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Press
Sam Smart: the pro surfer who punches as hard as he surfs
Think Land’s End, and the chances are that you won’t think boxing. Longships Lighthouse, innumerable wrecks, vicious storms and surfing at Sennen Cove, yes, but the noble art? Surely not here, in the far west of Britain.
Armchair sports enthusiasts might add that you could think Cornwall, and you wouldn’t make the connection, either. But the truth is stranger than fiction. Both Cornwall and its westernmost extremity have an intriguing, not to say vibrant, boxing history. And in the guileful, lean and athletic form of Sam Smart, a pro surfer from Sennen Cove who is soon to make his debut as a professional boxer, Cornwall has a real prospect in the fight game.
Smart boxes at middleweight and has every intention of emulating Cornwall’s most famous boxing sons. They include Bob Fitzsimmons, the first British-born world heavyweight champion who was born in Helston in 1863. The tall and frail-looking Fitzsimmons notched up a famous victory in 1897 against the legendary “Gentleman” Jim Corbett and became the first boxer to hold world titles in three different divisions (middleweight, light-heavyweight and heavyweight). One of his fights was even refereed by the lawman later canonized by successive Western movies, Wyatt Earp.
Closer to Smart’s home in Cornwall’s own wild west Sennen’s Zachy Nicholas might well have become one of Britain’s greatest ever boxers, had it not been for the Second World War. Locals still talk of Nicholas with awe, not least because of his unusual training regime. “Dad used to run up and down Cove hill with bags of coal on his shoulders,” says his son, Ernie. His father may have adopted unconventional training methods but Nicholas, who was born in 1918, amassed a series of impressive victories, many of which were chronicled by a columnist calling himself “Big Straight Left” in the region’s newspaper of the day, the Western Independent.
“Nicholas has a haulier’s business and regards boxing as a sideline,” wrote Big Straight Left, whose newspaper often characterized Nicholas as “the sensational Cornishman – all bone and muscle.” The Sennen boxer became the Western Area Heavyweight Champion in 1939, and in the same year fought another Cornish great, Len Harvey, in an exhibition match in St John’s Hall, Penzance.
Nicholas is regarded by boxing’s cognoscenti as a fighter who could have taken at least domestic, if not European and World titles, had the War not curtailed his career. He lost only six out of 45 fights, with many of his early opponents being dispatched by KO. But Nicholas refused to harbour any bitterness about what might have been. “Some thought I could make it as Heavyweight Champion of Great Britain,” he once said, “but I had the garage to look after.” Besides, “I always treated [boxing] as a sport and never took it seriously.”
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