It takes a special kind of character to take on Lennox Lewis and not regret it. Luckily, Mike Goodall is a bit special.
It was 2022 and Lewis, the former world heavyweight champion, was working as a television pundit for the WBC title fight between Tyson Fury against Dillian Whyte at Wembley Stadium when he told an interviewer that he thought the ring looked small.
It was a throwaway comment but for Goodall — the man who had built the ring — there were repercussions.
“Within 20 minutes, I’ve had 15 phone calls from lawyers, managers, trainers and everybody saying, ‘What’s this about a small ring?’” Goodall tells The Athletic. “I could have murdered the b******! It was a 20-foot ring.
“Eventually I saw Lennox and I gave him such a bollocking. I said: ‘It’s the same size ring as you always fought him when I supplied all your rings.’
“He goes, ‘Oh, well it looks small.’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, of course it does — you’re in the middle of Wembley Stadium so it looks bloody small! I told him, ‘Keep your trap shut, you’ve created so many problems!’”
Mike Goodall was an MC as well as a boxing ring builder (John Gichigi /Allsport)
Goodall laughs as he recalls the story, but it says something about his standing in boxing that he felt able to launch a volley at Lewis and not worry about the consequences.
The 78-year-old may be one of the most significant figures in boxing you’ve never heard of — or, at least, wouldn’t recognise. If you’ve regularly watched big fights since the late 1980s, the chances are you will have seen one of his rings, especially if the bout was staged in Britain.
Goodall, a former market trader, has earned the nickname of the hardest-working man in the sport and is certainly one of the most trusted. His company, Ringcraft, supplies rings for almost every major televised event in Britain and increasingly across the Middle East.
Lewis, Mike Tyson, Prince Naseem Hamed, Ricky Hatton, Joe Calzaghe and Tyson Fury have all fought in his rings, and when Anthony Joshua steps through the ropes to face Kristian Prenga this weekend in Jeddah, he will do so in one of Goodall’s 33 rings.
Goodall’s boxing career was something of an accident. He fought as a kid but “found out quickly it bloomin’ hurts”. Instead, he made a living selling fruit and vegetables as a greengrocer before a friend persuaded him to attend local boxing shows. The pair eventually decided to promote events of their own in Evesham, a market town in England’s West Midlands, and in an effort to save money, Goodall doubled up as the master of ceremonies.
Hiring a ring for every show soon became expensive. One of his colleagues suggested buying one instead and storing it in a warehouse used by Goodall’s fruit and vegetable business. It proved to be a life-changing decision.
After numerous local shows, word spread that he had a ring available to hire and, in 1988, the office of Frank Warren — founder of Queensberry Promotions — called, asking him to bring it to Cardiff.
“They said, ‘I hear you do MC as well?’ I said, ‘Yeah’ and the response was, ‘You better do that as well, then’. It cost about £250 to hire a ring then and it was on a Wednesday, which was our day off from the markets so it worked out well.”
Goodall built Ringcraft into boxing’s go-to supplier, providing not only rings but canvases, signage and event equipment for every major television promoter in Britain, including Queensberry and Barry Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing. Soon enough, it had gone global.
Mike Goodall with Michael Buffer in Saudi Arabia in 2024 (Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
The company now manufactures everything from canvases and rope covers to skirts and branding, shipping across Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East. Goodall’s son, Simon, has also worked with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, dressing its octagons for events in Britain.
It can be brutal work. Goodall recalls that in the early days of the business, driving 320 miles from his home in Evesham to Glasgow, building a ring, changing into a dinner suit to serve as master of ceremonies, dismantling everything after the final bell, then driving overnight to Cornwall — in the UK’s far south west, to do it all again the next day.
“In 1988, I went to Sheffield on the Monday, Newcastle after that, Birmingham the next night, Glasgow on the Friday and Nottingham on the Saturday before finally going home.
“My missus said, ‘I don’t like this if you’re going away six nights a week.’ So I took a big wedge of cash out of my pocket — remember, this was 1988 — counted out £1,000 (worth over £3,000 today) and handed it to her. She looked at it and said, ‘That’s great… when are you going away again?’”
