Workington's Darren Askew: back from the brink for bare-knuckle debut

It is a dark yet complicated story and Askew, a decorated professional fighter who is coming out of retirement to make his bare-knuckle debut in his home town at the WBKB IV show this weekend, is unsure about telling a certain part of it.

“You might not want to write this bit,” he says. Yet I tell him to trust in sharing the full truth. Askew says he was tormented by a loss of identity after the end of his professional career, which had seen him win state titles in Australia and fight for a world title. This, alongside the death of a fellow boxer, a cocaine addiction and a conflicted mind which has since benefited from an ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) diagnosis, led him to the ultimate despair.

“I felt like I’d lost a lot of respect for myself,” Askew says. “I was at that point where I was walking the dogs, Chelsea [his wife] was putting the girls to bed and I was thinking, ‘Right, how am I going to do this?’ I’d be thinking about who would find me – something as horrific as a stranger finding your body. It’s not right. But that’s as far as I got with it.”

The aspect that Askew is reluctant to repeat is his belief that cocaine, at this stage, helped. He felt that it “slowed my mind down” and gave him the clarity to avoid killing himself. Yet he also accepts that using the illegal substance to “self-medicate” was not sustainable, and wreaked other damage.

The 40-year-old is now in a healthier place, having turned to Christianity to salvage his thoughts and sense of worth. The focus of boxing again, a decade after retirement, also helps. On Saturday, at the Fibrus Community Stadium, Askew will top the bill at WBKB IV when he fights Bakhytor Kudratov for the European lightweight title.

During his professional career in Australia, Askew won two state titles before retiring in 2015 after a controversial world title fight (Image: Submitted)

There are “transferable” skills between gloved boxing and bare-knuckle, Askew says, but also a degree of the unknown as he returns to the ring. “As a pro boxer, I would describe myself as a tactician, a technician,” he says, “But going into bare-knuckle, I can’t account for what I’ll do.

“Myself and Dave Tennyson, who’s coaching me, have talked about tactics, but I don’t know if I can visualise myself fully executing what he’s wanting. In the end it’s a fight. As a five-year-old kid I was in a lot of scrapes at school and it was usually older or bigger kids who’d come after me. My dad would say to me, ‘You’re fighting for your life’. That’s what I’ll do here. I’ll be moving my head and avoiding the shots, but at the same time I might go absolutely mental. I really don’t know.”

Askew’s path to this comeback has been strewn with difficulty. During his time as a pro in Australia he felt guilty at having left home just as his mum was diagnosed with breast cancer, while his father later suffered from prostate cancer. He fought impressively Down Under, becoming the state champion of Queensland and Victoria at light-welterweight and light-middleweight respectively, but a highly controversial defeat to Anthony Taylor in a WBU world super-lightweight title fight in 2015 tarnished his love for the sport – as, profoundly, did the death of his friend Braydon Smith as a result of injuries in a fight.

Askew came home that year and opened the Empire Gym in Workington whilst working as an electrician, but says a psychological state rooted in his childhood returned with a vengeance. “There was a void,” he says. “Looking back, the wheels had come off mentally. I was broken. A number of illnesses in our family were hard, and I was also suffering with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] after Braydon’s death. As much as I loved boxing, I hated it as well. I felt betrayed by it. When I was teaching boxing in the gym, I was thinking, ‘I could be leading this person to death’.

“I had a lot of internal conflict. At work, there was a lot of downtime – my mind was racing and a lot of it was negative thoughts. I didn’t know who I was. Everything felt like it fell apart.”

Askew says he was using cocaine “quite heavily” at this time, to try and intercept his “self-loathing”. When Chelsea’s mum died, he says he did not give his wife enough support because of his spiralling sense of being a “victim”. Eventually he was diagnosed with ADHD, and while this helped him put certain things into context, the addict in him still tried to intervene by seeking higher doses of medication.

