Wes Capper Is The Globetrotting World Champion Australian Combat Sports "Slut" You’ve Never Heard Of

Billy Hussein can hardly believe it. "You mean you never had a trainer this whole time?" he asks incredulously. The champion boxing coach has just wrapped up a frustrating, technical hit-out in his Lakemba gym with his latest charger, 28-year-old former kickboxing world champion, Wes Capper.

Capper, a self-described "larrikin" and combat sports "slut," has spent the past three years in the boxing wilderness, with no cornerman or coach, fighting, sparring and training everyone from Mexican and Thai taxi drivers to Roy Jones Jr, Anthony Mundine, Olympic gold and silver medallists, not to mention surviving dozens of rounds in the infamous 'dog house' at Floyd Mayweather's Las Vegas gym.

"I've done it backwards. Ninety nine percent of fighters have 15 or 20 fights before they go to the (United) States, but what does dickhead Wes do?" he laughs.

The journey been as heart wrenching as it's been rewarding, but, as he just found out doing pad work with Billy Hussein, there's still a long way to go yet.

"I know it sounds weird but between boxing, Muay Thai and MMA, it's a completely different thing," begins Wes.

"Everyone thinks its just fighting but it's not. The way you go to throw your punches to the way you go to put yourself in position to throw those shots is a completely different world."

"So it has been super frustrating and difficult in that respect, of me trying to get my head around the different concepts, but I think it has made me who I am today. I have a lot of sneaky and niche tricks that I can that not a lot of people can do because they are straight and structured," he says.

Born-and-bred in Penrith (or "The Riff," as Wes calls it) to a 17-year-old single-mother from a foster home, Wes has been in one fight or another for as long as he can remember.

"I was always keen for a scrap growing up. I was always in some kind of altercation," he says.

His combat sports career began, as it happens, in the western Sydney gym run by John Pedro, the man credited with bringing Mixed Martial Arts to Australia and whose son, Tyson, is a rising star in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Soon-to-be Kiwi UFC legend James Tehuna was the instructor and Wes was immediately smitten.

"I just had a fascination with it. You don't have anyone to rely on except for yourself. Don't get me wrong you gotta have a coach - I haven't had that either - you gotta have good preparation with it, but you jump in that ring, man, there's no one else, you got no one else to rely on, it's a sole sport, it's a selfish sport, I just kinda flocked to it," he says.

In the time between he's turned his hand to everything from greco-roman wrestling, MMA, Muay Thai, kickboxing, and now boxing. He credits fighting with giving him purpose, self-confidence and a father figure in the shape of his former trainer.

He met his new mentor after his mum relocated to Perth when Wes was 16. Together the pair scaled scaled the heights of world kickboxing, winning three Australian titles, a world title, and touring the globe - from Europe to Thailand and Japan. Despite the accolades, the money never really trickled. By night Wes might have been one of the best fighters in the world but by day he was just another plumbing "digging through people's shit."

"That gets old real fast," he says.

As Wes puts it, if he was gonna get smacked in the head for a living, he wanted to get paid alright for it. So he thought he'd give boxing a go.

"I packed two bags, booked a one-way ticket to LA, and fucken winged it," he says.

The decision nearly destroyed his relationship with his trainer but he couldn't see any other way. If he wanted to follow his dreams and realise his potential, he had short window and it had to happen now. For years his fists had been his secret weapon in kickboxing, anyway. He'd won countless fights with straight, hard punching and even an amateur state boxing title in between. But this was going to be different. Wes was going straight to top. He was going to Las Vegas.

He arrived with nothing more than a chunk of savings and the Facebook contact of a guy he knew in the fight game whose couch he he could rely on for at least a couple weeks. His first stop after disembarking was Walmart where he bought a fixed-gear bicycle he named Rosie ("I've still got it in the States") and rode it from gym to gym looking for sparring work for the next seven months.

His his first gig was with a Japanese fighter he'd never heard of. He loaded Rosie onto the bus from LA to Vegas and arrived at the gym to find several other fighters there for the job. It paid $50 a session and after a quick audition in which he worked over the would-be sparring partners Wes was asked back every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for training.

After two weeks of solid hit-outs, he was surprised to find the fighter was in fact, Ryota Murata, the Japanese Olympic boxing gold medallist from the 2012 London Olympics.

"I just thought he was some Japanese guy who was really lovely and nice and could pick a punch," recalls Wes.

The pair have remained close friends to this day with Wes travelling to Japan on five seperate occasions to help him prepare.

Between sparring sessions, Wes would travel to Mexico where he'd take fights with anyone who had their hand up - whether it be cab drivers looking for a side-earn or ageing Mexican fight legends who knew nothing else than how to put on a show and pick punches.

"It's so corrupt down there. If the fighting commission thinks it's a fix and doesn't think you've put up a fight they just pocket the cash themselves," he says.

Back in Vegas, Wes caught wind of the open door policy at the Floyd Mayweather gym and decided to give it a go. "Anyone who has the balls to go in there can do it," he says.

