Film on rags to riches life of Sheffield-born boxer 'Prince' Naseem Hamed set to be produced next year

Boiling Point actor Ray Panthaki and producer Daniel Khalili have acquired rights to sports biography The Paddy & The Prince, which details Prince Naseem’s rise to stardom and and his relationship with legendary boxing trainer Brendan Ingle.

Naz, as he is known, walked into Ingle’s Wincobank gym as a seven-year-old boy and left it as a champion and multi-millionaire. The famous gym, in a former church hall, was close to where Naz grew up in a flat above the convenience store his parents ran.

Naz was one of nine siblings whose parents had come to the UK from Yemen and whose father initially worked at a steelworks in Sheffield before taking over the corner shop on Newman Road. Naz’s dad took him and one of his brothers to the gym because they were getting picked on at school.

Dominic Ingle, who now runs his late father’s gym, previously told The Star: “Every day after he got back from school he’d be the first in the gym and the last one to leave. He had a natural flair for boxing but what stood out in the early days was how he’d always be the first there waiting for my dad to open up.

“He was full of energy and always keen to learn new things. He idolised Herol Graham and he spent a lot of time with my dad, who would take him for walks to educate him about the history of boxing. My dad was preparing him for stardom and he was a very willing pupil, who would absorb everything. He was very quiet outside the gym and never got into any trouble but he came alive when he started sparring.”

The promising boxer turned professional at 18 and was 21 when he beat Steven Robinson in 1995 to win the WBO featherweight title. He went on to claim the IBF and WBC featherweight world titles during a glittering career in which he won 36 fights as a pro and suffered a solitary defeat, to Marco Antonio Barrera in 2001. He was 28 when he retired from the sport in 2002.

Naz’s rags to riches story saw him buy a 10-bedroom £3.3m mansion in Bents at the height of his fame and he led a flamboyant lifestyle and surrounded himself with celebrities.

The lifestyle came crashing down around him though in 2006 when he was jailed for seriously injuring a motorist in a horror crash on Ringinglow Road in 2005. Anthony Burgin spent weeks in hospital with fractures to “every major bone in his body” following the smash.

Naz was driving at speeds of at least 90mph when he performed an overtaking manoevre in his £325,000 supercar and crashed head-on into Mr Burgin’s Volkswagen Golf. He was released from prison after serving 16 weeks of his sentence. He missed the birth of one of his children while he was incarcerated.