I’m A Celeb legend in roadside row with driver as his wife begs him 'stop stop stop'
Professional boxer and I’m A Celeb star Tony Bellew has revealed he recently got caught up in a roadside row after a driver gestured to him to pull over, and the tense altercation that followed led Tony’s wife Rachael to beg him to get back in their car. While appearing on Saturday night quiz show The Wheel in an episode to be shown on Saturday 9 November, Tony, 41, was asked by host Michael McIntyre whether anyone had ever stopped and confronted him in public, and Tony told his story.
He said: “A guy told me to pull over on the motorway not so long ago, so I happily obliged. I pulled over and he pulled in right behind me. I jumped out of the car and started walking towards him and I got about six or seven metres from him."
Tony continued his story, adding: “He looked at me and he just said, ‘I am not a World Champion boxer.’ Then my wife got out, and she said ‘stop, stop, stop it,’ and I said ‘no, he told us to pull over so I’ve pulled over.’ He was a bully and there’s nothing worse in life than a bully. He expected the small little man to get out of the car.”
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Tony made his professional boxing debut in 2007, and was named the British and Commonwealth light-heavyweight champion in 2010. He formally retired from boxing in 2018, following his final fight against Ukranian boxer Oleksandr Usyk, a bout which reportedly earned Tony around £4 million.
After the match he announced: “It's definitely over now, you won't see me in a boxing ring again. I just want a normal life, I don't want this pressure. I only created the name Tony Bellew to make my dad proud. I've never been Tony Bellew, I've always been Anthony. Everyone who truly knows me calls me Anthony. Tony Bellew died on Saturday, Anthony Bellew comes back alive. I want reality back."
However, he didn’t stay completely away from the boxing ring, as he was cast as fictional boxer Ricky Conlan in the Rocky spin-off movies Creed and Creed III.
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Tony, who has four sons with his wife Rachael, was a contestant on the 2020 series of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, and was runner up to Sam Thompson in the 2023 series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! It was his wife Rachael who convinced him to sign up to the series, as he told ITV before he entered the jungle. “This is going to be very hard and I am apprehensive,” he said at the time. “I had to think long and hard about doing it because it is so out of my comfort zone and it was my missus who talked me around to doing it."
Tony added that he wanted to make his children proud: "I want to come in for the experience and leave a little bit of a trail for my kids who will be able to say: 'My dad did that'. And it is my children who motivate me."
