Until he took the job at Stafford College, all he had really known was boxing. There were pictures of him as a tiny kid perched on a boxing bean bag and 20 years’ worth of memories in the gym.

But, after 15 years as an amateur, Heaney decided not to bother with the sport. His dream of one day signing with Frank Warren was dead and that period of his life was over.

Or so he thought.

Almost immediately he could feel that unmistakable itch in the back of his mind. Surely all those years of dedication had not been for nothing? He decided he had to give it another try.

“Just give me three years,” he said to his partner Lisa one evening. “Three years, let me see what I can do.”

That conversation took place almost exactly 10 years ago, and on Saturday night, at Birmingham’s BP Pulse Live Arena, the 37-year-old will finally hang up his gloves after a remarkable professional run.

But it is impossible to tell the Nathan Heaney story without the heartbreak which so achingly defined it early on. His career had got off to a solid start, with six straight wins between November 2017 and April 2019 firing him towards a regional title shot.

However, the day before his manager officially offered him the opportunity, his world came crashing down. “My dad took his own life,” Heaney told me. “I went to his house and found him.

“The next day is when the Midlands board sanctioned me to fight for the area title. I text my manager back and said ‘yeah get it sorted.’”

Many others would have withdrawn given what he had been through but something inside told him to press on. His dad was a former amateur boxer himself, a puncher, who had more than 50 amateur bouts. His dad took him to the gym in the first place and sported a moustache just like the one Heaney has now made his trademark.

“I took the fight and sold 330 tickets for that night,” Heaney says. “But I felt like people were supporting me as a person because of what had happened with my dad.

“But if that fight had never happened, if I had pulled out of it, I don’t think I’d be where I am now. Because it was from then that the ball started rolling. From 330, there were 400 at the next one then more than 300 came with me to Birmingham.

“Then, for my 10th fight, 775 came to watch me against Christian Schembri in Stoke. That was when it really kicked off.”

Heaney completely outboxed Schembri at the Kings Hall that night, winning 100-90 on one card and 99-91 on the other two. What happened immediately before the first punch was thrown really transformed his career trajectory.

Back in March 2018 before his first fight at the venue, Heaney had noticed a small stage area from which all the ringwalks started. “I just thought I could do something with that," he says.

For Heaney, a lifelong Stoke City fan, there could be only one song: Delilah.

Let’s not forget, the song’s association with Stoke City is a weird one in the first place. The 1968 classic by Tom Jones tells the story of a wild, jilted lover murdering his lover after watching her cheat on him through a window.

The reason for its association with Stoke is debated but the main theory dates back to April 1987 when the football club traveled to Derby for a league match.

Local police asked the visiting fans, gathered outside an away pub, to stop singing expletive-laden songs. It was then that roofing contractor Anton Booth climbed on a table and sang Delilah, PG as it is, instead.

Regardless of how truthful that is, there is no doubting the tragic anthem is synonymous with Stoke City and now, thanks to Heaney, with perhaps British boxing’s greatest ringwalk too.

“First time I did it there was only about 80 people there and I looked a right idiot,” he laughs. “But for that Schembri fight, the place was sold out, there were Stoke City flags over all the bannisters. The ringwalk video went viral and the rest is history.”

Such social media presence means a lot these days and it was not long before Warren, his dream promoter, signed him up. It would be the start of an association leading him to a famous night in Manchester, where he outboxed Denzel Bentley to become British middleweight champion. Heaney had been 9/1 (+900) before the fight and more than 2,000 Stokies made the trip to roar him on. His Delilah ringwalk was, as he puts it, like a Stoke City Haka.

“It’s amazing to think of how it grew,” he says. “For my amateur fights I’d get about five people there. My dad, Lisa and maybe a couple of mates.

“For my professional debut I had 60 people, 80 at the next, then 100 ... it just grew gradually.

“I’m gutted my dad never got to see what it became. I remember telling him I’d sold 100 tickets and he couldn’t believe it. ‘100 tickets, son?,’ he said. ‘That’s amazing.’

“Imagine he saw all the other fights with thousands supporting. You can’t explain the pride he would have felt.”

On Saturday night in Birmingham, Heaney and his legion of fans will go again, one final time. One last trip, one last pre-fight beer, one last Delilah. As he speaks to The Ring, Heaney sports a little sparring shiner under his right eye and there will be no more of them either.

“It does feel scary,” he says of retirement. “It’s weird.

“It’s scary in the sense that it’s all I’ve ever done for the last 30 years. In the gym at 7, first amateur fight at 11, retired at 26 never to box again only to turn professional at 27 just because I didn’t want to have any regrets.

“Fast forward 10 years and I’m exactly where I envisioned I would be all those years ago. But I’ve always had something to work towards with boxing so the scary thing now is, what do I work towards? An idle mind can be worrisome so I just need to find my passion outside of boxing.”

For many, that can become a fight itself but Heaney has designs on punditry or even opening a coffee shop. That’s a question for Monday morning, once Saturday night’s rematch with Gerome Warburton is out of the way.

“I’ve seen this quote,” Heaney says. “And I admit it’s a bit morbid but it says that when you die, you should be able to think to yourself ‘I’m ready now’.

“That means you should be able to think that you’ve done everything in life and exhausted yourself, put everything into it and got whatever you could back. That’s when you can say you’re ready to go. For me, it’s the exact same in regards to boxing. You die as a boxer when you retire, your ego is going, I’ll be a normal person again next week.

“But am I ready to go? Have I exhausted myself completely in that regard? Absolutely.”

They were the best three years of his life.