GEORGE GROVES’S announcement calling time on his professional boxing career at the age of 30 is in keeping with a fighter whose career stands as a monument to a fierce independence of will, spirit and mind. 

The Londoner and avid Chelsea fan can retire satisfied that he does so as one of the bravest, toughest, most skilled and eminently watchable practitioners of the noble art these islands have ever produced. 

From his debut as a pro in 2008, Groves exuded the aura of a young man in boxing but not of boxing. In other words, he was never less than self-possessed, emitting a quiet, steely confidence that manifested in the aura of a fighter who seemed to exist on a different psychological and emotional plane than his peers.

My abiding memory of his career will always be his immense performance against Carl Froch in their first clash in 2013. Against all the odds and punditry going into the fight, Groves gave Froch one of the hardest tests of his own storied career.

Not only did the then 25-year-old give his veteran opponent a torrid time in the ring that night, he gave him a torrid time during the build-up. The way he managed to get inside Froch’s head and unsettle him was remarkable to witness, redolent of a psychological battering. 

When, in the final press conference prior to the fight, Groves told Froch that he would come out in the first round and take the centre of the ring and would then hit him with two right hands, one after the other, the collective gasp of the assembled boxing writers was audible. Either George Groves is mad or we are, they could have been forgiven for thinking.

Yet come fight night what turned out to be one of the most memorable first rounds ever fought in a British ring unfolded exactly as Groves predicted. He did come out and command the centre of the ring and he hit Froch with two right hands, one after the other. Moreover, he also in that first round put a by now frazzled Carl Froch down on the canvas for only the second time in his career. 

Unfortunately for Grove, his opponent that night, though technically flawed, was a fighter for whom the term “granite chin” was invented. For when it came to Froch, only massed cannons could ever put him down and keep him there. 

Groves hit the now-retired world champion with everything he had for six rounds, but ultimately the fight was won by Froch’s ability to take punishment rather than Groves’s ability to deliver it.

By the ninth Groves had punched himself out and Froch, a notoriously slow starter and strong finisher, forced the stoppage.
Groves refused to accept that referee Howard Foster was right to stop the fight and neither did most of the fans who packed out the Manchester Arena that night. 

They booed Groves into the ring at the start of the fight and they cheered him out in appreciation of a performance that was breathtaking in its audacity and skill, despite his losing. 

It truly was a beautiful moment to savour for a young fighter who’d gone in with a different trainer than the one he began his training camp for the fight with, having split with Adam Booth 10 weeks out. 

Despite the controversy surrounding the stoppage, it set up a whopper of a rematch at Wembley Stadium the following summer in front of 80,000 spectators. It was this event that announced boxing’s rebirth as a mass spectator sport in Britain, setting the trend of stadium fights that have come to define the sport in the years since.

There was to be no controversy over the ending second time round, not when Froch concluded the issue with a devastating knockout in the eighth round that he chose as a fitting moment to call time and retire himself. This said, given his bitter response to Groves’s retirement, it is arguable that despite winning the fight in the ring against his younger opponent, he lost the argument. 

Such a crushing knockout as the one Groves suffered that night would have ended the career of many fighters, but not him. He was determined to win a world title no matter how many attempts it took and finally did at fourth time of asking, stopping Fedor Chudinov at Bramall Lane in Sheffield in 2017 for the vacant WBA super middleweight title. 

However, despite winning the world title — and even despite his victory over long time nemesis James De Gale in 2011 — for Groves the fight that will probably always be foremost in his mind in years to come his 2016 clash with Germany’s Eduard Gutknecht. 

After the fight, which Groves one by unanimous decision, and which should have been stopped before the final bell, the German collapsed in his dressing room with a brain aneurysm.

What followed charts the dark side of a sport which for all the money, glitz and glamour it wallows in, ultimately ascribes a nobility to man’s brutality to man. Three years on and the brain damage suffered by Gutknecht that night ensures that he will never fully recover. 

Whenever the subject came up afterwards, Groves, you could tell, was conflicted by Gutknecht’s tragic fate and entered the ring carrying the memory around like an incubus. 

By the time of his final outing in Saudi Arabia against Liverpool’s Callum Smith in September last year — doing battle for the Muhammad Ali Trophy in the final of the World Super Series super middleweight tournament — he was a shadow of what had gone before. 

He appeared flat and weak; the timing, defence and venom that he normally brought to the ring deserting like him like an unfaithful partner. By the end, battered and bruised after enduring a merciless dismantling at the hands of his younger and stronger opponent, the writing was on the wall.

George Groves graced boxing with memorable performances against the best of his era. He fought 32 times, won 28 and lost 4.

However his biggest loss was against Gutknecht, despite the result, whose fate will no doubt forever haunt his thoughts whenever contemplating his career.

It is for this reason that boxing will miss George Groves more than he will miss boxing.