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

“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.

Bentley admits to being “disappointed” and “I don’t feel as if I’ve been treated like a champion”; but he still intends to beat Mosley Jr in the first bout of a new six-fight deal with the American promoter Zuffa. But, as the 31-year-old talks in raw and moving detail, Bentley draws me back to the streets around his old council estate in Battersea where his friends were stabbed or shot dead.

“I don’t want a sob story,” he says, “but boxing definitely saved me. I got out of a lot of trouble because of boxing. A lot of things happened on the estate and I was at the gym. I missed things by the skin of my teeth. But I’ve been chased. I’ve been shot at. I’d be scared for my life. But, as a teenager, you become immune to it.”

His expression mixes resignation and relief. “I’m blessed and fortunate enough to be alive.”

Bentley has lost three of his 26 fights and, in the buildup to his last defeat, against Nathan Heaney in November 2023, a close friend was killed in Battersea. “I’m from a background where you become numbed. Of course it’s sad and it hurts but I’ve lost friends more than once in the lead-up to a fight. That time was crazy because my friend got stabbed by someone we knew who needed money. He saw my friend and tried to steal his watch. My friend turned round and said: ‘We know each other. How can you try and rob me?’ They got into a scuffle and the other guy pulled out a knife and stabbed him multiple times. My friend died on the spot.

“We got the phone call and flew down there. The paramedics had arrived and the body was still there. [The dead man’s] brother was in bits. I went to him and said: ‘I don’t even know what to say to you. This is so hard.’” How many friends has he lost? “To knife and gun crime? It’s a lot, man.”

Do the deaths run into double figures? “Definitely. I can’t count how many friends I’ve lost. The first time I lost someone to knife crime, I was 12. He got stabbed outside his house. Even the night before I fought Danny Dignum [whom Bentley knocked out in May 2024], another friend was shot. I blocked that out and got on with the fight. It made me feel guilty that I’m celebrating my win and my friend’s just lost his life and his family are in bits.”

Bentley has real presence but he needs to pause before resuming: “People still live the same lives. That’s what they’re accustomed to and they can’t break out of it. They’re still people I’ve got genuine love for and I just hope I don’t have to lose no more friends to the streets.”

It must have been wounding to face death when he was just 12? “Yes,” he says softly. “It was mad. I remember going home that evening and lots of police were racing about. It was the summer and we were about to break up from school and we could tell someone had got stabbed.

“The next day was the last day of school and someone told me: ‘Yeah, so-and-so got stabbed last night.’ I was like: ‘You’re lying.’ I’d seen the commotion but I didn’t know it was my friend. You feel guilty because you’re not there for them. It’s traumatic but there’s nothing you can do. Even last month another friend of mine got shot in the back and passed away. He was a bus driver and I saw him as a little brother.”

Bentley is intelligent and the words flow from him. “There comes a day when something happens and you don’t hurt as much. But I still go round the estate to see my mum and things happen. I’d love to move her out. I want my kids to go see their grandma. But, listen, we’re not in the middle of Gaza where people are going through so much worse than us. We’re still privileged to be in positions where I can find a way to move myself out.”

We have a mutual friend in Isaac Chamberlain, the cruiserweight who grew up in Brixton. Before he was also saved by boxing, Isaac sold drugs when he was 11. Did Bentley follow that same route? “Yes, 100%. That’s how I’m around these people that I’ve lost in London. To us, that’s normal. Or it was. Now that I have a kid of my own, I never want him to be in an environment like that. That’s why I can’t let boxing get the better of me. I don’t care what I’ve got to go through. I’ve got to make sure my son’s good and if I have more kids in the future I don’t want them to be around people doing things like that.”

Bentley only began boxing when he was 17. Before then he had been a footballer. “I stopped playing at 16,” he says. “People were saying: ‘If you’re not in an academy by now you’re not going to make it.’ So I was like: ‘I’m going to college now.’ But I started taking boxing seriously when I made a conscious decision to leave university where I was studying sports science. I wanted to see if I could be a boxer.

