Josh Warrington, featherweight boxing champion and…dental technician? (2024)

Josh Warrington was 23 years old when he added the European featherweight title to a collection that already included British and Commonwealth belts. He did it in style, knocking out his Italian opponent Davide Dieli in the fourth round of their fight in front of a raucous crowd in the First Direct Arena in Leeds.

On Monday morning he was back at work — not in the gym but in the dental lab where he’d been working as a dental technician since leaving school at the age of 18. It was only supposed to be a stopgap job — a favour from the lab’s owner who was a friend of Warrington’s dad and offered to take the teenager on for a three-month trial while he decided what to do with his life.

“He said he’d give me some cleaning to do and stuff like that,” said Warrington. “I didn’t have any idea what a dental technician was at that point. All I found out was that I could make my own gum shields and thought that would be a plus point.”

Warrington had been a decent amateur boxer but never received the call up to box for England that he was desperate for. After a series of disappointments that included an opponent he’d beaten getting chosen to wear the England vest over him, Warrington decided he’d had his fill of the amateur game and was going to turn pro. There was just one problem: he was only 16.

“I managed to come out of school with 11 GCSEs, all A-C passes, but then I was like, what do I do with myself now? It was two years before I could turn pro,” he said. “Some of my pals had ideas of going to university so they were off to college. Others were going to work for family businesses or doing a bit of labour work. They had their future mapped out, whereas I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do.”

Warrington toyed with the idea of joining the royal marines. They’d come into his school to give a talk and he liked the sound of life as a soldier. As a kid he’d seen his dad (now also his trainer) train soldiers, putting them through gruelling fitness circuits that pushed them to their physical limits. He could see himself being a part of all that.

He started to get all the paperwork together but that was as far as it went. Why?

“My ol’ fella talked me out of it,” Warrington said. “He told me to wait and see how I got on with the boxing. That I could always go back to being a marine later if I wanted to. He said I had too much talent to just let it go.”

In the meantime, Warrington still needed to find a way to fill his time. He enrolled in sixth form to study sport and psychology and scored an A* for one of his first assignments. But after three months he’d had enough.

“I just didn’t have the passion for studying. It wasn’t there,” Warrington said. “I started not going to sixth form. I’d wake up and think, ‘I can’t be bothered today.’ So I left all that behind and bummed about for a month or two. Didn’t do anything. I had no purpose. I was just helping my dad doing little odd jobs with him or looking for jobs in the paper.”

But then came the day he was introduced to the Beever Dental Laboratory, where it did not take long for Warrington’s new boss to recognise that his new employee’s sharp brain and desire to learn could be useful. The fighter quickly found himself moved into the “model room” where he was to assist the dental technicians in their craft making fake teeth, gold crowns, veneers and dentures.

He was enthusiastic about his work. Eager to learn. Asked lots of questions and dutifully watched the other technicians to understand more about their craft.

“The way I looked at it was, I could have been out in the rain, digging up roads, doing really hard physical labour but I wasn’t,” said Warrington. “I was indoors, in the warm. Making constructive stuff. It was quite creative — at one point, I had 20 different gum shields in all different colours. And I was getting paid. I’d gone from a £30 a week government EMA (education maintenance allowance) funding to £600 apprentice dental technician wage.”

After his three-month trial period was up, Warrington’s boss said he wanted him to stay on. But there was a catch: in order for him to progress from being an assistant, he needed to be qualified. That meant going to university. His boss offered to pay for the course on the condition that Warrington promised to give it 100 per cent effort.

Thanks to his impressive GCSE grades, Warrington was able to enrol at Leeds University, where he signed up for a four-year course. By the end of it, he would be a qualified dental technician. It wasn’t exactly how he’d seen his life going, but Warrington enjoyed his work and the qualification would give him something to fall back on if his boxing career fell flat.

