Former Olympic bronze medallist and British heavyweight champion David Price lives a very different life after boxing.
The towering Liverpudlian has gone from sharing the ring with Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury to owning his own heating engineering business.
Price was an extremely talented amateur but didn’t quite achieve the lofty heights expected of him in the pros.
During his time in the unpaid ranks, he defeated Fury in an amateur bout back in 2006.
Price recovered from an early knockdown and beat Fury on points to spark a bitter rivalry.
The pair came close to fighting in the pros but Price’s back-to-back losses to Tony Thompson derailed their plans.
Instead, their rivalry will forever be defined by Fury’s hilarious Channel Five outburst, which has since become a piece of boxing folklore.
“See you, you plumber from Liverpool, it’s personal between you and me and I’m going to do you some serious harm you big, stiff idiot,” said Fury in the famous interview.
“It’s going to need 10 plumbers to do you when I’ve got finished with you. You are getting it – for sure. Call me out, call me any names and you are getting it.”
As funny as the rant was, it turns out Price was never a plumber.
“I’ve been focusing on other things after boxing, I’ve done a bit with property but now I’ve set a company up doing oils and insulation,” Price told Boxing Life Stories with Tris Dixon.
“It’s energy saving measures in housing. It’s what I did before boxing, I was a heating engineer or a plumber as Tyson liked to say.
“It’s easy to get confused but I was a heating engineer, not a plumber.
“I never focused on it because I was always going to become a boxer but it was easy to come back to after boxing as I had the contacts.”
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Three years before his fight with Fury fell through, Price was involved in a behind-closed-doors sparring session with Joshua, where he is said to have knocked out the Brit.
AJ has since confirmed the story to be true although the cards were significantly stacked against him given the ordeal he had been through the night before they sparred.
“I think I was doing Thursday to Sunday because I was doing a development course,” he told assembled media in 2018. “Got nicked on the way up to training camp, for trouble.
“Got out Saturday and I went up there. I got there by the station. I do think he [Price] was very good at the time, very strong. And I was making too many mistakes.
“Those circumstances don’t help when you’re sparring an elite fighter.
“I even had to get the train to Sheffield because they took my car – just to show my commitment. What I learned was you cannot stop someone like me.
“They say you have two types of fighters; those that get dropped and stay down. But the ones you have to be wary of are the ones who keep on coming.
“You just cannot stop someone like that. I learned it will take more than just power or durability to stop me.”
Price’s career went significantly downhill after losing to Thompson.
In retirement, he admits it took something out of him that he never got back.
Further stoppage losses to Erkan Teper, Christian Hammer, Alexander Povetkin, and Sergey Kuzmin saw his stock fall significantly before he closed out his career with a run of domestic dust-ups ending with a TKO defeat against Derek Chisora.
He eventually hung up his gloves in 2021 with a 25-6 record after teasing a return to the ring for three years.