It took a different venture for Askew to start moving forward more thoroughly. “My contract had run out at work, I phoned my mate Nath Beardsmore and said, ‘I need your help. I’m not good at the moment’. He was working at Bournemouth on a solar panel farm. I went down there and lived on the site in a caravan for four months.

“We’d go to the gym every evening, and over the weeks I’d seen Nath and other lads talking to this powerlifter. One night he asked about my boxing career, and I burst out crying. I said, ‘I don’t want to be here any more’. He invited me to come to church with him on the Sunday. At that point, I would have done absolutely anything not to feel how I was feeling.”

Askew was a talented junior boxer in Workington before progressing to professional status (Image: Ian Kershaw)

Askew said he had been open-minded to God and religion before, but a conversation in the evangelist church helped him articulate for the first time that he was a drug addict. The person he spoke to prayed for him. “I cried like a little girl. And he was so humble. I thought, ‘What a nice man. You do not know me, and I’ve done some horrible things in my time…’”

He has attended church regularly since then and underwent confirmation last year. Bible teachings helped Askew organise his thoughts and reconnect with old friends, while being part of the Narcotics Anonymous fellowship taught him how rewarding it was to help others in difficulty. Then, “fed up of being somewhat lazy”, he decided to focus on fighting again.

These steps have enabled Askew to look back with a clearer perspective. “Even as a kid I remember feeling different – sad, lonely, stuff like that,” he says. “Typical ADHD stuff, to be fair.

“When I got my diagnosis a couple of years ago, I went into a lot of resentment, because in my mind I’d been robbed of a life I could have lived. I actually got diagnosed with hyperactivity in 1987 but it wasn’t what it is today. I grew up being told to keep away from Smarties, e-numbers and so on.

“I was wild. I got into judo, and put the hyper-focus on that, but it only subdued symptoms, didn’t take them away. Same with boxing. I’ve lost friendships, girlfriends, jobs, all sorts – things that could have been prevented if I’d had a normal brain. I felt like I’d been robbed by the system.”

Askew feels that his ADHD mind meant his boxing career was volatile in how he veered from spells of supreme focus and losses of concentration. Yet he also says: “I’ve lived a very vibrant life” which brought him success in the ring.

Boxing was an ingrained passion given that Askew’s father, Raymond was an amateur while his grandfather, also Raymond, fought professionally. They both helped teach Askew how to stick up for himself at school, while he revered his grandfather. “He was a bit of a scrapper in the day, quite fiery, but a very good bloke with a good moral compass,” Askew says. “He taught me a lot about being respectful.

“As a junior, I got stopped seven times in my first 15 fights. I wasn’t taking the training seriously enough, and I remember my grandfather saying, ‘Maybe boxing isn’t for you’. I felt like I was getting cast out of the family. I used that as a lot of motivation. The next fight I won, I remember going to tell him about it, somewhat passive-aggressively. But I just wanted him to be proud. And he was – I know that.”

Askew revered his grandfather, Raymond, who was also a professional boxer, and donated a purse from a fight to Alzheimer's research a year before Raymond died (Image: Submitted)

Askew honoured his grandfather when, in 2009, he donated his purse from a fight in Australia to Alzheimer’s Disease research. Raymond, a year before he died, was in the advanced stages of the degenerative condition. The gesture earned Askew a British Boxing Board of Control sportsmanship award. “It was the last thing I could do for him, really,” he says, showing me the trophy.

“I’ve always felt that one day I’ll get to talk to him again. I believe we go to heaven if we repent for our sins. I always pray for him and other grandparents we’ve lost. Losing him was monumental. I was devastated.”

Askew overcame his mixed years as a junior, having started at Workington Boys Club, to become a highly skilled amateur and then professional. Yet he also survived a period when, living in Manchester as a young man, he was drawn into a dangerous crowd. “I’m not necessarily a bad person. I’ve just made some bad decisions, which in turn have led to bad things. I was 22 when I moved to Manchester and everybody I was around was a criminal. A lot of them are either dead or in jail now.

