The hitman "The intensity is there at the end of the punch" ... Daniel Geale. A shy lad as a boy, Daniel Geale is a powerful force to be reckoned with in the ring. Luke Slattery spars with the ambitious - and level-headed - boxer. Clad from neck to toe in ninja black, Daniel Geale trains alone in a ring that seems too large for his forceful yet slender frame. Fists raised, feet apart and knees bent, the boxer throws out a kaleidoscope of punches at the shadow opponent in his mind. It's early morning, cold and grim inside The Grange Old School Gym, a rather twee name for a concrete boxing school in an industrial estate on Sydney's southern fringe. The place is normally an echo chamber of grunts and thwacks, ringing to the dull thud of leather on leather, on skin and bone. But this morning Australia's highest-ranked professional boxer - until a crazy August night in Atlantic City, he was the International Boxing Federation world middleweight champion - is working away from the gaze of boxers and fight fans with only his burly coach, Graham Shaw, for company. Darren Barker (at left) and Geale during their Atlantic City bout in August. Shadowboxing in a cocoon of total self-absorption, Geale looks like he owns the ring. Always has. His fingers, protruding from the boxing wraps that bind his poised fists, twitch involuntarily for one brief moment under the neural storm of fierce concentration. His opponent is on the move. He can see it all vividly in his mind's eye, and makes a swift counter. The only sound, right at this moment, is the soft scuffing of boxing boots as they slide across the dull grey canvas matting. Kssshh. Kssshhh. Family guy ... Geale with his wife Sheena and their children Bailey, Lilyarna and Ariyelle. He steps back and across, rolls, checks the imaginary left hook, sways like a python and snaps out a silken straight right. As the punch reaches its furthest extension, there's an exhalation pushed from deep inside the boxer's diaphragm: "Eughh." Outside the boxing ring, Danny Geale is the shy guy, a 32-year-old father of three and a model of sincerity in a sport overburdened with big talk and outsized egos. His team motto, "the real deal," might sound like a limited-time KFC combo, but it neatly distils his boy-next-door public persona. Yet within the formalised quadrilateral space of the ring he's a cold-hearted marksman with a killer aim. Hence his alternative sobriquet: "The baby-faced assassin." I've caught Geale at a crux moment. He has 15 knockouts and 29 wins - one against rival Anthony Mundine - in 31 pro fights, following an amateur career of 165 fights crowned by a 2002 Commonwealth Games gold medal. In that recent Atlantic City title fight, lost controversially on a split decision, he landed such a savage left hook to the liver of his opponent, Darren Barker, that the 31-year-old Briton dropped to the canvas for nine counts in the sixth round. Yet Barker was able to recover, to gather strength in the final rounds and take the fight on points. Geale had earlier described his opponent as a smart fighter, but Barker's revival that night was more about grit, determination and character. In less than an hour, Barker went from a crumpled heap of satin and skin lying face down on the canvas to a teary victor with arms aloft. Speaking afterwards about those seconds of pain, almost 30 of them, Barker conceded he'd been badly hurt and couldn't even breathe, and then someone, something, "picked me up." At the post-match press conference he sported a broken nose, two black eyes beneath sunglasses, a cut beneath the left, and a liver in god-only-knows what condition. Just about the only wound Geale suffered that night was a blow to his pride. The baby face was pretty much unmarked, but the ego was shattered. So it comes as no surprise that the identity of Geale's imagined opponent in the ring this morning is Barker. Geale's team has appealed the split decision and, in the meantime, he trains six days a week, two hours a day, keeping himself sharp in the hope he might soon challenge for the world middleweight belt that he defended four times with success before that night in Atlantic City. But there's barely a close fight in international boxing that isn't contested by the losing team, such are the stakes; an Australian world champ can command fees of up to $500,000 and a slew of lucrative sponsorships. The real issue is that Geale lost a fight he could have won. He bulked up for the Barker fight and seemed to lose in technique what he'd gained in strength: hitting power, in boxing, being nothing without the active ingredients of balance, speed and timing. In order to find a way forward, he needs to find a way back. Coach Graham Shaw has been watching beside the ring with arms crossed as Geale spars with the rival in his mind. He hops inside for three rounds of pad work. "Upper cut," orders the north London-born trainer. Left jab. Right. Thayyt's beh-har. That's the shot I want. You've just got to put it all together. Synchronise it. Satisfied, Shaw leaves his charge in the ring for several sets of excruciating abdominal drills: crunches, lowers abs, lateral abs. Over and over again. As we watch, I remark on Geale's focused intensity in the ring, not only in a fight but here, too, in training. Intense? Mmmmm," Shaw says with a contemplative tilt of the head that mimes the phrase: "Dunno "bout that." He's pretty relaxed. Breathes well. Doesn't chew up a lot of nervous energy like some boxers. The intensity is there at the end of the punch," Shaw offers, turning towards me to throw a slow-moving right cross of his own accompanied by an expression - eyes wide, teeth bared - of mock brutality. That's where you want it to be. And then, after a moment's reflection, he returns to the point: "Certainly he's a thinking boxer. Reads the fight well. Boxing's a pretty simple game, where you hit and try not to get hit in return. Danny doesn't get hit that much.  