‘I’ve been chased and shot at’: Denzel Bentley on trauma, street violence and brutal boxing politics

Stripped of his WBO world title and numbed by violent deaths of friends in Battersea, the middleweight is determined to press on in pursuit of fights and titles

“I’ve been very reluctant to tell my story,” Denzel Bentley says as he sits upstairs at his gym in Essex and opens up about his testing life in and out of the ring. Before he addresses the latest maddening round of boxing politics, Bentley reveals how he has dealt with genuine catastrophe and trauma. This buried pain places boxing’s shenanigans into sobering perspective because so many of his friends have been murdered on the street.

Bentley has just been stripped of his WBO world middleweight title because the sanctioning body refused permission for him to defend his belt against Shane Mosley Jr this Saturday night at London’s Copper Box Arena. The body rejected his appeal last Friday that he was entitled to face the world-ranked Mosley Jr rather than his mandatory challenger in a first title defence.

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