It’s a Monday morning and two-weight world champion boxer Natasha Jonas is facing her first battle of a busy training day. This one is with her nine-year-old daughter, Mela.
“She was fuming because I didn’t give her egg on toast for breakfast,” smiles Jonas. “She’d said Nutella but actually wanted egg. Obviously, I should have known that.”
The Athletic is spending the day with the 40-year-old Jonas as she prepares for a very different opponent.
This Friday, she faces fellow world champion and 2021 Olympic gold medalist Lauren Price in a welterweight unification fight on an all-women card at the iconic Royal Albert Hall in London. (Jonas holds the IBF and WBC belts, Price has the WBA title.)
A decade separates the two in age, with Wales’ Price undefeated in her eight professional fights so far and England’s Jonas having fought 19 times as a pro since her debut in 2017 (with two defeats and one draw). It is, unsurprisingly, being billed as a potential “passing of the torch” between fighters at opposite ends of their careers; youth against experience; Price’s lightning-fast hands against the impeccable timing of Jonas; the confidence of a fighter yet to lose a single round in the pro game against the belief of one who says she has shared the ring with better boxers and emerged victorious.
The prize for the winner is likely to be a meeting with superstar Irish boxer Katie Taylor in what would be one of the last fights of her exceptional career, or a chance to become undisputed via a bout against the victor of a rematch between American Mikaela Mayer, who holds the WBO version of the welterweight title, and England’s Sandy Ryan.
Jonas and Price facing off in January (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)
When The Athletic visits Jonas, there are still five weeks until fight night and while some (mostly male) boxers would take themselves away from family during such a build-up, allowing them to focus entirely on what’s ahead, Jonas’ life remains as richly chaotic as ever.
It’s 10.30am when “Miss GB” (a running joke with her trainer Joe Gallagher after Jonas turned up for her first day of training in Union Jack-adorned national-team kit — a legacy of six years as an amateur boxer for Great Britain) walks through the door of the Champs Camp boxing gym in Manchester’s Moss Side district.
As Jonas wraps her hands, she recounts her morning so far: did the school run, dropped washing at a launderette, walked French bulldog Roly, made a shake to tide her over between two training sessions, picked up the laundry and drove the roughly 30 miles across from the Liverpool maisonette she shares with Mela.
While boxing has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years with high-end gyms presenting the opportunity to glove up in Instagram-friendly environments, Champs Camp is old-school: unglamorous, badly ventilated and cramped. It’s also buzzing with excitement: legendary boxer Roberto Duran, the former four-weight world champion, who is now 73 years old, is in Manchester to help Gallagher prepare one of his male fighters, Mo Alakel, for an upcoming bout.
Jonas warms up with skipping, ladder drills — “Lauren’s going to be up on her toes, so I know I have to get my legs going in this fight” — and shadowboxing before pairing up with male fellow pro Clark Smith to perform something she calls “tapping out”. It’s a bit like shadowboxing but with a partner. It’s mesmerising to watch; a silent dance. After a couple of rounds, the pace picks up. Movements become quicker, sharper. The fighters’ feet skip over the floor as they go in and out of range; the only sign of effort are the beads of perspiration forming on their foreheads.
Jonas training in the Moss Side gym (Sarah Shephard/The Athletic)
The winter weather outside is chilly. Inside, the mirrors are steaming up and drops of sweat dot the floor. Six or seven boxers are in the gym now and the noise is relentless; punches thumping heavy bags, shouts of encouragement for two fighters sparring, the bell ringing every three minutes.
Around an hour after arriving, Jonas gets in the ring. Today, she’s going to be sparring with a male southpaw amateur boxer. The duo go at it for eight three-minute rounds, with 30 seconds rest between them. When Jonas faces Price, they will contest 10 two-minute rounds with a minute of rest between each one. Gallagher believes Jonas is better suited to three-minute rounds with shorter ones suiting Price better, but for now, women’s fights usually consist of two-minute rounds.
Most of the other boxers have finished their sessions and position themselves around the ring to watch Jonas spar. Duran finds himself a seat while Gallagher stands on the ring apron bellowing instructions.
“Head movement!”
“Pull the trigger!”
“Shape!”
“Up and chop it down.”
“Two hands, Tash! She ain’t gonna sit still and let you tee off!”
After eight rounds, Jonas’ sparring partner climbs out and Gallagher climbs in, taking her through four further rounds of pad work.
Just 48 hours earlier, the 56-year-old was at the Christie Hospital in Manchester for his first round of chemotherapy; something only a handful of people knew about when The Athletic visited (Gallagher later released a public statement). He was diagnosed with stage-four bowel and liver cancer last November. As he puts Jonas through her paces, the only indication of his illness is a large, grey bruise on the back of his right hand from the cannula used for chemotherapy.
Jonas in the ring with Gallagher (Sarah Shephard/The Athletic)
It is about eight years since Jonas first worked with Gallagher.
