers not to get hit. He emphasised avoidance and footwork, reflexes and movement. Naz was richly supplied with all, as well as possessing gravity-defying balance.

Brash, arrogant, divisive, selfish, disrespectful, dazzling, flashy, eye-catching and magnetic are all words that would accompany conversations around the kid.

From early on, Ingle saw both sides, the eye-popping talent and the flawed personality, each part adding chemistry that made him a world champion and box office.

Ingle also taught life skills to his boxers and used to admonish Naz that things he said and did would not be said and done by “a good Muslim” All colours and religions were welcome in the gym.

Part of Ingle’s routine was to ask his boxers, including Hamed and WBO cruiserweight world champion Johnny Nelson, to stand to attention with their hands behind their backs and sing.

They obliged. One afternoon in 1992 Ingle said to Nelson ‘sing us a song’. He sang a nursery rhyme in the middle of the ring. It taught them, said Ingle, humility and discipline.

Naz, holding the top rope, somersaulted into the ring. He wore Leopard patterned shorts. He once arrived on a magic carpet. Another time he enacted Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

His outsize ability also allowed him fool with opponents in competition and he did. He showboated, humiliated, put his hands behind his back and swayed out of reach.

He relied on speed and off-balance punching, knocking out opponents in 31 of his 37 wins and suffering only one defeat, to Marco Antonio Barrera. A KO record of 84 per cent, he was world champion at 21.

In 1998 the friendship between mentor and pupil cooled, Ingle saying the ego and attention were interfering with training. Naz was cutting corners, enjoying his fame. The split arrived after he beat Ireland’s Wayne McCullough.

By 2001 Naz had lost his only fight to Barrera and had reportedly amassed a £50 million fortune. The following year an audience of 11 million watched his last bout on ITV. He was 28-years-old.

In 2006, the £320,000 McLaren Mercedes sports car Hamed was driving at 90mph crossed a solid white line overtaking a Ford Mondeo and hit another car.

It left the driver, Anthony Burgin, with every big bone in his body broken and with brain injuries.

Reports said Burgin’s physical state was “like soup” and the court was told that his life was destroyed. Witnesses said Naz, who was unhurt, had been driving “like a maniac”.

They also said he fled the scene as Burgin and his wife Claire lay trapped in the wreckage. Naz was arrested near his home trying to leave in another high-powered sports car.

The court heard he had four previous speeding offences, including a one-year ban for driving a Porsche at 110mph. It sentenced him to prison for 15 months.

He served three, was placed under home detention and monitored by an electronic tag. On release, he was met at Moorland Open prison by his brothers in a Rolls-Royce and blacked-out Range Rover stretch limo.

Ingle died at 77-years-old in 2018. There is a cast-iron plaque outside the door to the gym on Newman Road, where he transformed so many lives, not least that of Naz.

[ Brendan Ingle obituary: Trainer whose influence reached far beyond the ring ]

Less visible in Sheffield now, Naz moved down to Windsor, where, last May, he was driving a £120,000 Corvette Stingray. The way life falls. It’s unlikely it will be illegally parked outside the Crucible on Sunday.