By the time he was 18 and had turned pro, Warrington’s weeks were a logistical nightmare. He was working in the lab four days a week, studying in lectures the other day, running in the early mornings, training in the gym in the evenings and trying to keep a relationship going with a girl he’d met named Natasha (who he would end up marrying).

While his friends spent their weekends going out “getting pissed and letting their hair down,” he was in the gym on Saturday mornings and locked away at home on Sundays to work on his assignments. Add in the graft he put into promoting himself as a fighter — doing interviews whenever requested and traveling around the city to sell tickets to his fights — and it’s little wonder that Warrington soon reached a breaking point.

“At one stage I thought something’s got to give. I can’t do all this,” he said. “There were times I was going into university and falling asleep in lectures. I was missing deadlines on my assignments because I didn’t have enough time to finish them. I just felt everything was against me.”

His dad, Sean O’Hagen, had always said that if it came to it, he would have to put his boxing on the backburner until he finished his course. After seeing his son put so much into his studies and get so close to qualifying, O’Hagen couldn’t bear to see him walk away. But Warrington didn’t want to give up boxing. He didn’t want to give up any of it.

At just the time that he needed it, Warrington received what he calls a “kick up the backside.” It came from an old school friend who he was delivering fight tickets on the same weekend that a big 21st birthday party was planned for a mutual friend. Warrington was on the invite list, but with a fight on the horizon, it was out of the question. He was envious of his mate, though, and told him as much. The response made him sit up and take notice.

“It’ll be the same old, won’t it?” Warrington recalled his friend saying. “Josh, we’ve been doing the same thing every weekend since we were 18. It’s boring. Same places, same faces, just getting pissed. Everyone would give anything to be where you are. Everyone’s proud of you. You’re doing really well.”

Those words were all Warrington needed to push him over the finish line and get the qualification he’d worked so hard for.

By the time he became European champion in October 2014 — his 19th pro fight — Warrington was headlining shows on Sky Sports. He’d reduced his hours to three days a week to fit in sparring sessions and started picking up a few sponsors, but he knew that anything could happen at any stage. He could get injured or lose a fight.

So he’d fight on television on a Saturday night and stroll into work on Monday morning tired and aching but with a smile on his face.

In the weeks before a fight, he’d find 10 minutes here and there to do newspaper interviews and squeezing in radio appearances on his lunch breaks. Delivery drivers who came into the lab to pick up or drop off jobs would do a double-take when they were greeted by a guy who looked just like the “Leeds Warrior” dressed in a white lab coat.

“They’d come in and say, ‘I’ve seen your face before somewhere. Are you that boxer? What are you doing here?'” Warrington said. “When I told them it was my day job they didn’t believe me. ‘Ah give over, you must be a millionaire.’”

It was early 2015 when Warrington’s boss decided enough was enough. He sat down with the European champ and told him that he was really going places now, but that there would always be a chair in the lab with his name on it if he needed it. For now, though, he told Warrington to focus on putting everything into his boxing, safe in the knowledge that everyone at Beever Dental was firmly behind him.

That was all the encouragement Warrington needed. By that time, there was talk of some big money fights coming up and his sponsors were investing more too. So the fighter said farewell to his white coat and dentures, probably for good. It’s a time he looks back on with great fondness but admits it’s not something he is likely to go back to.

“I always try to give 100 per cent to whatever I do and while I was doing it, I found it therapeutic,” Warrington said. “When you know you’re making something that will be going into a patient’s mouth, you want to try and make it as best you can. It was a bit of an arty, sciency craft and I did enjoy that.

“But boxing was always the passion. When I finish fighting, I’ll probably still do something around the sport because then it doesn’t feel like work. I have a few ideas of what I’d like to do when I retire, but I’ll be honest — dental technician isn’t right up there.”

(Top photo: Nigel Roddis / Getty Images)

Sarah Shephard spent 10 years at Sport magazine before becoming Deputy Head of Content at The Coaches' Voice. She has also written for publications such as The Times, The Guardian and The Sunday Times Magazine, among others. Follow Sarah on Twitter @SarahShepSport