He told her to bring me to the gym the next day

"He told her to bring me to the gym the next day, and I loved it," Rhodes says. "Paul Jones was there, too, which made it quite hard for me to fight him for the British title last year when I'd known him since he was a kid But he had to do it and I had to do it. I've spoken to him recently, and there's no bad feeling between us."A lot of people were surprised when I was matched with him, but I never questioned Brendan's judgement, even to myself. I had absolute confidence that I could beat Paul, and so did Brendan and Frank [Warren].

The only worry was the similarity in our styles - fighting Paul was like fighting my shadow. It wasn't that I'd modelled myself on him or on Herol or anyone else. All Brendan's boys have basically the same style, hit and not get hit. It's the way he's been training fighters since he first came to Sheffield, and he was doing it before he had Herol."The best-known present exponent of the Ingle style is Naseem Hamed, the WBO and International Boxing Federation featherweight champion who set the standards for Rhodes by winning the European title at the age of 20. "Naz coming through so young has been a help to me," Rhodes acknowledges.

"He's explained things to me, told me what's going to happen and told me how to handle it. We started boxing around the same time and we've always hung around together. We won our first national schools titles on the same day, at the Derby Assembly Rooms in 1990. I was the one who started doing the back-flips in the gym, but now I let Naz get on with that kind of thing."Naz and me used to talk a lot when we were boys about what we were going to win, but I suppose I didn't really start to believe it was going to happen for me until I won my first national title, when I was about 15 Everybody knew Naz was going to be a megastar. You could see him getting better and better every year, so we were all prepared for what happened to him. We're still very close, in fact we've been playing snooker today. I don't begrudge him any of his success, and he's always there encouraging me."I lost some in the amateurs - 11 out of 67 - but most of those were down to amateur judging, which is unbelievable I properly lost only three or four Amateur boxing is ridiculous.