Boxing: Unlikely Contender Keeps Faith With Providence and Destiny

In a cruel and cynical world, where fighters' dreams are broken as often as their noses get smeared across their battered faces, Peter Manfredo has clung to a sweet but simple belief in destiny. "This is such a hard game that you need fate to help you out," he says as he rubs his own flattened features in wonder at the "wild and crazy journey" he has taken from America's outer fringes of reality television to a world title fight against Joe Calzaghe in Cardiff a week on Saturday night.

"You gotta be good," Manfredo murmurs huskily, "but you also gotta get lucky. Fate, destiny, luck, whatever. I don't care what you call it - you need it. The Contender, a show on NBC [American National Network Television], was my big break. It was my gift, because unless you're the best in the business you don't make money in the ring no more. I was an unbeaten fighter after 21 fights, ranked No3 in the world by the WBO, but the biggest purse I'd got was $15,000 [£7,600]. And then came my chance on The Contender where the winner winds up with a million bucks. That felt like fate to me."

Manfredo's fantasy soon lay in ruins. He entered The Contender in 2004 as the favourite to win a television series in which two groups of boxers from the east and west coasts of America trained together while the perpetually invasive cameras track their quest to eliminate each other. Yet Manfredo was knocked out of the competition in his first fight when, drained by a drastic weight loss and the demands of a show fronted by Sugar Ray Leonard and Sylvester Stallone, he dropped a decision to Alfonso Gomez.

"I was sick to the stomach," he grimaces. "I was so weak because the weigh-in was just hours before the fight. And the day before they'd had me running up this hill because they weren't worried about us as fighters; they were worried about making a TV show. But it's what we signed up for and so they took me to this mansion away from the other fighters, because I was the first to be knocked out. I sat around on my own for four days, crying because I didn't know what the hell I was going to do."

In a darker undertow to the manipulations of reality TV one of Manfredo's fellow boxers, Najai Turpin, shot himself not long after he lost his own first bout. Manfredo prefers to believe now that Turpin's suicide had more to do with his private life than a television show. Fate, anyway, had intervened in his own life. When Jeff Fraza, another fighter on The Contender, withdrew through illness, Manfredo was voted back into the show by his rival boxers. "Three of us had been knocked out by then and so the other guys picked me. They knew how much I was struggling with the weight but it backfired on them."

He beat Gomez in a rematch and made it through to the final, where he faced Sergio Mora in Las Vegas on April 2005. "I struggled to make the weight again and I didn't perform. But it was his time. It was just meant to work out that way." Manfredo still won $250,000 (£127,000) and became a certified American celebrity.

In his last two fights, at the evocatively named Dunkin' Donuts Center in his home city of Providence, Rhode Island, Manfredo faced a hardened pro in Scott Pemberton and a previously unbeaten boxer in Joe Spina. Manfredo stopped both in the third round and, backed by the promotional muscle of The Contender franchise, he was hand-picked by HBO to become Calzaghe's next, unlikely challenger. Their WBO super-middleweight title fight will be broadcast live across America by the cable giant.

Calzaghe is much the superior fighter - and will be making his 21st defence of the belt he won almost 10 years ago by beating Chris Eubank. "He's a good fighter," Manfredo says, "but he's not a great fighter. Against Jeff Lacy [last March] he fought a one-dimensional guy who was always going to make Calzaghe look like a superstar. If you come in and try to knock him out with one punch, like Lacy and his left hook, then Calzaghe will take you to school. But I'm a boxer-puncher, who can move and hit, and I've got the style to shock Calzaghe."

Manfredo admits that the prospect of fighting the Welshman before a fevered crowd of 35,000 at the Millennium Stadium "is a whole new experience. But I have no pressure because no one here thinks I've got a chance against Calzaghe. He's 42 and 0 and the fight's in his back yard. But I'm real relaxed and you should see me back in Providence on the day of a fight. I'll hang around with my friends, play some baseball, go into Dunkin' Donuts and grab a coffee. And then I go to the fight - cracking jokes in the dressing room with my boys. This will be a little different, because none of my friends could afford to come over for the fight. But I'll still have my dad and my uncles around me."

Peter Manfredo Sr, the boxer's father and trainer, will be joined in the corner by the legendary Leonard. It is partly a publicity gimmick - but Leonard was a brilliant strategist during his own boxing career. Manfredo's real preparation has been carried out in Los Angeles under Freddie Roach's expert tutelage. Roach, arguably the best trainer in the sport today, will not be in Cardiff. Instead he will be locked away in Puerto Rico as he trains Oscar de la Hoya for his epic fight against Floyd Mayweather in May. And so the focus in Manfredo's corner will once more switch to the intimate but complex bond between father and son.

A slightly tense undercurrent is even obvious during this interview in a secluded hotel lounge in Newcastle. The shaven-headed Peter Sr, a former kick-boxer, sits in and listens as his 26-year-old son dissects their relationship with raw candour. "We've fought our whole life because he expects so much of me. As soon as I came out of my mother he put boxing gloves on me. So when I have a good day in the gym he's happy but when I have a bad day I'll hear about it for a week. He kinda lives his life through me because he always wanted to be a great fighter and now he sees I have the potential to do that. He ain't gonna change. He's 50 now, so he's gonna take that attitude to the grave.

"My dad didn't want me to go for The Contender but I did it. And afterwards he was very hard on me because I lost. That's when I left him again to go work with Freddie. Then he called me and we sorted it out - but he had to know Freddie was my main man. It goes back to when I was a kid. I went to a Catholic school and every afternoon I'd go to the gym in my uniform. And then my father would train me so hard I had no time to be a normal kid.

He always knew I could make a lot of money out of boxing if I made the sacrifices but I was just a kid and had the hots for this girl, Yamilka, who's now my wife. She was a year younger but we ended up in the same class - because I failed history in 10th grade. I had to do it again and so fate threw us together. She was real book-smart, but not street-smart, so I'd copy her work to pass. I liked her as soon as I laid eyes on her but she felt no attraction for me. I wouldn't quit bothering her until I started bunking off school - and that's when she started missing my pestering.

"So I took to her one of my fights, in the Golden Gloves, and because it was a first date I showed off in front of her in the ring. I ended up losing and my father was so mad at me he threw me out of the gym. He said I'd disgraced the gym but I didn't care. I had my girl. I eventually went back to him - but the big difference is that I'm now boxing for my own family rather than him. I've got a wife and two girls, who turn five and two this year, and we've got a boy on the way. Man, I just walk past my wife these days and she gets pregnant."

And so, far beyond reality television, the more personal concerns of an otherwise regular Dunkin' Donuts guy make Manfredo such a likeable character. He talks amiably about his hope of one day opening up a sports bar in the Italian neighbourhood of Federal Hill - where he grew up in Providence. "You see Raging Bull? I don't want to be an old fighter who tries to be a comedian like Jake LaMotta in that movie - but I liked his idea of running a joint where he could show off his boxing memorabilia. It would be good to have a place where, one day, I could hang up the world title I win over here."

Manfredo, instead, is likely to face a long and brutal night against Calzaghe - with only a quirky belief in fate to bolster him. "I looked into Calzaghe's eyes when we met and I saw that glow that makes him think he's unstoppable. But maybe he's looking past me to the next fight. I just feel that this is my time. Maybe it's like, you know, destiny?"