I KO’d a boxing world champion – then I went to jail for assault and had to hang out with heroin addicts
FORMER boxer and rugby league star Garth Wood has detailed his experiences in prison after being sentenced for assaulting his partner’s ex-boyfriend.
Australian Wood, 45, played rugby for South Sydney and Balmain Tigers between 1997 and 2005, before turning his attention to the fight game.
He had his first professional bout in February 2007 and went on to accrue a record of 12 wins, four defeats and one draw.
Most famously, he knocked out former super-middleweight world champion Anthony Mundine in the fifth round of their first fight in 2010.
The pair rematched in 2011 as Mundine secured a unanimous points victory.
Then, after hanging up his gloves, Wood was incarcerated for an attack he carried out on his partner’s ex in June of this year.
Now a free man once more, he has opened up about the drug problem in prison.
Speaking on the I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin podcast, he said: “I was expecting it [prison] to be more of a man’s man experience where everyone is a tough guy.
“I thought I’d be confronted with guys who wanted to fight me, but a lot of it was drug addiction and mental health.”
He went on to add: “There were seven blokes in Parklea who were all on the heavy s*** [heroin].
“They all shared the syringe. Yet there was one bloke who had AIDS. He was the last one who was supposed to blast it.
“It just shows you what they are willing to do for the addiction.”
Wood also explained how he developed a way of staying in shape while behind bars alongside some of his other inmates.
But while he did grow close to some of them, he also insists he came into contact with some dangerous people.
He said: “I got with a gang of people – not a gang, people who wanted to train – and I tell you what, I did some of the hardest training sessions in there.
“We did a lot of burpees, bear crawls, squats, push-ups. It was like a big circuit which went for nearly 40 minutes and the first couple of sessions I couldn’t walk for the next couple of days.
“I met some really good people in jail, but there’s also some evil f***ing people as well, which I wouldn’t care to run into ever again.”