Geale has slipped out from the ring and stands at the wooden plank bench beside it, unwinding his wraps with the air of a man who enjoys this solemn ritual: binding and unbinding his fists and wrists, his weaponry. His day started with a morning run and he has been training for an hour or so in the ring, but he claims to "feel good" and sounds like he means it. He lingers over his tidy vowels for an extra beat, giving his enunciation a slight lick of the American west coast. There's not much of his birthplace, a working-class suburb of Launceston, in that accent, and nor is there much of Sydney's south-west, where he now lives. It's the voice of a self-made man of ambition; a man who feels closer, perhaps, to what he is becoming than to what he has been. "Mentally, I feel focused; I'm not letting all the issues that have taken place distract me," he says, alluding to the dramatic chain of recent events - the narrow loss, the appeal, and the rematch hanging in the air - that may soon pit him and Barker together again. I'd asked Shaw, earlier, about the Geale team's grounds for appeal and he would not be drawn, but the boxer is more forthcoming. There's a point in the sixth when the ref seems to wave the fight off, and then he went over to Barker, asked him if he was okay, and obviously he continued. For my part I could only react to what was ahead of me. Then there was the scoring in the last round. It was a bit strange. Neither Geale's father, Wayne, a Launceston truckie, nor his younger brother, Joseph, is afflicted by shyness, although the boxer feels his mother, Michelle, who is of Aboriginal heritage, "maybe is a little shy." Geale claims to have been born that way. "I guess I got the shy gene," he quips. It's not, though, a disability: he can hold a conversation, and seems to enjoy talking - especially if the subject is boxing. He could probably talk all day about the technicalities of his sport, but take him to a cocktail party and, he concedes, he seriously wants to be elsewhere. Preferably back in the ring. So self-effacing is his demeanour that it's hard to imagine a stranger at one of those dreaded parties picking him as a boxer, let alone a world champion. "It happens especially with women who maybe haven't seen a lot of boxing," he says, with the glimpse of a smile. "They say to me, "Are you really a boxer, "cause I just can't imagine you angry." I guess I don't come across that way, and hopefully I've kept my hands up enough so I haven't got [like a lot of professional boxers] that bashed-in look. But he can be mean, of that there's little doubt. Immediately after his victory earlier this year in a revenge re-match against Mundine, to whom he lost controversially in 2009, Geale confessed in an interview: "I did enjoy hitting him." Earlier, in his 2010 fight against Kariz Kariuki, a bigger man who was expected to have the advantage, Geale jolted his opponent time and again with his snapping right but it was a crunching left hook that really undid Kariuki. Geale closed in with open-mouthed ferocity and, as the Kenyan turned his back to stop the fight, Geale followed him, raining down blows on the back of Kariuki's submissively turned head and back, seemingly frustrated at his inability to get the knockout that was almost there, to feel the sweet connection of the coup de grâce and the end of his opponent's resistance - the yielding. The kill. When I mention this moment to Geale he admits with an embarrassed laugh that later, when watching the replay, he began to feel sorry for the Kenyan. He doesn't know why he chased Kariuki that night, and doesn't seem to care too much that something primitive geysered up in his normally cool psyche and boiled over. "I'm in that frame of mind," he recalls of the moment. The adrenalin hits, and it's pretty much the end of the night. He stresses, though, that while he can indulge in sympathy after the fight it's not a luxury he can afford in the heat of battle, "because you know sympathy is not going to be returned." Unlike fighters such as Jeff Fenech and Mike Tyson, who without boxing to harness their tempests and husband their raw strength might have ended up nowhere good, Geale was a shy chubby kid who needed the discipline of boxing to uncover the steel within. His father first got him into the sport, at the age of nine, as an antidote to introspection. "I went to a boxing club near home and I loved it from the start," Geale recalls. The coach put me onto the scales and I was 42 kilos, so I was carrying a bit of extra weight for a smallish nine-year-old. After a year of training, I hopped into the ring and I'd lost four kilos. That first year of training changed my life, gave me confidence - it bought the confidence out of me. Father Wayne, who goes by the name of "Cowboy," adds a shade of nuance to the son's story. As he recalls it, Daniel gave