People more fashion conscious than me - a group that includes basically every person alive and several of the higher primates - have been saying for a while that the 1990s are back in fashion.

 This means I've officially been around long enough that the cycle of fashion has caught up to things I remember from the first time around.

 If the 1990s are back in fashion, and have been for a while, it stands to reason that the early 2000s are going to be right around the corner. An early harbinger of this is that somehow - incredibly, implausibly, against all reason and logic - in the year of our lord 2026 I'm writing about Audley Harrison's boxing career.

 Kids these days don't remember Audley Harrison, or possibly even boxing. These days, it's all MMA and analingus with the young people, although there doesn't seem to be a causative link between the two unless a fighter gets REALLY avant-garde with his submission holds. Back in the early aughts, however, Audley Harrison spent a brief moment in the sun as the Next Big Thing in British boxing, before becoming a disappointment, then an embarrassment, and ultimately a lazy cultural shorthand - a punchline of a puncher, whose name was a quick way to elicit a chuckle, an eye-roll, or a weary sigh from fight fans.

 Boxing lends itself to storytelling and myth, but it's hard to say whether Harrison's career was a tragedy or a comedy. He was, on paper, the ideal heavyweight fighter. Six feet five with the sort of solid frame that let him carry weight easily rather than having to pack on excess muscle, and an enormously long reach even for a man of his size, Audley won gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and looked set for greatness.

 Unfortunately, he only won gold because he was, with hindsight, a lot older than the other athletes in his division. Olympic boxing is usually the springboard for young, hungry amateurs to launch a professional career, but Audley managed to beat them all by having remained in the amateurs far longer than normal and coming to the Olympics with an extra decade or so of experience. This should have been a warning sign - that Audley was only ever comfortable taking fights he could win at a cruise - but the BBC were enamoured and gave him a million pound contract straight away, hoping that he would both serve as a commentator and also put British boxing back on the map.

 He didn't. His career not only failed to show up on the map, but in mapping terms went the wrong way out of the front door, got lost in a nearby field, fell in a ditch, dragged itself through the woods and wound up in an unfriendly country pub, all the while insisting that it had found El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth.

 The awkward reality of Audley Harrison was that for a big man who fought for a living, he seemed to really, REALLY hate fighting. He went to pieces whenever someone hit him in the face, which is an appreciable part of the job. To borrow a line from Richard Pryor, even when he was throwing punches, he didn't seem to be attempting to beat people up so much as beat them off of him.

 His career settled into a familiar pattern - he would secure a big fight against a well known opponent, enter the ring, panic at the prospect of a fight breaking out, get savagely pummeled by someone who actually liked violence, and then make grandiose claims about how in spite of this setback, he was going to be the Heavyweight Champion one day. He would then take a couple of matches against less dangerous, lower-ranked fighters until his stock improved, at which point he would secure a fight against a legitimate contender and be battered around the ring again.

 At one point, he entered a reality TV boxing contest designed to find the next great fighter. He won that, obviously, because he was a millionaire professional heavyweight with years of experience, and everyone else on the show was a reality TV contestant with a day job. Buoyed by this success, he went on to take another serious fight, at which point another actual fighter beat him up.

 His management didn't seem to be able to impress on him that he might want to change strategy, or ideally, career. A big reason for this was that Audley Harrison's management was Audley Harrison.

 In this way, he might have created the only one-man folie a deux in all of history, let alone sports. His manager was horribly mistreating his fighter by securing him bouts he had no chance of winning, and the fighter kept lying to the manager about actually wanting to fight them. They had a delusional amount of faith in each other, despite being the same guy, and this faith always evaporated under any kind of pressure testing without either of him learning anything.

 It's hard not to picture Audley stumbling back to his corner after another three minutes of panicked flailing, bruised and bleeding and wondering who the fuck set this whole thing up. The next day, Audley Harrison (the manager) probably watched the tapes and wondered what the fuck his fighter was doing out there, attempting to sneak around the ring without arousing the ire of a much better and more aggressive fighter.

 "More aggressive fighters" covers basically anyone with a wider mean streak than, say, Pudsey Bear or the Dalai Lama.

