PEOPLE ask me how my life has changed since the Wladimir Klitschko fight but it’s actually a hard one to answer. My lifestyle is already set up and I know what I need to get through my day-to-day.
When it comes to going down the shops and stuff, I don’t do that. Life’s not like that in training camp. I’m just here.
My picture is on billboards everywhere but remember none of them were really up until after the Klitschko fight. I went away with the family straight afterwards and then came back to training camp so I haven’t really led a normal life like that.
Instead my mates send me pictures of the billboards and I just think any girl I’ve dated, their boyfriend must hate me. He’s going in the gym and seeing my face everywhere!
Since the Klitschko fight I bought a house but I’ve not moved in yet. I see it as a family house – I’ve got a big family. This house will be for the immediate family but everyone will come for Christmas and birthdays.
We are not moved in yet because there’s work still to be done. I think it has got five or six bedrooms.
It’s still local. My uncle is an architect so he’s helping out. I think it should be done in about 18 months. There’s no rush, I want to get it right. It wasn’t a house that was ready to be moved in to, but it was a house I saw potential in. It was a little project for me – like Homes Under the Hammer.
The most extravagant thing I do is help people. There’s no charity I’m affiliated with at the minute but I think I do a lot first hand. I don’t need a lot. I don’t think even if I fought for $100m it would change me or my lifestyle much.
Understanding business outside of the ring is so important. People like Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe – we all know their stories outside the ring which are just as entertaining as the stories inside the ring. I want to always manage that.
I put a little team together – Andy Bell, Fred Cunningham, legal and all that sort of stuff. In the early stages of my career we wanted to get the message across. I’ve always been open about my positives and my negatives.
Now we are at the stage where we are having a big fight – but we’re not thinking ‘We are having a big fight we need to introduce Anthony to the world’. We had instead done a lot of groundwork early on meaning we could just leave me to focus on the boxing.
Where we’ve been working on it for three or four years before, it’s now not so much of a shock. When you win the title and all these opportunities come along. You feel like The Man and you can lose track.
But we’ve been working on this for years now so now it has come, I’m thinking ‘so this is what you lot were taking my time up a few years ago’. It’s understanding the journey.
Now we are having big fights in big stadiums but people are talking about going abroad to fight too. Is it difficult to go abroad when we can sell 80,000 tickets here? I think that a lot.
How would the guys in America accommodate for that? I know there are big stadiums there. If I can sell 80,000 here why do less in America?
In the UK everyone can travel quite easily and stadium fights give so many people the chance to come. Boxing is a local sport in the UK so this gives people the chance to come and watch big heavyweight title fights.
Everyone used to have to go to the States to crack it, now a lot of the fighters from the States want to come to the UK to crack it. Since we’ve got things bubbling here, let’s not turn off the heat just yet, let’s keep it bubbling for a little while longer.
Video: Showtime