I wait for Abdul-Bari Awad, better known as Kid Galahad, outside the Ingle gym in Sheffield’s Wincobank. The Full Monty was shot in this part of town and the poverty, crime and good humour it depicted remain the same.

The gym was once a church hall before Brendan Ingle transformed it at the behest of the vicar in the early 1960s. Children file past me, their boxing gloves in shoulder bags. I can hear the drum of their feet as they run circuits inside. An elderly guy stands by the door and greets each by name.

I get a call asking me to head round the corner. Barry, to his friends, emerges from his front door. “Come in if you want, mate,” he says. “I’ve just got to put some washing on and then we’ll get some breakfast.” As he handles the washing machine, a quick glance around shows a humble, almost monastic home. There are no family photos on the walls or decorative touches.

“I’ve sacrificed everything,” he says, once we’re settled in a nearby cafe. “I’ve got no family, no kids, no girlfriend. There is no social life. Just boxing.”

On Saturday Awad, 29, will fight Josh Warrington for the IBF world featherweight title at the First Direct Arena in Leeds, Warrington’s hometown.

Throughout the buildup, Warrington has consistently called Awad “a disgrace to the sport” who should face a life ban. In May 2015 Awad was given a two-year suspension, later shortened to 18 months, after testing positive for trace amounts of the anabolic steroid stanozolol.

We used to rob people every day. We’d get their money and rob their phone. Then just after I started boxing, I stopped

At the fight’s first press conference, Awad was drowned out by Warrington fans chanting “‘cheat”. “They were shouting racist abuse at me too,” he says. How did you handle that? In response, Awad speaks of the unorthodox approach Ingle took to ensuring his fighters could handle abuse in the ring. “Brendan would desensitise it for me,” he says. “He used to say to me” – he slips into an Irish accent, speaking out the side of his mouth – “‘listen to me, you Arab bastard.’ If they want to call me that stuff, it really doesn’t bother me.”

Awad’s professional record stands at 26-0. He secured the fight by qualifying as the IBF’s mandatory challenger. Yet he goes into the bout as the designated villain and underdog.

Warrington did not want this fight. After defeating Lee Selby in May 2018, and then, in a stunning upset, the former double world champion Carl Frampton in December 2018, he had set his sights on a transatlantic bout with one of the Mexican stars of the featherweight division, Óscar Valdez.

“But I’ve always been an underdog,” Awad says. “I’ve been the underdog in life in general, all my life. I shouldn’t be where I am now.”

Kid Galahad in action during his defeat of Brayan Mairena in Sheffield. Photograph: Lee Smith/Action Images via Reuters

Awad was born in Doha, Qatar, the son of a soldier in the Qatar armed forces. Awad’s father had grown up “in the mountains” of Yemen and served during the Gulf war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. When Awad was a toddler, the family moved to Toxteth in Liverpool and his father opened a corner shop, the Mr Mohammed General Store, close to the street where Ringo Starr was born. Barry spent the first chapter of his life in the flat above, sleeping in bunk beds alongside his eight brothers and sisters, his widowed aunts and his grandparents.

“Dad used to open the shop at six in the morning and close at 11 at night. Every single day, no matter what, 365 days a year, he was in that shop,” Awad says. “He didn’t drink, didn’t go out. He provided. That’s discipline, that’s focus. My dad wasn’t very emotional; he was a soldier. You don’t realise but it ingrains things in you.”

When Awad was 12 the family moved to Upperthorpe in Sheffield. It remains an area blighted by violence. Awad and some of his family got in with the “street-rats”, as he puts it. He was expelled from secondary schools, banned from public transport and very much known to the police. “We used to rob people every day,” he says. “We’d get their money and rob their phone – three or four a day – and then we’d go to town and sell it. Then, one day, just after I started boxing, I stopped doing it. They carried on and I just stopped. That same week, they got caught. We were doing it for six or seven months, every day, and then, that one week, they got caught.”

