If you love boxing, you should love Curtis Woodhouse

Driffield light-welterweight Curtis Woodhouse is my type of lad.  If you love boxing - really love what makes it the highest form of sporting endeavour man has thus far created - Woodhouse should be one of your favourites too.

I wasn't one of the naysayers who immediately discarded his attempts at forging a career in the sport as a vanity project doomed to failure.  Even if it was, or is, so what?  The fact is, 99% of people in his former position - a very well paid professional footballer - would not have swapped the adoration of thousands of fans, the birds, the booze and all the other benefits of being a player in this football-saturated age for the hard, unremitting, abstemious, not particularly lucrative life of a small hall fighter.

For any crossover football fans reading this (you could have counted me in before the relentless worship of Mammon ruined the game for me) who might doubt that the brutal game is tougher than the beautiful game, get this - Woodhouse dropped two stone from his footballer's frame to become a boxer.

He's chasing his dream when he already had what most people regarded as the perfect life.  That takes bottle. 

Bottle, of course, is one thing that every single fighter has.  By definition, if you step through the ropes at all, you've got it.  Woodhouse certainly has.  But he also has the quality that scares more pacifist souls to death - he enjoys fighting.  Simple as that.  Some people - most, I'd say - wouldn't understand this.  If he wasn't doing it in the ring it's very likely he'd be doing it somewhere else.  It's the best place for him and any of his ilk.

But the thing I like most about him is the purity of his attitude.  He knows what the sport is really about.  Truly testing one's own limits.  Woodhouse is the antithesis of the fighter or promoter who is prepared to do almost anything to protect an unbeaten record and the accompanying hollow mystique that often lies beneath the surface of misleading statistics.

"I don't want anymore make time fights now," he told me after his impressive third round stoppage of the only man to have beaten him so far, Jay Morris. 

"I only want fights where I'm going to have a challenge.  I don't mind an 80-20 fight in the other man's favour to be honest and I'm only looking at ones that are 60-40.  I need to be testing myself all the time."

Is this philosophy due to the fact he's a late starter?  Or is it something more fundamental?

"It has nothing to do with my age.  It's what I believe.  Look, you see some of these kids who are 20-0 or whatever and you have a look at their record..."  At this point, Woodhouse's face takes on a pained expression.

"You look down it and - no disrespect to the opponents - but it's Latvian, Latvian, Pole, Pole, Romanian, Bulgarian...I don't want to do that.

"I'd rather lose 15 or 20 times and win the British title.  That would mean everything to me."

Woodhouse may not get to that level but it won't be for the want of trying.  Of all athletes, boxers tend to be among the most self-delusional.  To put it politely, I get to hear a lot of bullshit.  Woodhouse, you can take it from me, is sincere.

The little fella is a microcosm of what's good about this sport of ours and, however far he gets, I wish him all the best of luck.