Former Champion Boxer, George Groves, speaks to Ted Lawlor on the Crowns Gym Podcast about mindset and life after boxing.
From walking nervously into his first boxing club at age 10, to the mind games on boxing’s biggest stages, including that infamous Rubik’s Cube press conference with Carl Froch. George doesn’t just share what it takes to step into the ring – he breaks down what it means to survive and thrive outside of it, through politics, pressure, and personal growth.
Q: What did you feel when you first walked into the Boxing gym?
A: I was very nervous, to be honest. I was 10 years of age. I’ve done kickboxing, so I wasn’t necessarily nervous of the the environment, but I was nervous of the people – it was very hustle, bustle. It was a junior boys’ club then and it was a tough place to be, but a great place to be. It was one of them ones where once you earn the respect of your peers through your effort and ability, you was one of them. But at the start, I was a nervous kid.
I was a shy kid, so it was a definitely a baptism of fire coming to the Dale Youth where there’s swinging bags and a lot of the boys down there were traveler lads from the local traveller site – so they speak with a funny accent and you’re a little English kid so you don’t understand what’s exactly what’s going on.
It was a very mature environment, but, you know, a great environment. Then once you’re you’re in and you show dedication, you show willing, you show effort, you travel in the country with these guys, you’re winning titles with these guys, and they become some of your best friends.
Q: What surprised you most about the business and the journey of boxing?
A: There’s boxing politics that comes in the amateur form and definitely comes in the professional boxing game. You can envision and try to guess what’s going to come your way, but you certainly won’t have been prepared for all of it. You just have to dust yourself off, smile and go with the flow – forgive and never forget.
That’s prize fighting. It is a dog-eat-dog tough sport, rough sport. It’s filled with some of the best people you could ever meet, but it’s also filled with a lot of bitterness, a lot of envy, a lot of emotion, maybe a few snakes.
If you can take care of your own, and deal with business, then you’d be fine. Ultimately, you’ve got to be able to fight. If you want to make it in this game, you’ve got to be able to fight.
You’ve got to show confidence and resilience, and they’re the two things that I preach now. So if I’m talking to a 10 year old kid who’s just started boxing or started anything in his life or a guy who’s just left school and he’s taking on his first job or just had his first pro fight, Sometimes, guys, right at the end of their career, you have to remind them and say, you need unwavering self belief, that confidence, and, also, you need to show that resilience because, ultimately, it won’t always go your way and boxing is brutal.
We don’t have 50 games a year like we do in football or some other sports. You lose and you can be out. You could be be dead and buried. So you have to fight for everything inside the ring and out and if it don’t go your way, you have to show the resilience to battle on and be tough.
Q: You actually quoted David Haye who said “you have to be unpredictable sometimes in order to get what you want out of the unpredictableness of the boxing world”. Were there any weird moments, funny moments that you remember? One of mine, for example, is when you said to Froch “you look like you’re about to cry, mate” and his eyes were welling up
A: There were quite a few that were funny and that were weird. So, if you want to take people on a journey, tell a story.
That’s ultimately what boxing can be and hopefully should be. Not everyone has the ability to do it, but if you can, you’re much more engaged.
You can follow a team or you can follow your country in the Olympics or whatnot, but when it comes to boxing, you want to get people on your journey, so you have to tell a story.
I remember when coming around for the rematch Froch (and many people might remember this) but at the first press conference, I thought to myself, he’s gonna talk, and the insecurity from him will be he’ll have to try and not just remind me, but remind everyone at home of all his previous accolades – that’s gonna take a long time because he don’t seem to summarise the three big fights he had, he’s gonna tell you about everything.
So I thought I’ll bring myself a Rubik’s cube to the press conference and put myself on the spot, see if I can solve a Rubik’s while he’s waffling on. And if I’ve done it, then either I’m a genius or he spoke too long – or maybe somewhere in the middle. I was sat at the top tables for the Wembley fight, so we’re in the bowels of Wembley Stadium, I’ve never seen a press conference so big, there’s so many people there – everyone wants a piece. Eddie Hearn’s at the top table, he’s trying to promote himself, he wants this to be the Eddie Hearn show,
I’m trying to make it the George Groves Show. Froch won’t stop talking about the Froch show.
Sitting next to me was the head of boxing at Sky, which was Adam Smith at the time, and he looks at the Rubik’s cube, and I just give him a little nudge and I know in his mind, he’s computing it. I don’t know whether he’s thinking “Oh, cheeky f*cker” or “this is brilliant” or “what the hell is he playing at?”. It was always bit, the last little sort of algorithm that I’d struggle with. I’d get the cubes in the right spot, but it was getting them facing the right way. I’ve done it and put it down, and nudged Adam and the whole time I can hear the cameras going…Froch must have been thinking “they’re really interested in me talking about the time when I had a life and death with Brian McGee or Charles Adamu” or whatever other sort of fighter that was buried in the buildup of his career. But, yeah, that was one where I tried to deliver a little bit more.
Q: What I get from you a lot is that it’s all about the mind, it’s all about mind games. So, how much emphasis did you put on the mind both in terms of your mental health as a person, but also regulating your emotions during what is the most stressful situation someone can be in (in a ring against another man looking to knock him out)? How do you, regulate your sort of emotions during the training, but also during the ring as well? Did you put much emphasis on the mental side of things?
A: Yeah, absolutely. You want to be mentally prepared.
You never really want to step into a situation where you ain’t thought about it at all. You’re doing that in the boxing gym time to time again. When you’re shadow boxing, you’re not really away with the fairies daydreaming, you should be thinking about the movements you’re doing – thinking about the punches that are coming back at you.
