Jeff Horn - The Hornet: From Bullied Schoolboy To World Champion

Contents

JEFF HORNs story is one of the most inspiring in sporting history. A quiet schoolboy who suffered at the hands of bullies, Jeff started taking self-defence classes one night a week. At the age of twenty-four, he made the quarter-finals of the 2012 London Olympics. Five years later, on 2 July 2017, he defeated all-time great Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines to win the World Boxing Organisation welterweight title. Jeff is married to his high school sweetheart, Joanna. They live in Brisbane.

An award-winning journalist, GRANTLEE KIEZA has held senior positions at the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Courier-Mail. He is a Walkley Award finalist and the author of twelve acclaimed books, including the recent bestsellers Bert Hinkler, Monash and Mrs Kelly. In 2017, he was inducted into the Queensland Boxing Hall of Fame and named Queenslands Sports Journalist of the Year. Grantlee lives in Brisbane.

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First published in Australia in 2017

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517

harpercollins.com.au

Copyright Hornet Promotions Pty Ltd 2017

The right of Jeff Horn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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ISBN: 978 0 7333 3934 9 (hardback)

ISBN: 978 1 4607 0994 8 (ebook)

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Creator: Horn, Jeff, author.

Title: The hornet : from bullied schoolboy to world champion /

Jeff Horn with Grantlee Kieza.

Subjects: Horn, Jeff.

Horn, Jeff Childhood and youth.

Victims of bullying Australia Biography.

Boxers (Sports) Australia Biography.

Other Creators/Contributors:

Kieza, Grantlee, author.

Cover design by Lisa Reidy

Front cover photograph by Bradley Kanaris / Fairfax Media

Personal photographs are from the collection of Jeff Horn.

For my wife, Jo, and all my family and friends.

With love and thanks.

Chris Hyde / Getty Images

All it takes to reach the stars is a leap of faith.

My trainer, Glenn Rushton, wrote this on a pair of boxing gloves that he gave me for my twenty-first birthday

HAVE YOU EVER HAD a dream to achieve something great? A goal that you hunger for and that keeps you awake at night; a goal that makes you work and work and work to reach it? Where do you want to go in life? What will you have to do to get there?

These are questions we all ask ourselves and ones that I pondered every day in the lead-up to the biggest boxing match ever staged in Australia. Here I was, the most unlikely boxer you could imagine, about to go toe to toe with one of the greatest fighters in history at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane. The fight turned out to be one of the biggest international sporting events staged in Australia and, thanks to the incredible support from my country, it ended up generating a greater economic benefit for the state of Queensland than the G20 summit in Brisbane when political heavyweights Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin faced off in 2014.

It was a warm winters afternoon on 2 July 2017. All around me, roaring with excitement, were more than 51,000 people, the largest crowd ever to attend a boxing match in Australia and the largest crowd anywhere in the world to see Manny Pacquiao fight.

People were there to witness the most audacious title attempt ever by an Australian fighter, as I took on boxings Superman, a buzzing whirlwind who had been a world champion for almost twenty years and had earned more than A$660 million from the sport.

Reporters called my challenge for Pacquiaos title the most astonishing story in world sport a rank outsider who somehow found himself facing one of the biggest names in boxing history and a high-ranking Filipino politician to boot.

What the hell was I even doing here in the first place?

In fact, when you looked at our careers logically, the fight seemed like a bizarre match-up. No wonder, going into it, Id been ridiculed by know-alls around the world. The idea of me fighting for a world title and especially against a living legend of sport seemed like some ridiculous movie storyline, one of those science-fiction or fantasy flicks, in which an inoffensive kid is somehow transported to another world and given superpowers to face the ultimate challenge.

For one thing, I dont come from a boxing background. I didnt follow the sport when I was a kid and world boxing champion was hardly on the top of preferred jobs suggested to me when I was a school nerd. The first fights I ever saw live were the Australian amateur titles in 2007.

Growing up, I had a pretty comfortable home life in the Brisbane suburbs. In contrast, Pacquiao had been born into abject poverty and grew up in a dirt-floor thatched hut in the jungle in a remote corner of the southern Philippines. Through his iron will and blazing hands he had battered his way through the top tiers of boxing and become a dominant force in the sport.

Pacquiao has a long inventory of palaces he calls home in the Philippines and the United States. I live in a modest house in a working-class suburb of Brisbane. He learned to fight by watching roosters peck and claw each other to death in cockfighting tournaments in the Philippines. Ive got a docile Staffordshire terrier that never barks but comes running into my lounge room if she hears the codeword pizza, a word I dont say often. Pacquiao has held eleven world titles. Im a schoolteacher and a qualified childcare worker.

Pacquiao had arrived in Brisbane a week before the fight on a specially chartered jetliner carrying his entourage of 160 family members, friends, trainers, managers and bodyguards. He booked out a huge section of the Sofitel hotel in Brisbanes CBD. While Pacquiao and his team rested up in one of Brisbanes flashest hotels, on the night before the fight, I was snoring loudly next to my pregnant wife, Jo, in our little house in the suburbs. Jo normally elbows me in the ribs to quieten me when I snore too loudly but she thought I might have a busy day ahead of me.

I used to joke that working with children had prepared me for any stressful situation in life. But it certainly hadnt prepared me for the Filipino volcano when, about a minute into the ninth round of my fight for his world welterweight title, he started erupting in centre ring. Pacquiao was doing his best to destroy me, to crush all my dreams and aspirations, with a burst of heavy punches like those he had used to annihilate some of the toughest men of all time. Who did I think I was to stand up to him?