It is a chapter of his life that seems still very much on his mind. “Some of my friends were drug dealers,” he says. “And they had loads of money. I didn’t have any money. When you’re that age, you think the money they’ve got is always going to last. I looked up to them. I never, ever thought they’d go to jail or get killed. And then, one day, they got caught. I couldn’t believe it. Now one’s dead and two of them have got life in jail.”

Awad has been called the new Prince Naseem Hamed. It is easy to see why. They are both working-class Sheffielders of Yemeni heritage – they both grew up above corner shops. And they were both taught by Ingle to defend themselves primarily with their feet rather than their hands. Awad is an electric presence in the ring; all elastic strength, quicksilver reflexes and darting movement.

And Awad owes Hamed a debt. As a 13-year-old Awad remembers striding up to him in a Sheffield mosque. “I told him I wanted to be a world champion fighter,” Awad says. “And he said: ‘If that’s what you want, get down to Brendan Ingle’s gym.’”

Awad had no idea where the gym was – his mother drove him round the suburbs of Sheffield asking for directions until they found it. Awad marched in and announced he had been sent by The Prince. It was an instant faux pas; Ingle had only just fallen out with Hamed. He told Awad to work on his footwork – then left him there for the next six hours. Awad did as he was told. Then he was told to pick the litter from the church grounds.

He stuck at it. After a year of training, Awad moved out of his family home and rented a room with other boxers he trained alongside, next door to the gym. He cleaned offices, mowed grass, stood behind the counter in corner shops. Ingle took him to watch the pro fights, found him a place at a local school and started calling him Kid Galahad after the Elvis Presley character in the 1962 musical. It became his ring name.

“I wasn’t the best kid in the gym,” Awad says. “The only difference between me and everyone else is I stuck to it. I’ve seen so many boxers go through that gym. They would start drinking. Women and money distracted them. For some reason I was always able to keep my focus and discipline.”

Which raises a question. I ask about the drug ban. Awad has always protested his innocence, claiming his brother, Mageed, spiked an energy drink after they fell out over money. The UK Anti-Doping Agency has a “strict liability” policy, meaning athletes are responsible for any prohibited substance in their system no matter how it got there. Nonetheless, after Awad’s legal team appealed, it reduced the ban.

Kid Galahad says Brendan Ingle’s death has not hit him yet as he is ‘so focused on becoming world champion I haven’t let myself think about it’. Photograph: Joel Goodman/The Guardian

Mageed, who was soon sent to prison for unrelated crimes, “was into some serious stuff,” Awad says. “I kept out of it. But once I started boxing on TV, he thought I was earning millions of pounds and he wanted his cut.” Have you forgiven him? “To a certain extent,” he says.

Ingle died in May 2018 after living with Alzheimer’s disease for several years. Awad helped carry his casket at the funeral. “Brendan was a father to me; he prepared me for life,” Awad says. “When I was a kid, he used to tell me things again and again. I used to think ‘this guy is crazy’, because he would keep on repeating himself. But all he was doing was getting me ready. He told me I was going to be world champion but I can’t ever take my eye off the ball like Prince Naseem did.”

How has he dealt with the loss? “I don’t think it has hit me,” he says. “I’m so focused on becoming world champion, I haven’t let myself think about it.”

If he loses to Warrington, Awad does not expect to get another title shot. Unlike his opponent, who is managed by Frank Warren, Awad does not have a powerful promoter behind him. It is difficult, in that scenario, to see where next he might turn, what else he would do. “I haven’t got another job, I haven’t got a safety net,” he says. “I don’t have anything else but boxing. That’s why I’m going to win.”

God, he believes, has guided him to this juncture. He refers to an Arabic phrase – maktub, or “it is written”. “This title fight is my destiny,” he says.“Sometimes, when I’m in bed, I think of all the stuff that’s happened in my life, all the obstacles. My cousin was killed. People have been shot, stabbed, sent to prison. All these distractions always around me. And now I’m here. This was meant to be.”

Kid Galahad will fight Josh Warrington on 15 June at the First Direct Arena, Leeds, available via BT Sport