Name us a more fascinating father in boxing than Daniel Dubois’ dad and we’ll show you a flying pig.
Stanley Dubois – real name Dave – is under the cosh from boxing fans after throwing a lavish 70-person party at his Essex mansion just hours before his son’s defeat by Oleksandr Usyk in the biggest fight of his career.
How could Stanley, the boxing community wonders, expect Daniel to make merry with complete strangers, a misstep which saw him arrive later than ideal and lose his parking spot at Wembley?
It is a question only Stanley and Daniel can answer. The Times broke the initial report of the party, though it remains unclear to what extent the boxer consented to it going ahead.
But it is also worth asking: where would Dubois have been without his father in the first place? Dynamite has called his dad a ‘legend’ and a ‘prophet,’ crediting him for his rise in the brutal arenas of boxing.
Stanley says he had a vision before Daniel was born that he would be a champion. That much has come true – the London-born bone crusher went into Saturday’s bout holding the IBF title, though he was unable to unite the belts.
‘Before he was born I had a vision that he would become a world champion boxer,’ he told The Times this year.
‘Then I saw that he had a lot of muscle and so I said to myself, I’m going to get him into the game as soon as I can. I was training him up by the time he was four years old.
‘A lot of people don’t have the vision I have. When you do have one, as Malcolm X did or any great leader, it comes from an outside force. It doesn’t come from your mother, your father — it comes from God.’
He took Daniel to his first boxing gym aged nine and would have him study VHS tapes of Frank Bruno and Lennox Lewis – who was the last British unified heavyweight world champion – to hone his craft.
Stanley has had 11 kids via two marriages and homeschooled them from a council flat in Deptford, southeast London.
Breakfast wasn’t Golden Nuggets or Coco Pops. Daniel’s daily morning palette was an entire chicken. But he wasn’t just fed with protein, he was nourished with the word of God.
In the living room, the children would recite the first verse of Psalm 144: ‘Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who strengthens my hands for war and my fingers for battle.’
Alongside that, hours of push-ups. Daniel used to do his with his fists closed – he still has the scars to this day – for up to three hours at a time. There would be no food or drink until they had finished. When he was five years old, he broke the world record for the most consecutive push-ups completed by a child at that age.
‘You can do amazing things in a stable like where Jesus was born,’ Stanley once said.
Don Charles, Dubois’ trainer, holds this education in high esteem.
‘It was very tribal. Stanley Dubois is perceived within the boxing fraternity as this crazy, hard taskmaster,’ he told The Guardian. ‘He is – but there’s a method to that madness. It turned out to be a genius move as it motivated Daniel.’
Daniel isn’t the only bruiser to graduate from his father’s school of combat. His sister Caroline is the WBC lightweight champion, his brother prince had some amateur fights, while his brother Solomon often trains with Daniel.
Given all of this, you’d expect Stanley to have some sort of background in the sport. Not so. In fact, he actively disliked boxing when he was growing up. ‘I got punched in the nose once and never went back,’ he said.
Stanley was born in west London to a pair of Grenadian immigrants. By 16, he was the father of twins and homeless. This was no salubrious upbringing. His bed for the night was the hard floor of a laundrette.
What he did have was an entrepreneurial spirit. The details are hard to independently verify, but Stanley picked himself out of the doldrums with one of the old-fashioned routes up the social ladder – by becoming a market trader.
Posters were his game. London, New York, and the Caribbean were his playground. He claims that by age 23, he was the most successful street trader in the world, forking in millions.
‘We were taking ten grand every Sunday at Camden Market,’ he said in a different interview with The Times.
His first week in New York raked in $40,000. ‘I had the gift of the gab back then. There was no one in New York taking money like me.’
An extraterrestrial-themed poster banked him a fortune. ‘I had a few artists draw me some images and I came out with a poster called, “Take me to your dealer.”
‘It was an alien landing on earth passing over a Rizla, and it just blew up. That poster sold millions because people started wholesaling from me. I sold 80,000 copies to someone in France.’
The profit margins were reportedly so good, at least according to him, that you wonder why more people don’t go into making posters. Each one, he says, cost just 5p to produce but sold for £2 – off print runs of 2,000.
While he was no boxer himself, Stanley maintains that their ancestry holds the key. One such forebear, Silvia Dubois, was an 18th-century slave and bare-knuckle boxer in New Jersey.
A single punch almost killed her slave mistress and cost her her life – but instead she was let free.
Often boxers tell us stories of pent-up aggression, of taking out their frustrations with the world on the bags in the gym to keep themselves from darker pursuits.
Daniel describes a different childhood – he says that when he wasn’t boxing, he was distracting himself with other activities such as chess, board games, and siwmming.
Father Charles felt it was too dangerous to have his kids grow up in schools and hanging around on the streets – he cites the dangers of growing up in London, particularly for a family of their background, as a motive for raising his kids behind closed doors.
Their few ventures into the public arena often consisted of a boxing gym trip. he did a circuit of amateur clubs in London: ‘Repton, Dale Youth, Lynn, West Ham, Fisher and Islington.’
Eventually it made him a British amateur champion. A commonwealth titlist. Then a professional with a record of 22 wins from 25 fights, including 21 knockouts. Jarrell Miller, Filip Hrgovic, Anthony Joshua, all dispatched by his devastating right hand.
To this day, while Dubois has a fleet of trainers around him, his dad remains influential. And whoever he is preparing for, his father will come out with the same motivational line: Your opponent is working harder than you.
Daniel’s cloistered upbringing has an evident impact on his life even today. His phone, it is understood, does not even have the internet on it. Does he even know videos of his dad’s party were leaked? Does he even care that people are talking about it?
For all of the reaction on social media to the revelry, which has seen Stanley painted as some sort of traitor to the British boxing establishment, the man who jeopardised our chance to have a unified heavyweight champion again, Daniel’s opinion of his father is the polar opposite.
We return to the question of where he would have been without Stanley, and Dynamite’s answer is crystal clear.
‘I wouldn’t be here without him,’ he told Boxing News.
‘[My upbringing has] prepared and strengthened me. Sometimes you have to go through hell to get to paradise.’
