Sunday 22 May 2022 10:55 PM Former boxing icon Prince Naseem Hamed says he is content with his remarkable ... trends now
He was the world boxing champion renowned for his leopard-skin shorts and backflips over the top rope as much as his ability to defeat opponents in the ring.
For seven years ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed not only dominated his sport but, with his cocksure swagger and irrepressible rags-to-riches back story, became synonymous with the hope and hedonism of the 1990s Britpop era.
Feted by celebrities — the rap star P. Diddy once flanked him as he arrived for a fight on a flying carpet — and beaten only once in his entire career, the 5ft 4in, 9st featherweight was so idolised 11 million Brits tuned in to watch his last fight in 2002.
But then, just as emphatically as he had courted fame and set the sporting world ablaze, and aged just 28, he quit both boxing and the limelight. Granted, the father of three made headlines in 2006 when he was jailed for 15 months after a 90mph collision in his £320,000 Mercedes McLaren, for which he was stripped of his MBE.
But the working-class son of Yemeni immigrants, raised above a Sheffield corner shop, was rarely spotted in public and rejected mainstream media attention.
Until this week, that is, when the ‘Prince’, once so famous U.S. fans thought he was royalty, re-emerged waving from his open-top Corvette Stingray in Windsor, of all places, where he is renting a £1.2 million house near the Queen’s residence.
Looking all but unrecognisable from the wiry powerhouse of his 1990s heyday, if he feels any sadness at the demise of his athletic stature then he disguises it well.
‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed (pictured walking in Windsor last week) says he has never been happier than he is now
The former Flyweight boxing champ looks almost unrecognisable from his appearance in the 1990s
Naseem was widely known for him flamboyance and swagger. He would perform somersaults, christen every fight with a flip over the top rope and appear in leopard print shorts
Breaking his silence to talk to the Mail from the steps of his Georgian terrace, almost exactly 20 years since his last fight, Naseem, 48, insisted: ‘I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I’ve never been in a better place.’
A devout Muslim, he said he had joined a mosque in Windsor, described the people of the town as ‘beautiful’ and claimed he’s still something of a celebrity in the royal town, saying: ‘I wish I could walk around with a camera, the number of people who stop and talk to me.’
While his cockiness remains, he admits — ‘100 per cent, but I’m more humble now’ — the aggression has gone, and although he declines to talk further he is affable and, on the surface at least, anything but arrogant.
So what on earth is Naseem doing in Windsor? What is life like for the semi-recluse who still boasts an estimated £50 million fortune? And why did he retire from the sport he loved so early?
The answers to all these questions, the Mail found, are as complex as you might expect from a contradictory man who craves adulation but appears to abhor scrutiny, and whose audaciousness is undermined, believe some, by self-doubt and errors of judgment.
For a start, says one well-placed family friend, Naseem might be a member of the town’s mosque and so well known by locals that the first person the Mail’s reporter met was able to direct us to his house — but he’s not living in Windsor, but the Surrey home he’s had since 2008.
Instead, they reveal, he’s renting the Berkshire property for his wife of 24 years, Eleasha, ‘for some family members that have come from abroad on his wife’s side. He just goes and visits that house [in Windsor] to see the family’.
Prince Naseem Hamed and wife Eleasha at the premiere of the film 'Wild Wild West' at the Odeon, Leicester Square
Yet when the Mail visited Naseem’s £6 million Surrey mansion, an Argentinian woman said she was renting the property for three months until the end of July and didn’t know where the owners were.
One local shopkeeper in Surrey told the Mail he still sees Naseem, occasionally popping in with his wife and sons, adding. ‘They’re a very nice family and I’m always pleased to see them. They’re humble people.’
They are, however, having to deal with a growing family rift, in the form of Naseem’s younger brother, Ali, 44. Most of Naseem’s large family has been involved in the management of the boxer’s career.
But Ali is estranged from the clan and blames Naseem’s exodus from boxing on his ‘absolute betrayal’ of his trainer Brendan Ingle, who was a second father to the boxer but from whom he parted in 1997, leaving the rest of the Hamed family in charge of Naseem’s finances and career.
‘He was boxing royalty but the shame and the sadness is that he was too arrogant to hold onto that,’ Ali, a personal trainer in Sheffield, told the Mail this week. ‘He did not have the intellect to match the unique talent he’d been given. Now he has turned himself into a recluse who has spent 20 years eating non-stop and becoming morbidly obese.’
Many of the WhatsApp messages Ali sent to the Mail after our reporter spoke to him cannot be recounted for legal reasons, and one might be able to dismiss his words as the bitter ramblings of a jealous sibling. Indeed, he admitted he’d lost his identity aged 16 because he was no longer known as himself but Naseem’s younger brother.
But Ali seems hellbent on trying to sell an unflattering documentary on the ‘Hamed dynasty’ which could, if commissioned in any form, heap further embarrassment on his older brother, who spoke recently about his desire to release his own book and autobiographical film.
‘I’m looking forward to the future, to revealing some amazing stuff,’ Naseem said on a podcast interview with his former promoter Frank Warren in 2020.
Whoever’s version gets told first, theirs is, undoubtedly, a remarkable story. Two of nine siblings, they