As far as training grounds go nothing compares to the 'dog house' at the Mayweather gym. At any given time between ten and 50 members of the extended Mayweather entourage - an eclectic mix of predominately African-American fighters, trainers, gangsters, hustlers, thugs, gamblers and whoever else - are ringside taking bets and talking trash.

"They'll be yelling out stuff like, 'I got twenty on the white boy…' Hell no, he gonna get his ass whooped!' Stuff like that" says Wes.

The sparring sessions, meanwhile, are the most brutal he has ever encountered.

"Typically when you're sparring if someone gets hurt you back off, let 'em recover and then go back in. Not there. If you get hurt they're gonna put you away," he says, adding, "It's okay. It's different. It gets you thinking you know, shit, I gotta move here when you're hurting or you're gonna get knocked out."

It was here Wes had what he thinks was his closest brush with death due to a mix-up over the word 'knickers.' After accidentally hitting his opponent in the back of the head, a kerfuffle broke out in which Wes eventually lost his patience and made a quip about the man getting his "knickers in a twist."

"I said, man, relax man, don't get your knickers in a twist," recalls Wes.

Between the mouthguard, the headgear and his thick Penrith accent, the word knickers was heard as something else.

"He's like, 'Hell no. This white skippy motherfucker just called me a nigger!" recalls Wes of the moment the Mayweather entourage rushed to the side of the ring looking for blood.

"There's only two white people in the gym and one of 'ems a Russian - doesn't even count - and I'm thinkin' I'm gonna die. I'm actually gonna get killed here," recalls Wes.

"I spat my mouth guard out and took all my gear off and said, I swear I didn't say that man."

"He's like, what did you say then?"

"Man, don't get your knickers in a twist."

"He goes, what the fuck are knickers?"

"Women's underwear, you know like, underwear?!"

"And he goes, you mean like panties? What the fuck are knickers man? He goes, yo man, from now on you don't call them knickers. You call them panties."

The legend of Wes built up quickly in the American boxing underground. It was an easy one to get behind. An unknown fighter from the land down under plying his trade from the back of bicycle sounded like a bizarre hybrid of Crocodile Dundee and Rocky. The fixed-gear bicycle earned him the nickname 'Tour De France Kid' and before long he'd even earned the attention of his boxing idol Roy Jones Jr, whose management signed Wes to a short-term deal. One day while hitting the pads he felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to see the man himself.

"I turned around and it's Roy and he's goes (Wes puts on American accent): Yo Wes? Wes, Kaper?"

"I was like, Capper. It's Capper."

"He's like, yeah, Capper. We'll do some work ay?"

For the next two hours they worked pads and trained non-stop together.

"I couldn't believe it…couldn't believe it," says Wes.

"He's a super nice guy, gives you all the time in the world, got a wealth of knowledge, did a session with him for like two hours, didn't stop. That was definitely one of my highlights," he says.

His monastic dedication to the sweet science might have earned the respect and friendship of some of the best fighters in the world but those same old fashioned working-class values of loyalty, work ethic, respect and honesty also made him perfectly ill-equipped to survive in the money-grubbing, snake-pit that is the American fight game.

He lost count of how many times he was used and abused by shameless trainers, promoters and subterranean middle-men. The incident that ended his American dream was particularly insulting. After spending spent months training with a team he thought "had his back" he arrived at the gym one night to find they'd decided to go on a camp in LA without telling him.

"As much as I said it's a selfish sport and when you get in there you are alone, yeah you are alone but when you come back into that corner you want to feel like someone has your back, someone is trying to help you out a bit there you know? I didn't really have that," he says.

"I thought the trainer and the people around there had my back and were helping me out and they just disappeared to LA for the week and all the fighters that went were the same weight and the same rough caliber. I thought I was part of the team, I thought I was with these guys. That's my trainer, why was I not informed?"

"It sounds lame but it just crushed me man. I'm already over there by myself as it is and it feels super alone. That was the first time I ever really experienced home sickness," he says.

He returned to Australia with no trainer, no cornerman, and fell into a depression. His motivation waned, his weight ballooned, and he came within a whisker of giving it all away. Alls that stopped him was seeing guys he'd beaten succeeding in the fight game. That ate him up inside.

"You win some, you lose some, I just got used as a sparring partner," he says, reflecting on it all today.

"I learned a lot form that and I learned a lot technically and I learned a lot from sparring some phenomenal fighters. I got to spar a gold medallist, I got to spar a silver medallist, I got to spar world champions, I got to spar world contenders, I got to spar the top 15 in the world. I've been around it and I've seen a lot. I've got a lot to show for it in a lot of regards," he says, though adds, "I'm lacking in the basics."

Which is why he's in Billy Hussein's Lakemba gym. Widely regarded as the best boxing coach in the country, Hussein has trained three world champions and chalked up 20 plus years of experience in and out of the ring. But he's never heard a story like Wes's.

"Brother, you've done well to get this far," he tells him.

When we retire to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner afterwards, Wes lets slip that there's more to the master plan then he's been letting on. Boxing is just the beginning of his reinvention, he says.

"Mark my words, out the front of - what's this place called? - Maranello!"

"I'm gonna be in the UFC in the next five years. I'm a slut. I just wanna do it all," he says, with his arms outstretched.