 After a win during this period, British champion David Haye was asked about Audley Harrison's attempt to secure a fight with him, and visibly winced at the prospect. "Aw, man…" Haye said, "Audley's a nice guy…"

 He trailed off, managing to say everything by leaving the thought unfinished. They eventually did fight, and Haye won in three rounds. Audley Harrison was adjudicated to have thrown 28 punches, only two of which landed, which prompted the British Board of Boxing Control to consider withholding his purse for the fight.* Haye would later admit that he’d let the fight drag on into the third round for the sake of giving people their money's worth - literally, in the case of his family and friends, whom he had confidently told to bet on the third round as that was the point at which he intended to put an end to the whole farce.

 Audley was such a disappointment as a fighter that even the fans, who had never been as easily deluded as Audley Harrison or his manager, Audley Harrison, went past hating him and actually arrived at something like pity. A recurring joke when people mocked him was "Leave Audley Harrison alone - after all, he's never hurt anybody…"

His career finally ended in 2013 when Deontay Wilder beat him so badly that rented mules and red-headed stepchildren took up a collection on Audley’s behalf. He announced his retirement, before announcing three weeks later that actually, he wasn’t done with the ring, and wanted one more shot at glory. Eleven months and no fights later, he retired for good.

  He's back, today, in an article in the Guardian. Now 54 and living in the states, he spends most of his time playing competitive poker, a game he presumably likes because he can punch people as many times as he ever did (zero) whilst no longer in danger of the other competitors hitting him, either. 

 At a certain point, you have to wonder if Audley only became a boxer because he'd never heard of any other sports, ever. If you explained tennis to him, he'd assume it was a trick. If you explained the rules of tiddlywinks, he'd ask at what point the other players hit you in the kidneys, and whether eye-gouging was still banned.

 Having discovered a sitting down game where nobody attacked him, Audley should have been content, but instead he's returned to the spotlight to explain what REALLY went wrong with his career. 

 Apparently, the issue was that he managed and promoted himself, and the Boxing Establishment didn't like that, so they set out to ruin him. Audley has said that Kelly Maloney (who, pre-transition, made a living as boxing promoter Frank Maloney and is a fascinating story in her own right) admitted as much to him when they both appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. 

 I'm not saying that Kelly Maloney is lying, or that there isn't a very well established hierarchy in British boxing, often controlled by questionable people demanding profits from the blood and sweat of others. These people would, indeed, object to Audley Harrison managing himself instead of allowing them to do it on his behalf, for a healthy percentage.

 The problem isn't that Audley Harrison made the unusual choice not to out-source his management; it's that he should have been out-sourcing his boxing to someone who could actually fight. No amount of conspiracy, real or not, can make up for only landing two punches in a fight. 

 Not that this reality will break through. Harrison blames his opponents - Julius Francis, for example, was "the wrong opponent" and led to a boring fight before Audley finally knocked him out in the twelfth round. It doesn't seem to occur to him that he could have made the fight more exciting if he'd tried to knock out Francis (a then-forty-year-old journeyman) with a little more urgency. 

 He blames the BBC, who seemed to lose interest in him after a string of unexciting fights against underwhelming competitors, but he still takes the time to shrug that the devastating newcomer Moses Itauma, probably the most feared man in the British heavyweight division, hasn't impressed him yet because Audley wants to see him face a better calibre of fighter. 

 One thing I did learn that improved my opinion of Harrison is that before his career, he unionised amateur boxers and worked to improve their circumstances. It was this, he says, that motivated him to win Olympic Gold, as he thought it would bring attention and funding to British amateurs. Which it did, and which is undeniably commendable. 

 At the last, though, this seems to be the key to understanding Audley Harrison. He was a good amateur who succeeded when motivated, but floundered when placed in the big leagues with nothing to spur him on. The BBC gave him a million pounds before he'd even laced up his gloves, which was never going to inspire ambition. As Marvin Hagler explained, "it's hard to get out of bed in the morning and run when you're wearing silk pyjamas."

 Whoever is to blame for the failures of Audley Harrison's career - largely Audley himself, and his manager, Audley himself - it's strangely comforting that in increasingly uncertain times, Audley Harrison is STILL trying to make us believe he was one of the greats, and I'm still here to remind everyone he wasn't. 

 Perhaps his new career in poker will give him the title he always wanted. In 2024, he declared that this would be the year he won his event at the World Series Of Poker. 

 He came 126th.

 We can laugh, but 126th is actually not a bad placing for the WSOP. It's just 125 spots below where he declared he'd end up. 

 In that regard, it's kind of perfect. 

*Holding up a purse is a technical term for refusing to pay out the agreed money for a fight contract, and also the preferred defensive technique of Audley Harrison.