“I hadn’t lived the life they had. All these kids knew was drug dealing and robbing people. I was getting into it and thinking I was a gangster. I absolutely wasn’t. There were a few situations…and I realised, ‘I’m not that guy’.”

Askew fled that sinister scene and, because he and Chelsea had family in Australia, they decided to relocate as he focused more firmly on professional boxing. They were mainly based in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, and as well as honing his fighting skills, Askew trained with the Brisbane Broncos rugby league stars.

The southpaw boxed skilfully to win those state belts, both of which are on show in his lounge, and eventually he earned a world title shot, yet a contentious 12th-round stoppage in the WBU fight against Taylor left a bitterness that took time to deal with. “It meant a lot at the time, but now it’s put to bed. Certain things should never have happened, but that’s boxing – it’s a seedy business, full of sharks. As a kid I’d boxed for plastic trophies for nine years and loved it. Now it was all about money. It led me to some bad decisions in accepting fights at short notice too.”

What happened to Braydon Smith also threw a dark shadow over Askew’s relationship with boxing. On March 14, 2015 the 23-year-old featherweight from Toowoomba fought Filipino boxer John Vincent Moralde, who had gone up in weight. “He couldn’t punch hard enough to knock Braydon out, but that would have been much better. Instead it was like getting hit on the head very regularly with a rubber mallet. After 12 three-minute rounds he [Braydon] ended up with a subdural hematoma, a bleed on the front of his forehead. He collapsed as he was leaving the venue and was rushed to hospital.

“I wasn’t a stranger to the idea something like that could happen. I’d seen Eubank-Watson and things like that. But having it happen so close to home was different.”

Smith’s father, Brendon, was also Askew’s coach and the Cumbrian visited his friend’s bedside as, after two days on life support, Braydon died.

“He was an intelligent bloke, who had trained to be a lawyer. In my dealings with him he was a respectful young man, a bit green and fresh, still learning. Seeing his little brother hold his hand, his mum and dad stood beside him, his grandparents and girlfriend there…I was very numb, and in shock. I’d always felt like I was invincible, then all of a sudden that happened.”

This scrambled Askew’s mind to the point that, in his next fight, his view was that “I need to find out if I’m going to die”. This reckless approach saw him knocked out but no greater damage was caused. “For a long time afterwards, watching boxing was difficult,” he says.

Askew, right, pictured with Carlisle bare-knuckle boxer Danny Christie, fights Bakhtyor Kudratov for a European title at the WBKB IV show in Workington this weekend (Image: Submitted)

The tenth anniversary of Braydon’s death has been on Askew’s mind, but he has a more philosophical view on boxing as he prepares to fight again. When he takes on the experienced Uzbekistani, Kudratov, on Saturday night, Askew says, “We’re both agreeing we can hurt each other. But I’ve got nothing personal against him. There’s no beef or anything like that.

“Since the fight was made, January was a tough month. I had an internal conflict of, ‘Am I upholding my Christian values if I start thinking I want to knock this boy out?’ It was difficult, but I got over that.”

Askew says the idea of progressing from WBKB IV to the fast-growing BKFC bare-knuckle platform is appealing, but he is reluctant to look too far ahead. “This fight is for a European title, but I feel like I’ve already won. It’s more like part of the recovery journey for me. I don’t need to do it, as such, but I feel like I’m showing mum and dad the person I really am.

“I messed up. I wasn’t well, but I’m baring my soul to the world – even if, in the words of Narcotics Anonymous, I’ll always have one foot in the door with it. Once an addict, always an addict, and you’ve got to keep doing things right.”

Askew’s young family return home and the dogs scamper to the door. An interview of moving intensity is almost over but the boxer smiles when he says: “What’s class about this fight is that there’s no pressure. Winning or losing doesn’t faze me.

“I’ve still got my wife, my girls, my house. When I felt worthless I felt I’d lost everything. Now I’ll just go in there prepared to go out on my shield.”