It will be the biggest contest of his life, but not his biggest fight. Darren Barker has already won that. Just getting back into the ring after the tragic death of his 19-year-old brother Gary in a car accident has been victory enough.
Winning it for his brother.
Darren Barker: After the triumph, now comes tribute.
Next Saturday, Barker, 27, will take on the champion Wayne Elcock for the British middleweight title.
Victory over the veteran, well within Barker’s range as the pretender whose time is coming, will take him closer to a world title shot next year.
David Haye, Amir Khan, Carl Froch . . . Barker, already Commonwealth champion, plans to join them as British boxing sees stirrings of a revival from a new breed.
The fight at the Brentwood Centre, live on ITV4, comes against the backdrop of an impending anniversary that neither he nor his boxing family — father Terry was an Amateur Boxing Association champion himself — can ever forget.
On December 10, it will be three years since Gary’s death. Darren freely admits his younger brother was the more gifted boxer, a junior Olympic champion and a talent many believed would win a gold medal at Beijing last year.
These days, Darren talks about the ‘day our lives changed forever’ with candour on his lips but a reservoir of sadness in his eyes. He copes with that better than the anger that consumed him in the immediate aftermath and which led to him quitting the ring and drinking his way through his grief until finding the help he needed to box again in honour of Gary.
It was still dark that fateful, fatal Sunday morning when his panic-stricken grandad Rod banged on Darren’s bedroom door, then burst in. ‘Gaz has had an accident,’ he kept repeating.
Bleary-eyed, Darren dressed and went to fill the car with petrol. Gary would be all right. He always was. He was a smart, happy-go-lucky lad, who could take care of himself.
On the drive north from their Barnet home, however, it dawned on Darren. The junction of the M1 and M25, still 12 miles from the hospital, was gridlocked.
‘I knew then it was bad,’ he says. ‘The traffic was at a standstill. People were outside their cars, sitting on the bonnets, talking to other drivers. I flew up the hard shoulder. I was going mad.’
When Darren finally made it to the Luton and Dunstable Hospital next to Junction 11, and just south of the accident, he was ushered into a sideroom where tearful mum, Jackie, and dad, Terry, were waiting, having been driven up by the police from their home just around the corner from where Darren lived with his grandparents.
‘I will never forget walking into that room,’ says Darren. ‘My dad just said: “He’s not with us any more.” Grandad screamed. There were shouts. It was terrible.
‘I walked out. I was in shock. I wanted to sit on my own. Everyone was inconsolable. I couldn’t talk to anyone. You can’t prepare yourself for a moment like that. It’s mad.’
Gary was pronounced dead at 6.30am from ‘multiple injuries’. His silver Ford Fiesta had spun out of control just before Toddington services, hit the central barrier and rolled. He was thought to have fallen asleep.
Hours before, there had been a charity boxing dinner in Essex with Jackie, Terry, Darren and Gary united in contrasting celebration. The two boys then decided to go up to the West End with some mates.
They were entitled to some fun, after all. Boxing in Scotland on the Friday night for the noted East End club Repton — where Darren had also enjoyed a glittering amateur career, culminating in winning Commonwealth gold in Manchester in 2002 — Gary had won yet another fight and flown back down on the Saturday.
That same Friday night, Darren had won his 14th straight professional contest, against Paul Samuels at Alexandra Palace.
Once home in the early hours, Gary announced he was driving up to see his girlfriend, Jessica, a student in Leicester. Darren went to bed thinking he had talked him out of it. Back in Barnet after the trauma, Darren finally turned on his mobile. It contained a poignant text from Gary. He was fine, he said, and not hung over. He was going to Leicester anyway.
‘I beat myself up for a while, wondering if there was anything more I could have done,’ says Darren.
‘But Gary was his own man.’
Darren’s phone rang and rang, beeped continuously with texts. He remembers taking only a call from Tony Sims, his trainer. ‘He was saying: “Tell me it ain’t true.” I had to tell him it was.’
There was rage in Darren, who punched a door at the hospital and damaged his hand at the sight of his brother laid out.
There was no envy of Gary’s superior and astonishing natural talent — he even once beat a conqueror of Amir Khan, called Bobby Ward, and just a couple of months before his death won the London ABA title — but merely pride and a protective camaraderie on the part of Darren, almost five years the older.
Had Gary also gone on to turn pro, they would have been a promoter’s dream: the Fabulous Barker Boys.
There would be none of that now. In fact, there would be nothing for Darren alone. His desire for the sport was sapped as he sought to drown his sorrows after an emotional funeral in Barnet.
‘Hundreds turned up. It was ridiculous,’ he says. ‘All the shops on the way to the church had shut. People were standing outside. It showed how much he meant to people. I had to carry the coffin. It was horrible.’
Darren sold for £5,000 the second-hand Mercedes he had bought for £10,000 with his winnings and took himself, the middle Barker brother, Lee, and a friend of Gary’s on a spree to California and Las Vegas.
Once back, he was out every night and soon the money was gone. Dad Terry gave him some work in his painting and decorating business. Some of his wages went on a tattoo on his back. ‘In Loving Memory. Brother 1987-2006,’ it read.
‘All I wanted to do was go out and get hammered,’ he says. ‘Then I would come home and put on sad music and cry my eyes out.’
He did return to Sims’s Essex gym after a few months but he did not feel right. He thought he would have no choice but to pack up. Sims, benign confidant as much as trainer, asked one favour. Darren met Bruce Lloyd, a therapist who specialised in taking emotionally broken people and mending them. Darren agreed to see him and after a few painful sessions, Lloyd had him re-assessing what his talent dictated he should do.
‘We talked it all through. He said it was going to hurt but it was about cleaning the wound,’ says Barker. ‘I had no intentions of going back into the ring. In the end, I felt there was something I should be doing.
‘I’ve got a competitive nature and I can’t turn that off. It did go through my mind that fighting again would be disrespectful to Gary. But he wouldn’t have minded, I know.
‘People say that time is the greatest healer.
'I don’t know how. I don’t think it’s going to heal anything. It’s always going to be a bad wound. It feels like, emotionally, I’m always going to walk with a limp. It’s just learning to live with that disability.’
Ten months after Gary’s death, Darren made a comeback. Another two fights and he was Commonwealth champion, to go with the amateur title. He takes a record of 20 wins and no defeats into the Elcock fight.
‘I have served my apprenticeship. I’m ready to be unleashed, ready to fight the best,’ says Barker looking towards the world champions Kelly Pavlik and Felix Sturm.
‘Winning the British title and joining people like Terry Downes and Alan Minter would be special. I want to win, yes, for the money and because I hate losing. And for Gary. Through my success, his name will live on. You will never forget him.’
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