Exclusive interview with George Groves: “I tried to make one final match against James Degale in Westfield – but he wanted too much money”

After a great weekend of boxing, I hope you are buzzing about a potential AJ vs Wilder fight. Who do you have winning?

Whilst you think, George Groves gave Genting Casino a great retrospective of his career which I would love to share with you!

Speaking to Genting Casino, Groves said:

• I’m happy with my career, I have no regrets!
• I tried to make one final match against James Degale in Westfield – but he wanted too much money!
• My flight to Germany for David Haye vs Wladimir Klitschko was like Entourage
• Adam Booth showed signs of being greedy and selfish..he let me down

I’m happy with my career, I have no regrets!

My story ended up winning a world title at the fourth attempt, a story of unwavering self-confidence and self belief, as well as resilience. Balls of steel resilience. Don’t get me wrong, when I first turned pro, I didn’t want that to be the story. I wanted my story to be the greatest of all time, a multi-weight, unified world champion, a hall of fame legend. But that’s not how boxing goes.

There are no exact moments of regret, but sure, I’d love lots of things to have been different. The first fight with Froch, I got stopped controversially, I was winning the fight comfortably, I was in full control and the referee stopped the fight. And then off the back of that there was controversy. In boxing, you need stuff to help you gain that notoriety to break through to becoming a household name. That was that fight

“I’d love to have won that first fight against Froch. I certainly would have loved to have won the rematch at Wembley, where I got knocked out, where I got my lights turned off in front of a record attendance crowd for British boxing, which was just horrific. And from there on in my career is never going to be what I’d hoped it to be. If I’d won at Wembley, then maybe even with a blip in the first fight, I’d been back up to full momentum. I might have had a different route as a world champion. I could have obviously capitalised from that momentum.

It was uncharted territory after defeat at Wembley. I don’t know if there is a person on the planet who could have put his arm around me and told me ‘this happened to me, this is what you need to think and feel, this is how you go about it.’ I am single minded and resolute about my direction and my purpose in boxing, so I’ve got to now carry on.. And I remember in the cab home from Wembley,  I Tweeted saying, ‘I just got knocked the fuck out’. And that tweet done really well, 85,000 fucking retweets or something. Much more than any other post I did, pre fight or since. So I tried to show humour.

Then in Vegas, losing to Badou Jack, for a third time challenging for a world title – and that’s where my story really pivots to – am I ever going to get there? It’s a battle of desire, but for me, I’m happy with my career. I left boxing on my terms at 30 years of age. I had money in the bank, mortgage paid, money set aside for the kids, and eventually achieved my dream of becoming a world.

I tried to make one final match against James Degale in Westfield – but he wanted too much money!

My wife saw him in Westfield one day, she was with her friend who knows a bit about boxing. My wife goes to ‘DeGale’s in Westfield’. I was like ‘is he?’ And I’m on the phone to her from Vegas, and I was like ‘put him on the phone’. She went, ‘I can’t put him on the phone’. And her mate Emma said ‘I’ll do it’. So Emma’s gone running over to him and says ‘Hi James, I’ve got George on the phone’.  Me and DeGale haven’t spoken to each other for years, so he’s probably thinking, ‘what’s going on?’ How have we arrived at this? Who has he sent 007 style to pass the phone over?’.

I didn’t tell him that it was a friend of my wife who just handed you the phone. I just keep that bit really sort of vague, so I say ‘James, it’s George. How are you doing?’. Are we going to make this fight or what? And we agreed to a split on the phone. I think it’s like 55-45. I said, I’m bringing the value, but you got the belt. I said you’re not worth 50-50, I said, I’ve done Wembley, I’ve done this and we agree. I call my lawyer, but then we hear back from DeGale and he wants 80-20 or something. He’s priced himself out of this fight.

My flight to Germany for David Haye vs Wladimir Klitschko was like Entourage

We were going to Germany for David Haye and Wladimir Klitschko and someone paid for a private jet, but there’s only seven seats on the jet. And I’m thinking, am I going to make the cut? At the time, Adam Booth was running the show and ‘Aloof Booth’ is what we used to call him – you never knew where you stood with him. And he left it right up to the last moment and he goes ‘yeah, you’re coming with us on the jet’.

We went to a public workout at a Mercedes or Bentley dealership. Booth and Haye are trying to be really aloof and different and awkward because they know Klitschko is very organised and very sort of OCD about timings. So they’re just trying to be a bit obnoxious. And obviously I’m a goofy little kid at this point still. I’ve just come off the massive win against DeGale and I’m like ‘yeah, I’m in. I’ll do anything you want’ 

So we end up in this holding room and obviously there’s an internal door to get downstairs to where they’re all waiting for us. But we decided it’s a much better idea to climb out the window, scale along this sort of flat roof, hop down the drain pipe and come in through the front door, just to confuse everyone. But while we’re coming up with this scheme, Adam Booth needs the toilet. He needs to go for a piss, but he doesn’t want to leave the room, so he pisses in a glass. And he goes to throw it out. But the window is shut, so he just throws a glass of piss up against the window that bounces back onto his trousers. And at that point I thought – this is Entourage. From the outside it looks slick but on the inside, we ain’t got three brain cells to rub together amongst us and the whole team.

Adam Booth showed signs of being greedy and selfish..he let me down

I felt close to Booth, but there were ups and downs, and there were times where I felt like he’d sort of let me down. And it was more so commitment. He was committed and then he wasn’t. And I’m forgiving at the time. I know this man’s not perfect. I’ve just told a story about how he’s thrown piss against himself in the glass window, so he’s not perfect. But ultimately, you’ve only got one chance in this pro career. You’ve got to take care of yourself and you can’t afford baggage. And he was going to hold me back at some point. He was holding me back. There were loads of periods where he was holding me back. And boxing can make you paranoid, but it can also make you selfish and greedy. And I felt like he had shown a lot of signs of being selfish and greedy.

The only thing I can really remember in detail is we had the fight with Froch for the world title and at that point in my mind – I hadn’t had a conversation with Adam about it – but I was thinking he’s a good trainer and I don’t really know who else I could replace him with in terms of being a better trainer, so we’ll go along with this setup for as long as I can, for as long as it works. 

But the power dynamic changes. When you first turn pro, you don’t have much money. The trainer is much more high profile than me. He’s got much more money than me. He’s got all the connections, he knows what he’s doing in boxing. But at some point the fighter does outgrow the trainer and that’s sometimes where it falls apart. Sometimes it’s after a loss. But for me, it wasn’t necessarily after a loss. 

It was the most bizarre time to change trainers before your biggest fight of your career. But I think that shows a lot about me. It shows that I backed myself and I’ve got the nuts to go and do that, or at least I definitely did at that point in my career. I wasn’t getting enough commitment from Adam and I was just envisioning future problems.

Tuesday was the press conference to announce the fight with Froch. Now he’s my manager, he’s supposed to be setting up and doing everything, he should be telling me what time we’ve got to be there. Except I get a phone call from someone at Matchroom saying ‘You have a press conference Tuesday’.That put my nose out of joint. I’m like: ‘What’s Adam doing? Why has he not told me that?’ So I thought, don’t upset him, sort it all out. So I messaged him saying ‘Tuesday, press conference, I’ll book the train tickets’ but I got a message back saying ‘I’m not sure I can come, David Haye is probably sparring’. But it was a significant moment.

It’s like a power-control thing, a power-control thing that he liked to have. And I was on the verge of outgrowing that. Trainers make a lot of decisions for the fighter, but they do work for the fighter. They take a commission of the fighter’s purse and then when the fighter decides it ain’t working, they’re not there anymore.