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“Joseph Parker was a world heavyweight champion in 2016 when I was still having white collar fights,” Fabio Wardley says of the contrasting career paths he and his opponent have taken before their crucial bout at the O2 in London on Saturday. “So it’s been a wild, wild journey for us to reach this point. And if I get through this fight I’ll get a chance to meet Oleksandr Usyk. Fighting Usyk for the world title would be a funny story, remembering how I went to Ukraine to spar him seven years ago. It would feel like I’ve come full circle.”
We’re sitting in the back room of a gym in Wardley’s home town of Ipswich and the amiable and intelligent 30-year-old, who is unbeaten after 20 professional contests, allows himself to get a little excited before confronting the serious threat of Parker. He nods when I suggest that it sounds like an outlandish boxing movie or overheated drama series.
Wardley smiles: “I’ve got a title for Netflix already. It’s going to be called White Collar to World Champion. I think it rolls pretty well.”
Nine years ago, when Parker beat Andy Ruiz Jr to win the WBO world heavyweight title, Wardley was commuting from Ipswich to London where he worked for a recruitment agency. His task then, apart from the occasional scrap on the white collar circuit, was to find jobs for health and social workers. Years later, he risks his health every time he climbs into the ring.
Wardley’s British and Commonwealth title fight with Frazer Clarke in March 2024 was the most savage example. The canvas resembled a Jackson Pollock painting, with most of the blood shed by Wardley, and both fighters went to dark places during a battle that ended in a draw.
Clarke told me that he was afraid he might die while he lay on his hotel bed after the fight. Wardley grimaces: “I was also badly beat up. I had a cut on my nose, my face was bleeding. My shorts, my outfit, everything was covered in blood. That was my first real touch of how serious and dangerous boxing can be.
“My head was rocking for days. I was eating only ice-cream and noodles for four days because I couldn’t chew. I had that puffy eye I couldn’t see out of, a split nose, cuts all inside my mouth. In a weird, twisted way, once I’d come back to some normality, it felt good having gone through that. You can be the biggest bluffer to yourself but until you actually do it, and come through the other side, you can’t really say: ‘OK, that [courage] is in me. That’s there.”
What was he thinking amid the fury of the fight? “I distinctly remember sitting on my stool at the end of round six. I was like: ‘So everything I’ve just done, I’ve got to do all over again?’ But I only allow myself five seconds before it’s like: ‘Right, let’s get back to it.’ You’ve got no time to think: ‘Oh, I hurt and this is not going well.’ Those thoughts evaporate. It’s funny how having someone on the other side of the ring trying to take your head off narrows your focus.”
The heavyweight adds: “The O2 Arena will always have a piece of my soul. I left a little bit of me in that ring.”
Wardley insists he does not think in detail about the long-term consequences of boxing. “I made peace with it when I decided to take the sport seriously. I’ve accepted that there is a worst-case scenario and that’s how it could go. As long as you’re OK with that, crack on.”
But he offers a layered answer when I ask him to describe his emotions after he knocked out Clarke chillingly in the first round of the rematch last October. “Conflicting. As fantastic as it is to get a knockout like that, it’s a stark reminder of how very easily that could happen to me. I was obviously full of joy but I was within touching distance of that devastation. I was the one that did it to Frazer. I was closer than anyone to seeing again that brutal side of boxing.”
On Saturday he returns to the same venue when he lost something of his soul. “I might need to find it, and use it, against Parker,” he quips.
Wardley was initially a footballer, who played for the academy at his cherished Ipswich Town, and he only discovered boxing years after he met Robert Hodgins. “I’ve known Rob since I was 12,” Wardley recalls. “He was my mentor in a programme called Positive Futures for unruly children who seemed to continually find themselves in trouble. Rob was always trying to get me into boxing but I was only interested in football.
“Years later, when I was 20, after injuries took me away from football, I gave Rob a call and said: ‘You’ve been trying to get me in boxing for years. Where’s the gym? I’ll give it a go.”
If he had not met Hodgins, Wardley could have ended up living a life littered with trouble and even criminality. “Not because it’s seductive,” he suggests, “but more out of necessity. Circumstances mean you look to your left and right and [crime] is all you see. It feels normal. It took me a few years to work my way out of that and it was then I walked into the gym and I never left. I did a boxing session and it wiped me out – but I was buzzing.
