David Price, a former Olympic bronze medalist and British heavyweight champion, now lives a totally different life after boxing.
The big Liverpudlian has gone from boxing with Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury to running his own heating engineering company.
In his prime, David Price caused numerous issues for Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury.
Price was an extraordinarily s𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ed amateur who did not quite reach the heights expected of him in the professionals.
During his unpaid career, he defeated Fury in an amateur match back in 2006.
Price returned from an early knockdown and defeated Fury on points, igniting a nasty rivalry.
The pair came close to competing in the professionals, but Price’s consecutive losses to Tony Thompson wrecked their hopes.
Instead, their rivalry will be eternally defined by Fury’s comical Channel Five outburst, which has since become part of boxing lore.
“See 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,” Fury stated in the iconic interview.
“It will take ten plumbers to finish you after I’m done with you. You are definitely getting it. Call me out, call me any name, and you’ll get it.”
As amusing as the outburst was, it turns out Price was never a plumber.
Price got his hand raised against Fury in the amateurs in 2006.
“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.”
Three years before his fight with Fury fell through, Price sparred with Joshua behind closed doors, and he is alleged to have knocked him out.
AJ has now corroborated the claim, however the odds were stacked against him given what 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.
Price also KO’d Joshua in sparring.
“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.