At the time, she’d been absent from boxing for two years, having walked away in 2015 after injury scuppered her chances of competing at the Rio Olympics in 2016. With no real professional pathway for female fighters at that point, Jonas decided she was done. By the end of the year, she had another focus: Mela, or “the baby” as she still calls her nine years on.
As time went on, Jonas watched Taylor, her former rival, build a career as a professional boxer and asked herself: why not? There were many answers to that. Jonas separated from Mela’s father not long after she was born, her daughter still very young, and there were financial considerations. It would take time before she was ready to fight again: how would she pay the bills?
Fortunately, the Jonas family is large and tight-knit. She knew childcare would be available when needed, via her grandmother, mum, sister or cousins. Her job, running courses for the Youth Sport Trust helping unemployed people back into work through boxing, would still be there and they’d be flexible about her hours.
So she joined forces with 2015 Ring Magazine Trainer of the Year Gallagher and returned to the gym determined to show she belonged. After putting her through some tough physical tests to see whether she really had the stomach for it, Gallagher accepted she did.
Jonas did find it hard to balance life as a mother with being a professional boxer. “I remember thinking, ‘Is this what being a mum is?’. Because I was dropping her off at 8am, going to do my two sessions with Joe, getting her back for 4 or 5pm, playing with her, feeding her, washing her and getting her to bed, then that was it. I was like, ‘Is this normal?’.
“I struggled, because I didn’t think that’s what motherhood was going to be. I asked my friends who have kids around similar ages: ‘Is anyone feeling like this is not right?’. They all said they used to feel the same, working 9-5 or whatever it might be. But you have to just roll with it and find your little system that works for you, and everyone’s system will be different.”
Jonas doing ladder drills (Sarah Shephard/The Athletic)
Nine years on, Jonas believes that having Mela made her relationship with boxing healthier than when she was an amateur on Team GB and constantly worrying about keeping her place in the squad.
“Mentally, it was so hard,” she says as she drives from Gallagher’s gym to the Training Station in Liverpool, where her second session of the day is taking place. “My body could do the sessions, but mentally I stopped enjoying it. You’re just focused on the next thing and the next thing. I was always thinking ahead: ‘What’s coming next? Who do I have to beat next? What result do I need?’. I was drained by the weight of that.”
“Tough as hell,” is how Jonas describes a sport she found at 21.
Football had been her first dream and she was offered a scholarship to play for an American university, but a ruptured anterior cruciate knee ligament (ACL) ended that dream and she returned home with no degree, money or direction. A year later, she turned to boxing and made rapid progress, competing for England within 12 months.
Her first six fights as a pro were plain sailing, but then came a shock defeat to Brazil’s Viviane Obenauf in 2018. She and Gallagher were in tears as they made their way home from that card in Wales, but it’s a moment she believes was crucial to her later success.
“The bad things get you a step closer to where you want to be,” Jonas says. “I was doing things wrong that I didn’t fix because I was winning. When you lose, you go back and correct the things that you needed to correct from the start. I didn’t want to lose, but it made me a better fighter.”
While defeat was tough, two years and three victories after losing to Obenauf, she was plunged into a situation that presented another level of stress entirely — the Covid-19 pandemic: “Really and truly, stress is being a single parent in lockdown, self-employed, with no boxing happening, wondering, ‘How am I going to pay for my house? How am I going to pay my bills?’. That is stress.”
Jonas after getting knocked down by Obenauf in 2018 (Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)
Jonas counts herself fortunate to have family who supported her financially through that time, as well as sponsors who did the same. “And now I am in a privileged position where they’re the kind of things I don’t stress about anymore,” she says. “I’ve got a good standard of living, I’m not worrying about covering bills, I’ve got great sponsors and my fight purses of late have been brilliant. So I’m not in a position to worry about those things. Life outside of boxing is a bit more enjoyable because of that.”
One consequence of lockdown was Mela becoming aware of what her mum’s job entailed at a younger age than she would have otherwise.
In the summer of 2020, with boxing’s regular venues not in use because of restrictions on crowds designed to limit the spread of the virus, Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn staged a series of fight cards in the back garden of the company’s headquarters in Essex, east of London. Jonas headlined the second against Terri Harper, a fighter 13 years her junior who had surprised many by winning the WBC super-featherweight title in only her 10th fight after turning pro that February.
“Mela always knew that mummy boxed and mummy’s work was the gym,” says Jonas. “But it wasn’t until the camp for that fight that she really understood what happened in the gym.” With the UK’s schools closed because of the pandemic and childcare restricted, Jonas took Mela with her to training.
The then four-year-old was given jobs by Gallagher. “You’re my number two,” he’d tell her, and she’d count her mum’s push-ups and sit-ups. Mela also saw Jonas sparring during that camp with gym-mates Paul Butler and Liam Smith. “Then she was like, ‘Why is a boy hitting my mum?’,” says Jonas.