“I was working part-time at Sainsbury’s and I’d take a Santander bike to the gym in Bermondsey. Pay £2 and, if you get there in under half an hour, you don’t get charged another £2.”

Bentley laughs before he remembers the first words of genuine validation he heard in his life when his amateur trainer told him that he had the talent to become a champion. “Oh, Steve Hiser, what a man,” he says. “He took so many kids off the street and told me: ‘You can be a champion. You can win things.’ That sparked my confidence and got me believing.”

He had become the British middleweight champion when Hiser died in 2023. “He was proud,” Bentley says, “but he was on his deathbed.”

Bentley fought for the WBO world title against Janibek Alimkhanuly in Las Vegas in November 2022. He lost on points to a fighter who, three years later, failed a drugs test. Bentley entered his own spell in the wilderness. After beating Brad Pauls in December 2024 to regain his British title and become European champion, Bentley went 16 months without a fight as the machinations of boxing scuppered numerous bouts. “It was no fault of my own,” Bentley says. “No injury, nothing.”

Did he make any money during those 16 months? “I didn’t get no pay. I had to start looking for jobs and when I couldn’t get any we went back to [his former promoter] Frank Warren and he was kind enough to give me an advance. But after my next fight I’m using that money to pay back everything.”

Bentley points out that he was on the verge of becoming world champion but he ended up trying to get work as an Amazon delivery driver. “My cousin asked me why I wasn’t fighting. It’s frustrating because I ain’t got the answers. So he told me to sign up to Amazon deliveries. It’s a zero-hours contract and you work when you’re available. If you’re not training one day, you could do a 12-hour shift of delivery work. I downloaded the app and put in my postcode but there were no jobs near me. I refreshed it every day and even tried to use my mum’s address to see if I can get any jobs there. But nothing came up.”

In what other elite sport would a world-class operator be reduced to scrabbling around for a delivery job? “There is no other sport like it,” Bentley says. “It’s crazy but it makes my journey more unique.”

What did his partner say when he went 16 months without steady pay? “Luckily for me, my missus has got a good job so she just cracks on with it.”

He finally returned to the ring seven months ago when he stopped Endry Saavedra to win the WBO interim title at the O₂ Arena. In July Bentley was upgraded to being the WBO’s world champion after Alimkhanuly vacated the title.

Bentley left Warren’s Queensberry Promotions, and a month ago it was announced that he had signed a multi-fight deal with Zuffa Boxing, the US-based outfit headed by Dana White. “I need to be where I’m appreciated,” Bentley says, “and Zuffa offered me a long-term deal with better money. Look, Queensberry have brought me back from losses and done loads, but I felt unappreciated by them.”

He adds: “Of course people are critical of Zuffa because they’re new in boxing. But they’ve got two world champions in my weight class in Aaron McKenna [who holds the IBF belt] and Carlos Adames [the WBC title-holder]. There are loads of fights for me so it was a no-brainer.”

Amid all these changes Bentley has been dealing with the fallout from the WBO’s insistence that he should fight their mandatory challenger, Yoenli Hernández. “They wanted me to fight Hernández,” Bentley says, “but they had an agreement with Queensberry. After Hernández’s last fight, they put out a tweet saying great performance. Denzel Bentley, the champion, gets a voluntary before the end of the year, and then he fights his mandatory [Hernández] next year. That was the original plan I want to stick to. Hernández can’t fight until next year but I can’t be inactive. I also have a family to feed.”

After the initial disappointment when hearing that his appeal to be allowed to fight Mosley before Hernández had been rejected, Bentley says: “Weirdly enough I feel relief that the saga’s now over. We can move forward and look to win another world title.”

He stresses that “this changes nothing in my approach to fighting Mosley Jr. He’s a good, tough, awkward fighter. He throws shots and he’s a dog in the ring.”

Bentley loves fighting even if he hates the business of boxing. And, so in a hard-edged scrap on Saturday night, he will feel at home in the ring. “My past experiences have helped me build a lot of resilience. I’m ready to go out there on Saturday and put on a show. It’s an exciting new chapter in my life and we’ll see where it takes me.”