Standing at 6ft 5in tall, Richard Skerritt, the boss at Skerritt’s Chartered Financial Planners in Hove, East Sussex, is preparing for his first ever amateur fight on August 13.
He will be hoping to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee in true Mohammed Ali style when he goes before a 400 strong crowd. His aim is to raise £50,000 for Action Medical Research, a charity which investigates diseases that affect children, by doing the fight.
Mr Skerritt has mixed emotions but insisted he will be pulling no punches when he faces Matt Ryan at the Grand hotel in Brighton.
He said: “I am slightly nervous at the minute. But at the same time, it’s also going to be really exciting as well. So, I’m both excited and nervous currently.”
Mr Skerritt, whose firm has more than 25,000 clients, took up boxing three years ago at his local gym and the fight has been on his bucket list.
He is taking preparations seriously, saying: “I have been training for quite a while. I am on a strict diet at the moment. I’m not allowed any alcohol and no carbohydrates and I am training every day at the moment.
“I am doing a lot of sparring and a lot of fighting with different people who are all different sizes.”
Asked whether boxing or getting to grips with the new legislation is the more challenging, he replied: “I am really finding it tough at the moment. I have got another five weeks to go, but it’s definitely going to be really tough. So, it’s going to have to be the boxing I am afraid!”
So far, he has raised £9,500. The minimum goal is £30,000 but he hopes to reach £50,000.
Whatever the outcome of his fight, he has picked up the boxing bug, saying: “I definitely will continue boxing. Whether I will do another fight I don’t know. If I lose then I definitely won’t! I might think about it if I win.
“But, I am only allowed to do the one fight because of my wife and it took me a while to convince her to let me do this one!”
