Family to the rescue
A professional British heavyweight boxer who has fought the likes of Dillian Whyte and Luis Ortiz has revealed he needs the help of his family to avoid the temptation to gamble.
The stop-start pro career of Dave Allen effectively began in 2015 by which time, the boxer revealed in ex-middleweight champion Darren Barker’s podcast, he was in the grip of a severe gambling addiction.
Allen, 33, said that at his worst: “I was gambling tens of thousands of pounds, maybe into hundreds of thousands.”
The boxer revealed his addiction got so bad, at age 26 he told his sister: “You’re going to have to look after my money.” Going through his sister and wife to get his cash, Allen said, has kept him from gambling for seven years.
Unorthodox approach
While Allen is an orthodox boxer, his approach to stopping his gambling was anything but. “If I want any money at all, I have to text my sister and now my missus, I get a card and they send me money.”
The ‘Doncaster De La Hoya’ explained the reason for handing over financial control was because:
if I could still gamble now, I think I would.”
Allen stated he’s spent “mad money on mad sh*t, I was spending ridiculous money and when I boxed Luis Ortiz, I did it for the money, really.”
The boxer who has made a comeback since retiring in 2020 after taking a vicious knockout from David Price, revealed how gambling was fuelling his need to fight for money.
“I think I owed a few quid at the time of the Dillian Whyte fight, I think I lost about eight grand on the day of the fight, I didn’t clear too much more than that really.”
Started with a horse
The boxer, who has sparred Tyson Fury, Alexandr Usyk, and Anthony Joshua, got hooked on gambling aged eight with a £1 ($1.33) bet on horses.
Playing slot machines at betting shops led to Allen’s online gambling addiction. In the Barker podcast on YouTube, the boxer revealed the “online stuff is where it got bad for me because it was so easy, it was numbers on the screen.”
not about the money”
Allen also stated love of money wasn’t his motivation to gamble. “It’s not about the money for me. I just wanted to keep winning.”