Concern for Mum resurfaced after that fight with Harper, a thrilling 10-round contest that ended in a controversial split-decision draw. Early on, Jonas suffered a deep cut above her right eye. By the time she got home to Mela the next day, the wound was stitched, but her eye was bloody, badly swollen and closed up. “I put sunglasses on, because I didn’t really want her to see me like that,” says Jonas. “But she was intrigued and asked if she could see. She lifted up my glasses and winced when she saw my eye. Then kissed it better.”
Jonas’ famously broad smile covers her face as she recalls the moment. “Sometimes, they can be a menace all day where you question yourself as a parent. Then they’ll do something cute like that and you think, ‘I could have 10 of you’. It makes you forget the other 23 hours.”
Jonas on the treadmill for her day’s second training session (Sarah Shephard/The Athletic)
On arrival at the Training Station gym, Jonas opens her car boot to reveal a mountain of clothes. Such is life when you spend most of your days moving from one workout session to another. She swaps one T-shirt for another, takes a swig of her shake and heads inside. This session is to be a “green” one, meaning low intensity. She’ll complete a 30-minute jog, do 10 minutes on the cross trainer and another 10 on the stationary bike. Jonas continues to chat throughout, pausing only to wipe the sweat from her face.
She talks of her surprise when, during a holiday to Thailand last year, Mela spotted a sign advertising a fight and asked if they could go along. “The whole time she was just mouth open, amazed by it. I wasn’t expecting that, because she’s never been that fussed by what I do. I’m just boring old Mum. She’s always loved what ’Kita does (Jonas’ half-sister, the Brighton and England footballer Nikita Parris) and that she can go to the match and be as loud as she wants, but the only time I’ve ever got a bit of kudos with her is when her school asked me to go in with the (title) belts and do a talk. Apart from that, she doesn’t care.”
But that night, the questions came out, says Jonas: “What’s that place where you used to box before Joe’s?” (it was the Rotunda Amateur Boxing Club) and, “How old do you have to be to go there?”. When Mela woke up the next morning, the first words she said to her mum were, “I think I want to go to the Rotunda now.”
Mela has been training there two nights a week for the past year. Sometimes she wants to go. Sometimes, Jonas says, she moans. But ‘little Jonas’, as the coaches call her, is already using her newfound knowledge to offer Mum some help. After Jonas’ last fight, a convincing win over two-time welterweight world champion Ivana Habazin, she picked up Mela, who’d watched on TV, and asked her daughter what she made of it.
“She said, ‘You did really well, but you were on a tightrope sometimes…’ — which is a phrase that I know has come from the Rotunda, where they’re really big on footwork — ‘…and you came a bit square when you did this…’. I thought, ‘Oh god, I’ve created a monster’. So now she corrects me on my stance, on my guard, and if I try to tell her something, she’s like, ‘No, that’s not what Mikey (her coach) says’.”
Jonas has experience of watching family members fight.
Her brother Liam is an MMA fighter and she hates seeing his bouts. It’s the same when she watches her colleagues from Gallagher’s gym. “I get an anxious feeling that I don’t get when I’m fighting; a tightness in my chest when I’m breathing, and I can’t control it. If Mela gets that far, I know it’ll be hard (to sit in the audience).”
Jonas beating Habazin in December (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
For now, the roles are reversed and Mela will be sitting in the Albert Hall to see her mum fight live for the first time. How will Jonas feel, entering the ring knowing that her daughter is there? “I won’t concentrate on it,” she says. “In the nicest possible way, she won’t be on my mind.”
Fighters often talk about a switch being flicked as the week of their bout comes closer; a transformation from the person they are outside of the ring to the one they know they will need to be in it. “The baby always asks me, ‘Are you Mummy or are you Miss GB?’. Because she knows there’s a difference,” says Jonas. “Once I’m away for fight week, I can be Miss GB. I’m in fight mode from then on, which means I have my mind strictly on what’s ahead.”
It’ll be time to leave the gym soon for the afternoon school run, but before she does, talk returns to Gallagher. It was Jonas who pushed him to go for tests that he kept putting off. She also reassured him none of his fighters would think less of him if he prioritised his treatment over being in their corner on fight night. But she knows what boxing and his stable of fighters mean to Gallagher, especially when life outside the ring is filled with uncertainty.
“The way he is helps him to deal with it, and he needs to focus on something that’s not that. Boxing is his escape. Everything else doesn’t matter when he can concentrate on that. When he has to sort out the other stuff, that’s the stressful bit. That’s his uncomfortable space because he’s very regimented in what he does and when he can’t control it, he struggles. Boxing is the bit where he can have tunnel vision; he’s a horse in the Grand National with the blinkers on and he can just focus on what’s in front of him.”
While Jonas absolutely wants to win on Friday for herself and the opportunity it would give her to end her career on a high, she also wants to do it for the man who has taken her from Miss GB to a two-weight unified world champion.
“Yeah, there are times during camp when he’s pushing you to your limits and you just think, ‘Pr*ck!’. But I know he wants the best in the world for me. Good, bad and ugly, Joe has been there. So when something like this happens, it gives me motivation to do better for him, as well as for me.”
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(Top photo: Sarah Shephard/The Athletic)