martial arts a whirl but it didn't seem to suit. Boxing, though, a second choice, became his great passion from the day he laced on a glove. "He was always tugging at my sleeve, wanting to go to training," he says. His first coach, Lloyd Poke, adds a detail that lies unstated, yet implicit, in the father's and son's accounts. He was a big boy, heavy for his age. He was getting knocked about at school. They used to pick on him. Once they knew he was boxing, they backed right off. Poke trained him until the age of 14, and recalls a kid with a "good straight right who knew how to put his shoulder into it" but who took an age to get any grace into his footwork. Even at this early age, however, Geale possessed an attribute that has sustained him through almost 200 fights. He was cool, unemotional - always level-headed. His next amateur trainer, Graeme George, felt so strongly about the teenager's talents that he flew Jeff Fenech, then close to retirement, down to Launceston to see for himself. "Graeme told me he had a future world champion," Fenech recalls. I had a look and thought he had huge potential. Had great speed, a great eye, great stamina. Daniel has grown up in an era where there are many fighters who talk it up," he continues, in a clear reference to Anthony Mundine. But Danny lets his fists do the talking. In a corner of The Grange boxing school there is a poster advertising the last Geale and Mundine fight. Geale looks straight ahead with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get expression; Mundine raises a finger and cocks his head. Geale v Mundine: it's never just a fight between these two, it's a clash of two diametrically opposed types of fighter. When I catch up with Geale a week after our talk at the Grange, he is waiting at the gate of Harrington Park Public School to pick up his three children - Bailey, Ariyelle and Lilyarna - with his wife Sheena. The couple met when Geale was 10, Sheena nine, and were dating off and on in their early teens. Geale has the names of his children tattooed on his left arm. The fringes of an impressive body-width winglike tattoo on his broad back are visible beyond a black T-shirt bearing the insignia of American metal band Throwdown. He smiles at mates and beams as his first born, Bailey, comes bounding up. But he looks tough. A stranger meeting Daniel Geale today would struggle to see him as anything other than a boxer. A gentle boxer. As we take the short walk home beside an oval, the kids stop to play with their friends, and Geale is in the thick of it. His own father, Cowboy, used to wrestle him as a kid and it's a guy-thing he does instinctively with Bailey. But the girls come running to him, too. Because of his strength, he's able to scoop them up like a circus performer. But it's Sheena who races off to rescue one of the girls from a bicycle tumble, while Geale saunters behind. "I'm bad cop to his good cop," she tells me later. He has all the fun. Harrington Park is a procession of cookie-cut McMansions and "circuits" instead of streets, yet within this spread of palatial outer-suburban order the Geale family inhabits a small, single-storey home. They have both come a long way from Launceston, and still have a way to go: on a plot nearby they are building a larger family home. How much time does Geale think the profession will give him? "About three years, maybe four," he replies. When he hangs up the gloves, Geale hopes to open a gym, while Sheena aims to "do something" with fashion. He doesn't want to be boxing for a living at 37, Mundine's age when they fought earlier this year. Even now, at 32, Geale is conscious of the pain and the rigours of the pugilist's life. As he builds towards his next fight, in December, he will triple his training time to three sessions and six hours a day. And when the big fight is over, if his father Cowboy is any judge, "he will want to get straight back in the ring." Geale does it all, he insists, for family. Mum and Dad had to scrape by when I was a kid. They did it tough. Given the opportunity, I want to make the most of it, to set our future up and give [my children] those things I didn't have when growing up. Has Bailey inherited the shy gene? He laughs that hesitant laugh. "He's not like me as a kid. He finds it easy to talk. Between our first meeting beside the training ring and this one at the family home, there has been some not-entirely unexpected news: the IBF has rejected his appeal against the Barker decision. The pieces on the chessboard of elite boxing are shifting. Most likely Barker will soon fight German boxer Felix Sturm, against whom Geale defended his title in 2012. Geale is looking for another opponent in December and hopes to take on the winner of the Barker-Sturm fight next year. No matter how it pans out, he knows he learnt a hard lesson in August. I probably lacked a bit of mental edge in those final rounds. I'm going to have to do a few things differently next time, change my preparation a bit. He is still learning. But his challenge now, as he sees it, is not so much about acquiring new skills as rehabilitating old ones. He must recover the rare combination of speed, stamina, balance and power - "He has great power if his feet are in the right position," says Fenech - that took him to the top. That the shy guy should also possess such enormous reserves of self-belief is Daniel Geale's gift, his mystery.