Ultimately, if you’re a kid and you love boxing, you’re a dreamer because you’ll be dreaming about winning a world title, dreaming about ring walking at Wembley Stadium, dreaming about all the fun bits. And then at times, you should be thinking about the technical aspects of the contest at hand. But then I took it into “how do I wanna be portrayed?”, “How do I wanna come across?”, What do I want people to think?”.
Where I was put in situations where I was an underdog or people weren’t really hearing my voice, I thought I “well I’ve gotta really be prepared and I’ve really got to win these these battles” as such. So, I think about what I wanna say, how do I wanna come across, what is the guy in front of me gonna say, what’s he gonna ask, what’s my answer or retaliation gonna be – my counterpunch, if you will. That builds into controlling your emotion really because you’ve already gone through those emotions.
At least once a week, I’d go for a long long steady run. I used to like to do it at night in the dark, and then I just be processing the week, processing tomorrow – visualising!
Lots of people do it now and, I’m sure if you get a nifty mind coach they’ll explain it much better than me and they might have new age names for it. But, ultimately, being mentally prepared is just thinking about it and testing yourself, putting yourself in difficult situations time and time again, and taking the emotion out of it because that was a message that was relayed to me early on. People would say watch the Eubank VS Benn build up (the original) and, obviously, it’s for our entertainment, but they would say to Eubank “how do you feel about Benn” and he’d say “I don’t care. I feel I feel nothing. Nothing. I’m emotionless with it” and that is the total right way to be. And then it would come to Benn and Benn would say “well, actually, I hate him” and that’s a funny line because that’s what people wanna hear at home whether that’s the truth or not – it probably was the truth, we did hate him. But, ultimately, you wanna be Chris Eubank in that situation, you wanna be emotionless. It’s a bit sad sometimes because you are a bit dead to the world and you are definitely dead to your boxing and you’re dead to your opponent…when, really, you wanna immerse yourself in it as much as possible because then the highs and lows you’re experiencing them, and then you’ve been on the journey.
People say to me, what’s it like ring walking at Wembley Stadium? I’m like, I don’t know because I was dead to it. I was just like, I’m not gonna get sucked into this feeling because I’m either gonna love it and be exhausted at the end of it, or maybe at worst, I’ll be, like, petrified of it and be exhausted at the end of it. Whereas, really, I’m just like, I’m performing. I’m numb to it. I’m just on the stage, trying to entertain the crowd.
Q: You spoke there about your, dreams, how do you get that excitement from the visions and the feeling of being in the ring? How do you get that excitement now? Do you sort of attach and live almost vicariously through the fighters?
A: I’m not looking to replace it, to be honest. At the time, I didn’t really lean into thinking too much about what I was doing because the best stuff was yet to come – even when it wasn’t, it felt like there was more to come. I don’t need to look back and celebrate, let’s look forward and plan & scheme and make it happen.
But now I can look back and celebrate. I celebrated ten years since Wembley Stadium against Carl Froch, it’s a fight that I lost and at the time, I thought I’m never gonna watch this again – I’m never gonna talk about this again. But now I can look back and go, actually, I did something quite incredible, something that people now still bring up.
It was recently seven years since I beat Chris Eubank Junior and as as time goes on, if Chris Junior never wins a world title, that win may well dampen. But, ultimately, I know what it was at the time. I went into the ring as an underdog again and we sold out the Manchester Arena, it was the biggest number of buys on ITV that they’ve ever done – it was a massive, massive fight.
Dislocating my shoulder and winning the last round, you try and keep the emotions out of it, but they do obviously creep in.
I get my boxing fixed through working within Boxing, podcasts, and I’m fortunate enough to be ringside at a lot of the fights working TV, commentary, radio, punditry, meeting boxing fans, going to events..sometimes I get booked to come and do master classes and teach boxing. Recently, I’ve reactivated my manager’s license with the British Boxing Board of Control. I took my trainer’s license out and I’m managing and training my sole fighter, Lucas Roehrig who’s from this Dale Youth ABC – same as me.
Yeah, new journey, but still living and breathing boxing, so I still get plenty of thrills out of boxing in that respect I suppose. But there’s no point me chasing what I had experienced before because I had my chance, I had my time, and it was it was incredible.
Q: And now you get to see the excitement of of the other fighters, the people you’re training, the people you’re helping in the community as well. With the people you’re training, how does the training differ from how you used to train back in the day when you first started especially to now?
A: There’s a lot more information out there now than when I first started off Boxing. Sometimes the information can be good, sometimes it can be bad, sometimes you get the wrong information.
Cold plunge in an ice tank might not be a viable option for everyone, and skipping has a much lower bar of entry. But, yeah, when I’m down there on a on a Sunday morning coaching all the guys from the amateur gym, loads of them are from humble backgrounds, but, we have fun with them.
We’re in Notting Hill so I take them up the hills do our hill runs and I don’t let them sit down in between sprints – I make them stand up, show no weakness, show no emotion. I’ll get them competing against each other, try and keep it fun.
Sometimes we’ll be at the bottom of the hill and I’ll say “come on, bounce on your toes in your Boxing stance and start thinking, start visualising.”
I’ll just pick anyone and say “where are we today?” and they’ll say “we’re at the O2!”, great ok then we’re at the O2.
“Right, give us your ring walk track” etc and then they’re shadow boxing and we make it up as we go along. “Give us your celebration”, you pick the punch you knocked him out with (normally a big right hand) and celebrate *Ronaldo SUIIIII*.
Q: I love it. Thank you very much. Apparently, you might be coming down to Crown’s Gym at some point and helping some of the the people train as well?
A: Yeah. I’d love to. Yeah. Can’t wait.