“I wanted to do more. Some of the more experienced lads were hanging for sparring and I asked Rob if I could jump in and he was like: ‘Are you sure?’ I was really overeager and he allowed me in with one of the older lads, an ex-ABA champion who beat me up for three rounds and dropped me a couple of times.”
Wardley laughs. “Maybe I’m missing a screw because it made me more excited. I was like: ‘I want to be as good as you, if not better than you.’ That’s what the next few years were all about, catching the next guy in front of me. It was that constant incremental progression.”
He had just four white-collar fights before turning pro and so, when considering the vast amateur experience of many of his opponents, Wardley has sometimes suffered from impostor syndrome. But he has also proved adept at quelling the internal doubts. “I’ve become better at doing that. Every new opponent’s better, the occasion is bigger, so with each different level there is a new enemy to conquer within your own brain. But you build evidence over time. I did XYZ to get me through that situation. I can carry that over and that will drag me through.”
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In his most recent bout, in June, Wardley faced the unbeaten Australian Justis Huni who had been an excellent amateur at international level. Huni is also a more skilled boxer and Wardley came close to his first defeat. Trailing badly on all three scorecards after nine rounds he knocked out Huni with electrifying power in the 10th.
“I was losing that fight but it was never overbearing,” he says. “I always felt I was making small strides. Maybe they went unnoticed but, even when the round as a whole didn’t go my way, I took a little bit from it and thought that worked. Take that, bank that. I was figuring it out because he was very tricky, very good with his feet and hands. So there was a lot of trial and error before we adjusted the gameplan and I got the knockout.”
Wardley is realistic when acknowledging the vast gulf that separates even an accomplished amateur and adroit pro such as Huni from Usyk – an Olympic and two-time undisputed world heavyweight champion. His recognition of Usyk’s superior skill is rooted in first-hand experience of sparring the Ukrainian in Kyiv in 2018.
“It was very random,” Wardley recalls. “I got a Facebook message in broken English from a member of Usyk’s team. I didn’t believe it because it was quite abrupt: “Hi Fabio, do you want to come Ukraine spar Usyk?” It didn’t seem authentic so I asked my manager to look into it. After a day or two we realised it was genuine.
“Two weeks later I arrived at the airport and they had a guy with my name on a bit of paper. He didn’t say a word, just nodded and actioned me to follow him to his white van which had no windows. We drove for 45 minutes and the guy never spoke. I was like: ‘This is it. I’m done for. I’m lost in the depths of Ukraine and no one’s ever going to find me again.’ But he drove me to my hotel, gave me some money for food and he pointed me to be waiting tomorrow at 3pm.
“I got to meet Usyk the next day. I’d built this picture in my head of how it was going to be really strict and regimented but he was dancing and laughing and messing around. He came over and he said: ‘Hi, hello, welcome,’ shook my hand and I immediately settled and I was like: ‘OK, this is great. He’s a great guy.”
Wardley had been professional for just a year then and so he was staggered by Usyk’s brilliance. But he was not cowed. “I don’t know if I caught him that well but, a couple of times, I landed. He definitely made me pay but it was an incredible experience for three weeks. We all went for dinner every night and he was really nice and inclusive.”
His eyes widen at the giddy prospect that a surprise victory over Parker would probably lead to a world title fight against Usyk. “Fingers crossed,” Wardley says with a grin.
He becomes more serious as he concentrates on the mighty challenge awaiting him against Parker – who has been in brilliant form the last two years while dispatching Deontay Wilder, Zhilei Zhang and Martin Bakole. “We have followed different paths to reach this stage,” Wardley says, “but we both know that if we win this fight there’s a huge chance against Usyk. Parker’s already been to the top of the mountain, a world champion, so he knows what that feels like. He wants it again and he’s within touching distance. So the ambition will put a fire in him that can’t be understated.”
Wardley has the same fire but this is a huge step up for him. He remains confident and, asked if he sees any weaknesses in the vastly experienced New Zealander, says: “Yes, there’re a number of what I prefer to call gaps, flaws, in the way he fights. There’re certain habits that we have identified and are going to pick out on the night. But he’s also proved time and again that, when he is caught and knocked down, he always gets back up.”
The former white-collar slugger pauses and then, with quiet intent, he says: “I know it’s going to be very hard. But that’s only to be expected. This is a very long way from where I started.”
