TV psychologist on inspiring Prince Naseem Hamed film

A psychologist behind a new movie about former world champion boxer Prince Naseem Hamed and his turbulent partnership with his trainer said it shows exactly how “relationships develop and can break down”.

Called Giant, the film chronicles the boxer’s journey from being a diminutive working-class boy to an international superstar – who only lost one fight.

Geoff Beattie, professor at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, Lancashire, first met the flamboyant fighter when the latter was a child at a Sheffield gym in the early 1990s.

The academic, whose books inspired the movie starring Amir El-Masry and Pierce Brosnan as the boxer and his trainer, said a “father-son relationship is almost an underestimation”.

But that bond strained as Prince Naseem “became super confident” with success and fame.

The academic, who also featured as an analyst on the Channel 4 series Big Brother, had just moved to Yorkshire in the early 1990s to take up his first job and wanted to explore how former steel workers and miners were dealing with unemployment following the decline in manufacturing.

Beattie said: “There were a couple of people I met who were boxers and I thought here were guys who were a bit different.

“They had a sense of purpose, discipline. They had something – their dreams.”

He was then invited to the gym of local legend Brendan Ingle in the working class area of Wincobank and later wrote two books – On the Ropes and The Shadows of Boxing – highlighting the trainer’s mentorship of Prince Naseem.

Beattie – who is originally from Belfast and now trains at the same Salford gym as one of Prince Naseem’s sons – said he became “fascinated” by Ingle, an ex-steelworker-turned-trainer, “because he was this charismatic Irishman from Dublin”.

“He had this way of training boxers, which was completely different to anything that I’d ever heard about before,” he said.

“So they turned up wanting to box and he’d get them reciting nursery rhymes to build their confidence.

“He always said to me, ‘If they can’t cope with the embarrassment of singing a song or reciting a nursery rhyme in front of their friends, how they’re going to feel when they step in the ring?’.”

As a psychologist, Beattie wanted to know more about “how you make people get rid of the doubts in their mind, how you make them feel more secure – and this was a guy who was doing it for real in a gym”.

As someone who used the facilities for his own fitness, he ended up watching Naseem’s transformation from a “small, skinny kid” to a world champion who became a household name, comparable to Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury in current times.

Adopting the moniker of Prince, the fleet-footed fighter entertained the masses with his leopard-print shorts and somersaults into the boxing ring.

Born in Sheffield, Naseem came from Yemeni roots and was “taunted a lot because of his race early on”, says Beattie.

“But of course Brendan told him to embrace that racism and use it as fire in his belly, which he did.”

But rifts emerged in the relationship as Naseem won more titles and money.

“He knew how good he was. And Brendan turned him into a brilliant boxer,” he said.

The professor continued: “Naz is a Muslim and had said, ‘Look, the whole point is it’s my natural gift and it’s a gift from God’.”

Ingle “thought his role wasn’t being acknowledged”, he added.

While there were disagreements over money “like with a lot of boxers and trainers”, he said he believed Ingle had been more concerned “about the credit and attribution for the success”.

“Brendan, of course, became kind of deeply hurt through the process. So I watched that sadness slipping in because the two of them were just incredibly close,” he said.

Ingle died at the age of 77 in 2018, having also guided three other world champions, but never reconciled with Naseem.

Poignantly, the ex-boxer, now 51, has told how he wanted to reconnect.

He told the BBC: “He laid down the fundamentals and he taught me stuff from a very young age that I can never just not include – I can’t say it was on my own and it was just a God-given talent.

“I have to mention him in a good way, not because I have to, because I want to.”

Ingle’s daughter Tara says she was pleased with how the film captured her father’s “generosity”, adding: “I just wish he could see all this.

“He’d be amazed that someone had made a film about him.”

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