THE claim of Nathan Heaney has always been that his fight nights are “the best night out in Stoke”. It depends on what you want from a night out, of course.
If it’s a quiet conversation you want, better look elsewhere, but if you want noise, passion and drama, the King’s Hall will be the place to be this Saturday night. All 1,200 tickets for this weekend’s show were sold “immediately”, he says.
“I could have sold it out five times over. Easily,” he claims. “It’s going to be the loudest it’s ever been.
“I don’t think there are many fighters who have that sort of support on the back of two losses.”
Those losses were a 12th-round stoppage defeat to Brad Pauls that ended his reign as British champion, and then a defeat to French champion Sofiane Khati (below).
Heaney knows, at 36 years old, he needs to beat Grant Dennis on Saturday night – and beat him well.
Heaney has been saying he will one day end his career at the King’s Hall – and he admits it could happen this weekend.
“If I win, we will see what happens,” he says. “Worst case, if it does turn out to be the last one, I need to win.
“I want to win and perform and remind Frank and George [Warren] what we can do here, because the dream is still to fight at the football ground.
“I need to know there’s a path to the football ground. I just need to have a good night and see what’s next.”
The Bet365 Stadium was booked for June 8, 2024. Top of the bill was going to be Heaney challenging Carlos Adames for his WBC ‘interim’ title.
“I had seen the floor plan and everything,” says Heaney – but defeat to Pauls in their rematch led to a rethink.
Heaney insists: “There’s no reason why it can’t still happen.
“Frank and George need to know people will turn up and Stoke will turn up.
“They have turned up at every stage of my career and to have a once-in-a-lifetime event at the football ground, everyone will turn up. Me and Denzel Bentley there and the place sells out.”
That is a rematch that would surely appeal to Bentley after Heaney took away his British title with a majority points win in Manchester in November 2023.
Boxing News rated it the biggest upset of the year and Heaney still talks about the night in almost disbelief.
“That was the perfect performance,” he says. “[Coach] Steve [Woodvine] always said to me: ‘One day you will show everyone what you can do,’ and that was the night I did it.
“When I look back at it now, I think: ‘How did I do that?’ I was making him miss, the shots were flowing, it was perfect.
“The rematch will always be there for him. It would sell out the football ground and people would tune in to see if the first fight was a fluke.”
That result put Heaney at No.12 in the WBC rankings and the expectation was that beating Pauls in his first defence would take him into the top 10 and set up a match with Adames.
“I still think I won that first fight by two or three rounds [a belief shared by broadcasters TNT Sport],” says Heaney of the split draw in Birmingham in March, 2024.
“That derailed everything. It’s an unforgiving sport.”
The snakes and ladders continued when Bentley outboxed Pauls to take back the British title and Heaney was beaten in seven rounds by Khati.
“He was very good; had been active and Steve has said that after four rounds, I looked a bit flat, I wasn’t as sharp,” says Heaney. “Why it was, I don’t know. Maybe it was the weight. I plan to be a bit leaner this time.
“I was boxing well and remember thinking it was a bit quiet. It was a big arena and I couldn’t hear the crowd. I was thinking: ‘I hope people aren’t bored,’ so I started committing more than I should have done, and got caught.
“I don’t have to worry about the crowd being quiet for the next one. The nights we have had there will never be replicated. They are unique nights. The last time we went there, it went viral.”
That was in March 2020 when he unanimously outpointed Christian Schembri over 10 rounds. Heaney’s ring walk – bare-chested and belting out Stoke City anthem Delilah at the top of his voice – made the pages of the national press and came to the attention of Queensberry Promotions.
“I remember watching Naz [Prince Naseem Hamed] when I was growing up, and that’s what I wanted to bring to Stoke,” he said.
At the time of the Schembri fight, Heaney was still working as a sports teacher at Stafford College and he now returns to King’s Hall – his eighth appearance at the venue – as the former British champion, only the third in the city’s history, after Tommy Harrison and the late Chris Edwards.
“It’s a fighting city in the sense the people are fighters and in terms of boxing, we’ve always had good clubs without churning out lots of champions like Liverpool and Manchester,” says Heaney, who had 90 amateur bouts and says that growing up, Scott Lawton was his “idol”.
“On the flipside, there are so many good fighters in those cities, it’s hard to break out and get noticed. It’s easier for me here in Stoke and I try to entertain, from my ring walk to the fight itself.
“People must be entertained or they wouldn’t keep coming back.”
Though his support has grown – Heaney says he even has fans coming over from Ireland for this weekend – the core of his fanbase are followers of Stoke City.
Heaney also has a genuine attachment to the football club, remembering his first visit to the Victoria Ground as a schoolboy, and says being put in the Stoke on Trent Sporting Hall of Fame last year alongside 1966 World Cup winning goalkeeper Gordon Banks is “my greatest sporting achievement, bar none”.
There was a time when Heaney was the No.3 light-heavyweight in the Potteries.
As an amateur, he had points losses to Luke Caci – one of his best friends – and Jamal LeDoux in the space of a few weeks towards the end of 2013.
Caci won all 10 as a pro but hasn’t boxed since the coronavirus lockdown, while LeDoux finished with an 8-2 record after winning Midlands Area honours at 168lbs.
Early in his pro career, Heaney never looked beyond the Midlands title when interviewed by his local newspaper, The Sentinel.
He got his shot at the vacant belt against West Bromwich’s Tom Stokes at the King’s Hall in June 2019.
Rocked early, Heaney got boxing together and pulled away in the closing rounds to win on points, but that was only part of the story.
Heaney took the fight a day after he found his father Joseph’s body. He had taken his own life.
Described as “the perfect dad,” Joseph boxed as an amateur and took Nathan to the gym as a boy.
Nathan says his moustache is a tribute to his late father.
“It’s not a fashion statement,” he says. “Dad had a great moustache.
“I remember Chris Eubank coming out in the yellow shorts that his dad wore and I used to say: ‘He isn’t being himself.’
“Dad would say: ‘He is proud of his dad and wants to look like him.’
“I wish my dad could see what I have done.”
