On the New Jersey shore the great gaudy wall of casino hangars face out to sea, turning their back on the little town that first imagined them. Appositely, Naseem Hamed makes his entrance here, live from Sheffield via Concorde and stretch limo.
All mouth and no class. Blowing Atlantic City down.
Kid from The Yemen. Skinny as a rail with a mulekick of a punch and a rattlesnake's bag of spite in him. Naz's father Sal had a shop at the top of the hill on Newman Road in Wincobank. Sal would stop Brendan Ingle on the street. Naseem's picture is on the national postage stamp back home in Yemen. Naseem with Brendan. Two heads in a perforated square. That was later though.
Brendan has always said that he spotted the future featherweight champion of the world from the top of a double-decker bus. Naseem Hamed was seven and he was fending off a clutch of schoolyard bullies. Says Brendan: "I knew he was a fighter."
"I can tell you that's the greatest load of rubbish ever," says Naz 17 years later. He shakes his head and radiates the low intensity dumb schmuck look of a man who doesn't see the point of Brendan's lyrical pitter patter.
It has come to this. Fight night in Atlantic City and Naseem Hamed, The Prince, doesn't see the point of Brendan Ingle the Dubliner who first imagined him. He has no use for the ring man who has served as coach, confessor, pad man and social worker to half the kids in the east end of Sheffield for three decades now.
Pity. The sincere arrogance and the chinkproof bravery which he brings to his craft are Naseem's own asset, but the theatre trimmings are all Ingle's touch. The man who invented Bomber Graham and Slugger O' Toole and Silky Jones has a light touch with pug pantomime.
Prince Naseem wears leopardskin togs and somersaults into the ring, there to dance the sweet, defensive two-step which Ingle taught all his boys. They used to say you knew an Ingle fighter because he danced backward into the gym and you couldn't hit him with a handful of rice. Naseem has all that.
The Prince can defend, but he hits like a jiggy wrecking-ball too and, unusually for a featherweight, he is well on the way to making the sort of money which means neither he nor his family will ever have to work again. The business of this weekend will leave him $2 million to the good. Then there are the car deals and the Adidas endorsement tie-in and the TV work.
All an unlikely storm of money to blow through the life of a 24-year-old, but one which has brought him here to fight Belfast's Wayne McCullough in the most hyped world-title scrap the resort town has staged outside the lucrative heavyweight division.
He should be a happy kid. Not many come out of the east end of Sheffield like he has. He has a backside in his bespoke pants and a house with six garages for all his cars and so many bedrooms that on happy days Brendan teases them that if he dances and shuffles fast enough he might manage to sleep in all of them.
But the Naz Fella, as Brendan calls him, has a retinue chirping in his ear. The savvy sadism in the ring sometimes runs over into ugly humiliation, taunting opponents as he beats them up, worse is the cheap recourse to humiliating, occasionally masturbatory gestures to belittle opponents. Naseem's lower lip has an ominous meanness about it. He has been pouting it Brendan's way.
So Brendan and Alma, his wife, were a little hurt and surprised when they saw Naseem bouncing his four-month-old son Sami on his lap and denouncing Brendan as a Judas on Sky Sports a couple of weeks ago. Twenty minutes of pointed denunciation and calculated hurt.
"Could you not kill him Brendan?" said Alma, close to tears.
"You know Naz," said Brendan. "Tomorrow he'll come in and he'll be sheepish and nothing will be said."
Duly it happened.
"You alright Brendan?" said Naz, looking up half afraid.
"How are you going on Naz?"
And it rumbles on like a bad marriage with all the hurt buried in routine. Brendan has been forced to keep his distance. His sons do the close-up work for now, proxies for their wounded father.
"He's been that way since he was seven," says Brendan "He's never been talking to me. He's never not been talking to me."
Brendan is blue-eyed and a little frazzled in the winter sun today. He has been running around Atlantic City with a loud-hailer, corner man turned fairground barker, working his 58-year-old bones to dust to make sure that it doesn't all go bad for the Naz fella.
"If that place is only half full on Saturday it looks bad for him. He's still only cracking it over here."
Cracking it. When he was a kid perfecting the struts and somersaults Naseem used to tell anyone who would give him the time that he was going to make £40 million and give £10 million of it to Brendan to retire on. Good times and sweet dreams.
So when the big contract came in Naz called Brendan in and told him that the 10-fight deal wouldn't bring him his 10 per cent cut of £1 million sterling, but £600,000. The kid said that Brendan should be glad to get it.
"You have me hanging here Naz," said Brendan. "You want me to walk away after all these years or just do what you say. I'll tell you this, Naz. It's wrong what you are doing, it's wrong."
"You're doing alright Brendan," he said, "you're doing alright. Sure what would you spend it on?"
