Alan “Avalanche” Higgins

Published: 22 November, 2012
by STEVE BARNETT

ON Sunday an emerging force in the world of professional boxing continued his somewhat unassuming climb up the ranks when he notched up another impressive knockout victory.

Alan “Avalanche” Higgins beat veteran Italian fighter Matteo Cecchetto in the second round of their scheduled four-round contest at York Hall in Bethnal Green.

It was the 24-year-old’s third professional fight and the third time his opponent has failed to last long enough to hear the sound of the final bell. With three early victories under his belt, Alan knows only too well that harder fights will follow; but none will compare with the fight he has already won.

Approaching his 11th birthday, Alan, who lives in Kilburn, went to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead for a routine tonsillectomy.

It was the moment he discovered “true fear” as he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

He underwent a series of operations to remove a tumor from his throat. It led to his spending more than 18 months in hospital with just a few weekends home to be with his family to lift his spirits. It was the life-changing time that he feels ignited the fearless focus for which he is quickly becoming known in the ring.

“Having beaten cancer I know I can beat anything. That was the time in my life when I discovered what true fear was,” he said. “Now my mindset is that an opponent is just a man. He has two arms and two legs just like me. There’s nothing to be scared of.”

Looking back Alan isn’t sure just how much being diagnosed with cancer affected his childhood. What he does know, however, was that the young boy who joined Haverstock Secondary School found trouble a lot easier than the one who left Primrose Hill Primary.

“I was an energetic kid and always getting in trouble,” he added. “I was suspended from school countless times for fighting and being disruptive. Inevitably, I was excluded for getting into one fight too many.

“The cancer was always at the back of my mind, and I was scared that it would come back. To this day that hasn’t changed. It’s hard to say how it affected my childhood, maybe if I had never had it I would still have been a little nuisance.

“I guess we’ll never know.”

Having been expelled from school, Alan needed a new direction in life and he found it when he joined a friend training at the St Pancras Amateur Boxing Club in Kentish Town.

“Boxing gave me something to channel my energy, I enjoyed it straight away,” he recalled. “As an amateur I knocked out my very first opponent in the opening round, I knew then that the buzz of winning was something I wouldn’t be able to replace. It was a feeling I wanted, and needed again.”

Alan, who is a qualified electrician by trade, is certainly doing a good job of maintaining that winning feeling. He stopped Emmanuel Moussinga in the first round on his debut in July and followed that up with a second-round success against Richard Hajdu.

Under the guidance of top St Pancras coach CJ Hussein, the middleweight was at it again on Sunday when he stopped Cecchetto in the second round with a barrage of punches, including a fero­cious right hand that left the 37-year-old Italian with little choice but to visit the canvas.

With a glittering career ahead of him Alan has a very strict game plan: “I’m confident and fully focused on winning a British title. Anything after that will be a bonus,” he said.