Sporting Bygones: Prince sets out on the journey to becoming king of the ring throughout the boxing world

He entered sports arenas on gold thrones, rode a magic carpet and even cat-walked into Madison Square Garden.

But, at just 18, Prince Naseem Hamed introduced himself to professional boxing in the less dramatic venue of a the leisure centre in Mansfield in a flyweight contest against 29-year-old Ricky Beard.

It was April 14, 1992, and wearing leopard-skin patterned trunks, Hamed shimmied, shadow-boxed and danced his way to the ring.

He jumped over the top rope and, as his name was called, he executed a forward flip before exploding with punches and retreating to his ring corner in anticipation of the opening bell.

It may be 20 years since that night but the man who followed Hamed to the ring, his former trainer and mentor, Brendan Ingle, remembers first seeing the prodigy in a chance encounter when he was just seven years old.

“I used to do a lot of walking, I would walk from the bottom of Newman Road here next to the church and I’d walk up and I used to pass the school,” says Ingle from his gym at Wincobank, Sheffield.

“I’m going past on the bus and I see this young kid, about six or seven, and he’s fighting two or three kids off and surviving their attacks.

“A couple of days later, I was walking past the local corner shop opposite the school and I see this same little kid talking with his father.

“His father told me that he kept getting picked on at school because he was small – so I got him to bring him down to the club, and from that day on, anywhere I went I took him with me.”

With the likes of Herol ‘Bomber’ Graham, Johnny Nelson and Ryan Rhodes training with Ingle at St Thomas’ Boxing Club, Hamed was in good hands.

Ingle continues: “I had a heated discussion with a fella in the gym about Herol Graham. He told me: ‘Herol Graham was already made when he came to you’.

“I responded: ‘Possibly, but the year before he came with me he got beat in the ABAs; the year he came with me, he won them. And you see that little kid there (pointing to Hamed), when he’s 21, he’ll be the British, Commonwealth, European and World Champion’.

“This guy thought I was mad. I told him, ‘Go and put a bet on it, you’ll get 1000-1.’

“Naz started in the amateurs, won everything up to 18, turned pro and the rest is history.”

Hamed became the British, Commonwealth, European and World champion as Ingle had predicted, in a reign that saw him own the WBC, WBO, IBO and IBF world featherweight championship belts, as well as the WBC International super bantamweight championship.

But it all started on that April evening in Mansfield, when Hamed despatched Beard with a right to the body which scored a technical knockout midway through the second round.

The fight had been scheduled for six three-minute rounds but in the time it took Hamed to get rid of his opponent he had shown glimpses of the speed, agility and showmanship that defined his career.

John Ingle, son of Brendan, helped train Hamed throughout his amateur days and the beginning of his pro career.

He said: “Naz going into a fight was like you going into a shop and buying something.

“You were never on edge, because having seen him spar with people like Neville Brown (the British middleweight champion of the time), Johnny Nelson, Clifton Mitchell, Kevin Adamson and Ryan (Rhodes) he used to give them nightmares and you’d just think that even somebody that size, if he’s keeping up with fighters who are British champions or rated in the world top 10 like Johnny and Ryan, you just knew what was going to happen.

“The kid was never out of the gym. As soon as he’d done at school he didn’t even stop at his house.

“Looking back to that first fight, on paper Ricky Beard looked and seemed a stiff test for a debut fight, but with Naz, he never had any butterflies or anything like that, he was just straight in, get the job done and out.

“Then he’d come back to the locker room and say; ‘When am I fighting next?’ He lived to train and fight. Different kids get nervous before they fight, but with him it was unique in that nothing ever fazed him.”

In 1998 Hamed split from Brendan Ingle and his sons John and Dominic, and left the gym he had trained in since he was seven.

Hamed’s record stands at 36 wins from 37 fights, with 31 of those by way of knockout.

His sole defeat came at the hands of Marco Antonio Barrera in 2004, when he lost on a unanimous points decision at the MGM Grand, Las Vegas.