Brendan, addicted to abstinence, could even see the point. He doesn't drink, smoke or gamble. He never consumes tea or coffee, meat or fish. He fasts one day a week and observes both Ramadan and Lent. The principle of the thing haunted him, though. The oldest hurt in boxing is betrayal.
So Brendan told his story to his old friend Nick Pitt of the Sunday Times and they stuck it down between two covers and called it The Paddy and the Prince, a largely affectionate tale of the busy little academy of boxing at the bottom of the hill and its most famous graduate.
Naseem didn't take the book in the generous context of 17 years of literal blood, sweat and tears invested in him, much less as the work of a man who loves talk the way other people love breathing. If Brendan told readers that money had become Naseem's god, it merely saved him going around and telling them individually.
Whatever, the distance is there. Around the camp they whisper that Naseem might set up his own gym and use his name to drive Brendan out of business. If Brendan had a business rather than a day-care centre for troubled kids it might be true. There are greater sadnesses.
When he was a kid Brendan Ingle gave Naseem Hamed a book to read. The life of Sugar Ray Robinson.
"He turned on everyone in the end and he was on his own. I wanted Naz to see that. You can't end up bitter and on your own. Especially not in this game. It hurts too much."
Brendan knows. Once he reared Herol Graham in the same freethinking boxing style. Graham was all defence and no punch, but he went as far as his silky feet would take him. Then he bolted for a carrot dangled by Barney Eastwood and spent a bad night being beaten and trying to listen to Brendan's advice being shouted from a row in the stand. Herol is still on his own, still out there in early middle-age trying to win it all back.
And Naz? He isn't good-looking and when he's not surrounded by ropes he ain't too bright either. He's here in casinoland shouting the odds. He is a showman, but a good one, plenty of bang for the buck. Having crossed the Atlantic, he does 15 rounds of energetic sparring, then ducks out of the ropes to trade haymakers with the press. He has two volume settings. One, half-muted for written media, the other full-out hysterical for the broadcast media.
Bally's casino, home for the week, is a big barn of a place decked out with sufficient neon to give it illusion of dime-store tack.
Bally's had to, ahem, sever its relationship with its own chairman because of alleged mob ties before it could open here.
Now the barn is filled with old people flitting their pensions and the boardwalk teems with strippers and call girls.
The perfect place to come for a boxing match.
Brendan is on the boardwalk taking the New Jersey sun as the seagulls wheel around his head. Naz is playing pool with Dominic and John, Brendan's two sons who have been doing his training while the row with Brendan simmers.
When the three of them come back, Naz will work out again, a private session this time. The promoters are growling in Brendan's ear about this. Tickets are moving sluggishly. The fight isn't expected to last much longer than one pull of the slot-machine arm.
Naseem is in astonishing shape. Whipped up and coldly hungry.
Dominic isn't like his old man. Brendan is a duck-and-dive merchant, in close, out wide, just make it happen. Dominic is straight lines to Brendan's curves. Listen Naz, he said, I'm not like me oul' fella. I have me house and I'm happy and I don't need this crap. You're here at eight and we do it at eight. You're not here by five past I go home. The afternoon session is at four and we have the same rules. Your vitamins, your diet, your weight, all those things you take care of yourself like a big boy.
Brendan has seen it all, looking across at the gym like a wounded parent, excluded from the family meal. He knows his boy will deliver, because somehow or other he has been delivered here.
Even with Dominic and John as the proxies. He has been delivered.
"Why bother?" Brendan says, his voice high and indignant in the Atlantic air and he whirls around on the boardwalk and grabs your sleeve. "Because I came to England 40 years ago and I could hardly read or write and maths was a mystery to me and I found something I'm good at, that I love. You never give that up."
Unless the world is to turn up one of its bigger quakes, Naseem Hamed will win tonight. His 30th first straight professional win, probably his 29th knock-out. Two years ago McCullough stood up in the stands at a fight in Dublin and goaded Hamed between rounds. He didn't take the fight when it was offered, though, and tonight, as Hamed likes to say, "He'll take twice the beating for half the money."
A few weeks ago in hilly Wincobank, Brendan was sitting in a gym. His gym. Block on block with his own stout fingers. Girders scrounged from scrap men around Sheffield and punch-bags saved for, and scrimped for hanging from them. Naz, the millionaire with a well-padded backside in his bespoke pants turned and pointed his finger at him. "See you, you're sat on that stool there for 17 years."
"Correction, Naz. I'm sat here this 30 years. What's your point?"
"And you're brainwashing everyone that walks through that door."
"That's right Naz."
"You admit it. You even admit it."
"Learning by repetition, Naz. It's called learning by repetition."
And Naz swatted the air and walked away, a genius with the brains of a rocking horse and a backside too big for his leopardskin cacks.
And if Brendan wants loyalty he'll buy a dog.