Project O: I am fighting in a boxing bout on Saturday. Here’s why.

It’s about 12:30 when I make my way to Garlands nightclub, slap-bang in the heart of Liverpool’s gay bar district.

Tony Moran, former British, Commonwealth and world cruiserweight boxing champion meets me at the door. Tall. Gangly. Gregarious. Sparkling white teeth. He has that classic scouse vibe. Nice. Edgy. Ballbuster.

There’s not an ounce of body fat on his face or hands. “Alright, Ollie,” he says. “You ready?”

Nope.

This story started a little over three years ago.

I had been travelling back-and-forth to America a bunch for work. It was taxing, but enjoyable. I was living the dream. On one trip, I met a current NFL All-Pro player for coffee. I was working on a story and knew he’d have good information.

We spoke for a few hours. He asked more questions about my life than he answered about my nerdy football topic. He was intrigued by an Englishman sat at his desk in rural England, living on east coast time, writing about the intricacies of pro football. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.

We stayed in touch. We talked life and kids and big-picture decisions more than we did the day-to-day of the NFL world.

At this time, I was launching a new website. It was intended to be all about smart football. We weren’t going to chase clicks, I told myself. We’re going to focus on analysis, and X’s & O’s and explaining the why.

And yet you kind of, sort of, have to get people to view the work. You have to chase some clicks. At least at the start. I didn’t want to do it through headline manipulation. No, Sir. I wanted something bigger, bolder, better. Something that was rooted in the work, even if it wasn’t exactly a detailed breakdown of how Matthew Stafford successfully runs the Levels concept. We needed something that made people think wait, what the fuck? Umm, OK, sure.

I settled on a steroid cycle.

I’m not quite sure why. Doping in sports has always been a pet interest of mine. I don’t consider myself a cynic. I consider myself a realist. I consume every book, interview, and documentary on the subject. The science and psychology fascinate me. I never watch a single stage of the Tour de France. I absorb every doping controversy it spurts out to my roots.

Doping in professional football particularly interested me. It’s my sport. And it’s rife, I knew that. People are open about it. Always. Ex-players talk of pink pill bowls in locker rooms — dianabol, the ‘roid of choice in track-and-field in the 80’s.

I always saw PEDs in the NFL as this moral quagmire. These guys are doing tremendous damage to their bodies. If we can help them to recover — a little bit quicker, a little bit better — is that the worst thing in the world?

Yet it’s a combat sport. Guys are flying into each other at unspeakable speeds. Tacking on more explosive power onto sturdier frames begins to warp physics. Players get hurt, seriously hurt, physically and mentally, because of the sheer transfer of forces we witness on Sunday’s. Adding more mass and fast twitch muscles makes the thing even more dangerous. How do you justify that?

I wanted in. I wanted to understand the moral dilemma. I wanted to know what players felt, rather than speculating on them from afar. I wanted to see the performance gains. I wanted to see the side effects. I wanted to join the brotherhood, secret juice-head handshake and all.

I discussed it with my new friend. He thought it was dumb, but was happy to help.

He gave me his program. Not one he was currently using, he assured me. The testing had changed. But it would be a good base for what guys in the league had done or were continuing to do, the risk-reward of getting busted being so lopsided in favor of reward.

I was all set. I took the list and began my research. I found a friend who knew a guy, who knew a guy, who had this cousin who was willing to hook me up (that’s gear-user parlance for those at home).

I had a decided advantage against any competitors in the US of A: Steroids are, somewhat, legal in the U.K. They’re not. But, I mean, they are. You can’t sell them. But once you have them, you’re all good.

Great. That settles it.

Then I began to panic a little. Two things gave me cause to pause:

1) What would be the stakes of the piece?

I had initially planned on doing a version of The Combine. Do it initially without any PED advantage. Then juice to the gills and go again. The changes would be extraordinary. Or they wouldn’t.

It would give credence to — or disrupt — the silly notion you typically here that anyone could do that if they juiced, something consistently insinuated during baseball HOF discussions.

The problem: I’d obviously get better at the events. If I just continued to eat right and train hard after the first Fake Combine, I’d be able to move quicker and leap higher. It wouldn’t be all that riveting.

2) The program included the use of Human Growth Hormone

Research on HGH is all over the place. In one study, it’s a miracle drug, turning back the clock of time and maximizing human potential. In another, it’s the same, albeit with the caveat that if you have a teensy, weensy bit of cancer in your system, the HGH will feed it.

The first problem I could get over. I wasn’t conducting a scientific study. It would be a story. I’d find a way to make it interesting.

The second issue spooked me. The risk ain’t worth the reward.

White Collar Boxing. Now there’s some stakes.

I abandoned my initial idea. I got offered a new job. I poured everything into that. The steroid story was left on the back burner. I can always go back to that in the future, I thought. I’ll reshape it.

