AFTER capturing the WBC flyweight world title in December and warming the nation’s hearts ahead of last Christmas, Charlie Edwards will headline at the Copper Box in London on March 23.
He has achieved his dream but is determined now to go on to a new level. “You’ve seen how hard I’ve worked for all these years to get here and how much hardship and bad decisions I’ve been on in the amateurs and all the stuff like that. This is a dream come true for me. This is finally where I’ve arrived. I’ve arrived and I’m not going to give this up any time soon. I’m here at the top of my game now and I’m obsessed with this sport and obsessed with pushing boundaries and making a legacy. I want to be known as a British great,” he told Boxing News. “Being a world champion has always been a dream but it’s never just that. I want to be a multi-weight world champion, I look at the likes of Pacquiao, that’s the ultimate goal.
“I want to make the lighter weights in British boxing have a lot of noise. I want everyone to be looking at me and treating me a bit like a rolemodel, thinking, ‘You know what, it’s possible. Why shouldn’t I live my dream?’
“If you work hard and you believe in yourself and you knock those doors down, anything’s possible.”
Edwards will fight Angel Moreno in his first defence. “He’s game, he likes to come and have a fight. We’ve sparred 24 rounds together which is great, it’s going to heat up nicely. I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “It’s going to a very good night.
“The pressure’s on in every fight for me. I put pressure on myself more than anyone else in the world. That’s only because I want to succeed so bad. I want to push my boundaries again and again and again. Like I said I’m obsessed with this sport.”
“I’m obsessed with how far I can go,” he adds. “I’m 25. I’ve been boxing for 14 years… That’s my whole adulthood. And childhood. This is what I thrive off, having these opportunities, having people wanting to take what I’ve got now. It’s just making me hungrier.”
Promoter Eddie Hearn is happy with what he’s seeing. “I think he is an unexpected star. Honestly, before we got that [world title] fight, and he was calling every day, MTK were calling every day, ‘Guys, we need to find Charlie a fight.’ So when I got the fight that was a relief for me. Then it’s over to you. But when we were building up to the fight and we were building up the desire, the story a little bit, and I was seeing just that bit of faith and support from the UK public and I thought if he wins this fight we’ve got a little bit of chance with Charlie Edwards and obviously he won, it was a great performance and then everything started unfolding, the real truth, the story, his mum… It’s quite astonishing what’s happened to him during that period. Probably an unexpected hero is the way I look at it,” Hearn said. “Charlie has the opportunity to step into that mould as a major British star. When I say unexpected not just because of where we were but also because he’s a flyweight.
“The only face of the sport there’s ever been in this country post-Bruno, and even I don’t think Lennox [Lewis] did it, is [Anthony] Joshua, a posterboy. But where we are in boxing, it does allow these guys to have that opportunity to be posterboys. He’s young, he’s dedicated, he’s a great rolemodel, he’s a good-looking kid, he’s a very good fighter. He’s got a great story and he’s world champion. So he ticks all of those boxes. It is harder for the smaller guys, unquestionably but because of the growth of the super-flyweights, why not at fly? He’ll move to super-fly [eventually], he was at super-fly before this opportunity came.”
“He speaks so well,” Hearn concludes. “He’s a genuine character.”
