Kell Brook is no pampered star, yet Errol Spence fight can be next step on the righteous walk to greatness

Brook defends his IBF welterweight title in front of 30,000 fans against the unbeaten American as the surprising underdog

Kell Brook can get his quest to join the greats back on track if he beats Errol Spence at Bramall Lane (Getty)

It all started for Kell Brook in the tiniest of forgotten venues, in fights with the finest losers in our business and a long way from the acid tongues of American boxers.

In 2004 Brook made his debut when he was just 18 on a show a mile or so from his gym on the hilly outskirts of Sheffield against a man called Peter Buckley. It went six rounds, Buckley lost for the 190th time and an excitable Brook went home with just under 400 quid in his pocket.

He fought in small hotel banqueting suites in Worksop, Bolton and Rotherham for promoters with cash-flow problems; Brook would often get back in the packed car for the journey home to the gym with a few annoying spaces in his wallet and once after a long trip to Blackpool he came back without a penny. "The show was cancelled because there were no paramedics and Kell never got paid," said John Ingle, the matchmaker at the gym. "It were only a tiny thing, in some type of trade and labour club. He was probably on about five hundred quid."

The venues often held 200 or less, men and women dining and waiting for a blue comedian to follow the boxers once they had done their thing. This type of ancient apprenticeship is not to be confused with an education on the small-hall circuit, but it was against this backdrop of faded glitz and the cloying aroma of chicken in white wine sauce that Brook had eight fights in ten months.

"Kell could do it all back then, the lot," said Brendan Ingle, the whispering guru from Dublin and the man that started the Wincobank gym in the Seventies. "He had been in the gym since he was a boy, sparring with world champions like little Naz (Hamed) and Johnny (Nelson)." I remember sitting on the ring at Ingle's gym and watching little Ezekiel making Hamed envious of his back-flips in the early Nineties when he could only have been eight or nine.

The kid developed, grew hard in anonymous fights and after four years he won the British welterweight title; he added the world title in 2014, survived a machete attack, made three easy defences and last September gained a stone and lost to Gennady Golovkin. He needed brutal surgery after Golovkin to fix a broken orbital bone on the right side of his face.

He is back on Saturday night outdoors at Bramall Lane in front of 30,000 to defend his IBF welterweight title against unbeaten Errol Spence and Brook starts as the betting outsider, an underdog on his home turf. It is in many ways a fitting return to his beloved fighting city for the local hero, world champion and proud Yorkshireman. There is no easy path to boxing greatness, but there is the righteous one that Brook is walking.

"What's Spence ever done?" asked Brook. "He failed at the Olympics when he were meant to win gold, he's only beaten washed-up fighters and yet I keep hearing he's going to knock me out. How's he going to do that?"

Spence is only four years younger than Brook, is unbeaten in 21 fights and he has looked good beating a succession of "washed-up" boxers during a beautifully choreographed career. He is from Texas, a decent talker but most of the trash has come from Derrick James, his trainer. "Don't call me a trainer, I'm a teacher," said James. "This fight is between my athlete and a fat guy - that's Brook, he admits he raids the fridge in the middle of the night and they will have a hard job to get him back down to welterweight."

Brook takes on unbeaten American Errol Spence (Getty)

The fridge has not been a factor during the thirteen week camp as Brook has chipped away with the help of science at the 13 pounds of packed muscle he gained for the Golovkin mission. "I listen to Americans when they come here for fights and it always makes me laugh," said Dominic Ingle, who is in charge of getting Brook ready. "Right now, Kell is perfect - eye perfect, weight perfect and he just wants to fight. Do they think I've just starved him for three months to drop the weight?"

Local hero Brook will have 30,000 cheering him on in Sheffield (Getty)

Brook has been to a lot of the nasty places that Spence has so far avoided as professional and to win he will have to take the American on a hard journey. It can be done but it will be extremely difficult.