Then Icarus came out, a Netflix documentary in which amateur cyclist and movie-maker Bryan Fogel replicates the doping program of Lance Armstrong. Fogel, an Armstrong devotee, raced the most gruelling amateur cycling event in the world — the Haute Route — clean, then came back the next year utilizing the kind of PED abuse that turned Ben Johnson’s eyes yellow.

There goes my plan. Anything I do now will be considered derivative, I thought. I couldn’t deliver a piece as strong as Fogel’s film (his movie takes a gigantic turn in the middle. His own PED use is incidental to the story. Seriously: go watch it). Still: I wanted to do something.

The company I was working for, a branch of the Cox Media Group, shuttered its doors in June.

I had just taken a three-month break from work. I was over-worked, running on empty. I had known I’d needed a break for about nine months.

Here’s the thing: being a US sports writer living on East Coast time sat at your desk in the UK, isn’t great for your health, mentally or physically. It’s taxing. You finish work at 5 in the morning. You don’t have a weekend life.

That’s only amplified when you’re covering college football and the NFL. Now you’re writing and discussing schemes and players. You can’t fake that stuff. Watching 14–15 hours of tape a day becomes the norm. That’s before you sit down to write.

It sounds like hyperbole. I assure you it’s not.

I went flat-out for six years and I needed to refresh. I travelled around the Middle East and Europe for three months. I spent the time thinking about what I wanted to do, returning again and again to my earlier idea. Something that would ignite that spark in my belly to write again.

What are the stakes?

I’m not quite sure where it was — I think Munich — but somewhere along the line I re-found my love for football. Ideas poured out of my head. I sent a manifesto to my editor at Cox Media. I have a billion ideas here they are let’s do them all in week one.

Then the company shut down. Billion dollar companies aren’t content with part of its media branch making a small profit, apparently.

Gulp. Now I had a bunch of free time. It’s now or never to do the whole athletic feature piece, I thought. I’m 24. I’m never again going to have this much free time to train and do all the meticulous things necessary.

I started discussing the idea — generally — once more with people I trust. Sometimes I’d include the steroid angle. Other times I wouldn’t.

I was still seeking the stakes.

Then I listened to a podcast. It was The Rewatchables, a Ringer podcast in which a bunch of people sit around and shoot the shit about re-watchable films. They discussed Creed.

Boxing!

Win-lose. Pain. Training. Physical harm.

Stakes!

I jumped on google and quickly started searching for boxing gyms and trainers and local events in the area. It was somewhere around three in the morning. I wanted to commit to it before I woke up and found a way to weasel out of it.

I came across White Collar Boxing.

The idea, as I understood it: pitch an office-working, wannabee Essex-boy, who drinks a little too much on the weekend, does a little too much coke, is a little too tanned, and drives a car that makes him a little too much of a twat, against another wannabee Essex-boy who drinks a little too much, does a little too much coke, is a little too tanned, and drives a twat mobile.

It is so much more than that.

Boxing was an alien world to me. I enjoyed big fights — who doesn’t. But I’d never engrossed myself in the sport to the same degree I had with so many others. It was perfect.

I think I threw one punch in high school. That’s the extent of my fighting experience.

I decided I’d go all in.

Well… Not all the way in. These were the stakes I was looking for. The kind of moral dilemma I needed the steroid story to be ground in. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t in good conscience get into a ring with someone juiced up. It’s not even a decision. To do so would be utterly shameful.

The story morphed. I focused on the strange, wonderful world of boxing. For the past three months I’ve trained, eaten and prepared as a pro. I’ve never felt more out of my depth. I trudged out of my place to training every day, often twice a day. On Saturday, I step into the ring for my fight.

I have been working on a cross platform story (that’s media speak for written, audio and video) that will be out after my fight. It looks at the life of a boxer: the psychology, impact on family, training, diet, medical, and life after fighting.

“Are you doing a weight cut?” Tony asked me that first day we met. Yeah, I said. He cocked his head back with one of those simultaneous laugh-head-shakes. Part you-don’t-know-what-you’re-getting-yourself-into, part welcome-to-the-club.

I started my weight cut today.

(Tony will re-appear. His is the most fascinating story of all)

This whole thing has been an exhausting, rewarding process. I’m excited to share the full story with you.

In the meantime, I wanted to offer this snippet. To outline the why. You can jump to the end of the story on Saturday night. It is free to stream through Facebook. “Like” this Facebook page and you will be able to watch the live stream on Saturday from 12 pm EST, 5 pm GMT. Use it as your under-card to the Anthony Joshua fight, if you wish.

Heck, if you live in the Manchester area you can come along and watch the thing in real, actual life.

I found the stakes. In doing so, I discovered a whole different story.