Goodall has been on the road ever since, but his horizons have expanded well beyond the UK. The arrival of Saudi Arabia as boxing’s new centre of power opened up an opportunity which Goodall was eager to seize, even if it has presented problems.
His first assignment in the country was Joshua’s December 2019 rematch with Andy Ruiz Jr in Diriyah. He was met with a very peculiar request from Prince Khalid bin Abdulaziz — the Saudi royal effectively putting on the fight — who wanted the ring from the fight erected in one of his homes after the event.
“He wanted the ring put up in his house,” Goodall recalls. “He didn’t have a space for it at first so we had to put it in the garage.”
In May, a job for Saudi boxing powerbroker Turki Al-Sheikh also became complicated. Goodall had been commissioned to build a 19-foot ring for Oleksandr Usyk’s WBC heavyweight title fight with kick-boxer Rico Verhoeven in front of the Pyramids of Giza in Cairo.
Goodall and his team had a container at the docks in London ready to ship the ring on a boat, only to be told at the last minute their paperwork would not be accepted by the Egyptian authorities.
The ring used in the Fury-Whyte fight at Wembley in 2022 was built by Mike Goodall (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
It was a lucky escape: by the time they had scrapped their shipping plan in favour of flying a lighter ring to Cairo, Usyk had signed a contract stipulating a 20-foot ring. As Goodall puts it, “It’s about having your finger on the pulse so you can change last minute.”
Goodall will be in Saudi Arabia this week putting up the ring for Joshua’s fight. The British heavyweight usually trains on the same canvas – and crucially, the same underlay – all through his camp.
Joshua had asked him to build a ring for his training camp in Dubai after the one he was using originally proved not to his liking. Goodall uses one-inch foam underlay beneath his rings — a specification that has since become mandatory for professional boxing in Britain.
Too much cushioning can sap energy, affect movement and even increase the risk of injury. Too little risks further injury when fighters fall.
Goodall remembers Fury’s world title victory over Wladimir Klitschko in Germany in 2015, despite not being involved in building the ring.
On the morning of the fight, Fury’s camp discovered more than four inches of foam beneath the canvas. The plan, at least according to Fury’s camp, seemed clear: slow the Briton down by making it softer underfoot.
“Klitschko had trained on that so his legs would have been used to it,” said Goodall. “I wasn’t involved but Tyson’s uncle Peter rang me and asked what to do.
“I told him to go to the commission and tell them there is a danger of turning your ankle on it and get it changed. They did and Tyson won.”
Goodall has become the dominant force in ring building in the UK, working for almost every conceivable promoter — unusual in itself given this is a sport built on such fierce sporting and commercial rivalries.
Wladimir Klitschko was used to thicker foam used in his fight with Tyson Fury in 2015 (Patrik Stollarz/AFP via Getty Images)
That has required discretion as much as reliability. As the man building rings and providing backdrops with the event names on them for big press conferences, he is often trusted with sensitive information long before it is announced.
“I have done the rings for everyone,” he said. “I know some were uncomfortable with it but I learned from an early age: never disclose to another camp. So if I’ve been told something about a fight, event or fighter, then that is it — you’ve heard it and it doesn’t go any further.
“I would get people asking, ‘What are they up to?’ and the answer would be, ‘I don’t tell them what you’re doing so why would I tell you what they’re doing?’”
Now given his age, Goodall doesn’t get involved in the physical building of the rings.
But he is still at the arena before 6:30am, supervising the build, helping lay the canvas, fit the ropes and dress the ring before remaining long after the final bell while everything is dismantled.
Retirement is not even in his thoughts.
“I do it myself because when you have built something up, you don’t want to walk away from it and watch people do it not how you want it done,” he says.
Four decades after buying his first ring, Goodall remains the man trusted by boxing’s biggest promoters and biggest stars.
Just don’t tell him one of his rings looks too small. Lennox Lewis already learned that the hard way.
