One of New Zealand’s leading heavyweight boxers, Junior Fa, is leaving the ring in his prime for a new, more peaceful life. He tells Steve Kilgallon why he’s traded pugilism for philosophy, peace, and veganism.
“I looked down at my fists,” says Junior Fa, probably New Zealand’s second-best heavyweight boxer, “and said to myself, ‘Why am I doing this? I don’t want to hurt people anymore.’”
At first, he thought the sudden reluctance he felt last month to step inside a boxing ring could be ascribed to anxiety.
He’d suffered that before. But he also knew from experience that one good sparring session would dissipate those nerves. And this time, Fa felt apprehensive every time he even contemplated training.
So, despite a looming, potentially lucrative fight, for a fortnight he did nothing. Running the Maraetai half-marathon had earned him some downtime, but by the end of a third week of inactivity, with his coaches and manager calling him, it was time to make a decision.
Fa spent a day with his manager, Mark Keddell, sparring, mountain biking in Woodhill forest, eating lunch at Keddell’s place in Dairy Flat. It felt good. He took a day off, then went to a local gym that Monday morning to train alone, working the punch bag.
‘Why am I training so hard to hurt people?’
A rush of emotions came upon him, and Fa moved onto a treadmill to try to process those feelings. “The question that popped into my mind was, ‘Why am I training so hard to hurt people?’”
Fa’s next fight still remains on the official boxing schedule. In May, he’s due in Shawinigan, Quebec, to fight a Russian boxer called Arslanbek Makhumdov. It was a fight Fa wanted; a fight that could earn him another big fight; a fight he believed he would win. But he won’t be there. At 34, and with perhaps his best years ahead of him, you can call this story his retirement announcement.
But it’s more than that. “I’m still on the journey of trying to figure things out,” he says, eating kumara hotcakes at a vegan restaurant in Ponsonby. But so far, that journey has involved a loss of faith, quitting his job, adopting a vegan diet and a deep dive into Stoic philosophy.
It all began, thinks Fa, about a year ago, when he made the decision to walk away from both the Mormon church in which he was raised, and then from all religion.
He’d begun asking questions about the origins of Mormonism and what young people in the church were taught, in particular around the church’s origin story, in which founder Joseph Smith used a “seer” stone placed in a stovepipe hat to translate the newly-discovered Book of Mormon.
Conflicted, he began reading a lot of philosophy, and found some answers in The Denial of Death, a 1974 work by American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, which in part discusses the impact of a loss of religious belief.
Both Fa and his wife Tayla left the church around the same time, which caused some ripples, especially when Fa wrote a Facebook post explaining his exit.
He’s now, he says, “almost an anti-theist, definitely agnostic to atheist”, and his worldview is that if there is a God, he would be a strange one if he only rewarded those who were churchgoers, rather than those who lived a good, just life. “In religion, to find my morals, to find what was good, I looked up there [he gestures skywards]. Now I am looking around me.”
That made Fa examine his own life. Having seen the harm in organised religion, he says, he began seeing the harm in everything else around him. Borrowing a term from the philosophy he’s immersed in, he calls it his dark night of the soul. Veganism was a natural conclusion to one principle he arrived at quite quickly - he didn’t want to hurt any living thing. His feelings about boxing took a little longer, after going through some therapy sessions and letting his emotions show in front of his wife.
‘A new lens on my life’
But his loss of faith, he says, had “triggered a new lens on my life. I started to see the violence in the sport, and the old reasons didn’t justify it any more”.
He can’t even watch the sport any more. He says he has no regrets about his career, one which took him to fifth in the rankings of one of the major sanctioning bodies, the World Boxing Organisation, a contract with US promoter Lou DiBella, a professional record of 20-3 and a 2021 bout with Joseph Parker. But there’s no particular feeling of pride either.
Keddell says there’s been no pressure on Fa to keep the gloves on. “It’s not my job to talk him into fighting. It is my job to make sure he has looked under every stone and been honest with himself,” he says. “When a fighter doesn’t want to fight any more, they’re done. What do they say? You don’t play boxing.”
What Fa is feeling most keenly is the loss of community and purpose. He says removing both religion and boxing from his life has taken away its two foundations. “My old identity was leaving me, and I didn’t know what my new identity was. I was lost trying to figure things out. Boxing has really been part of my life, and I am still processing that.”
‘Sad but relieved’
Later, he puts that feeling of being lost back into the present tense. But he’s made some key decisions. He’s switched the boxing gym for ju-jitsu - self-defence over aggression. He wants a job which involves service to others, so he’s considered the fire service and disability support work, and this week applied to join the police. Philosophy remains important (he’s got a book of the teachings of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius in his car).
Keddell, who has managed Fa since his first professional fight in 2016, says the joy of management is seeing your charge succeed, and his role now is to help Fa succeed at being a regular citizen. On Wednesday afternoon, that meant helping him write the first CV of his adult life.
“I am feeling sad because I am leaving something that has been such a big part of my life … for as long as I can remember, I’ve been involved in boxing, it’s all that I know and I am leaving all that behind and mourning that,” Fa considers. “I feel sad for that, but I am also relieved, because I am more in tune with myself, and I am excited for the future.”