SEAN LAZZERINI'S thumb and forefinger are tugging at his front tooth. He's explaining how the tooth is false. It's barely remarkable, a boxer with a denture; it's an occupational hazard when you take punches every day. But there's a twist. He didn't lose his tooth in the ring.

“I was fighting in the Nikolay Pavlyukov tournament, a really prestigious Russian boxing competition,” recalls Lazzerini, one of Scotland’s brightest hopes for a medal at next year’s Commonwealth Games where he hopes to fight in the 81-kilo category. “I'd knocked out one of the home favourites Dalgat Shikshaev in the third round and he wasn't happy. His coaches said he was from a region in Russia that was really big on honour and pride – Dagestan or Chechnya – somewhere like that. They said that his family came up to get him and they were going to beat him up because he had lost to me. The police had to keep him under guard and the Russian coaches wouldn't let him go because [the family] were going to set about him.

“I was waiting outside for a taxi to take me back to my hotel when he came up and punched me. We had to be separated; I'd have knocked him out again if that hadn't happened. He was a bad loser. It was disgusting but that's sport. At football you lose, at rugby you lose. It's more personal in boxing, I suppose. It's about pride, especially in countries like Russia.

“The coach was saying 'Is okay, is okay, shake hands'.” And I said, 'it's not okay, my tooth's hanging out'.”

Lazzerini mimics the Russian coach’s accent as he retells this anecdote. He does that a lot, drifting from Irish (two of his friends come from the north) to nasally Glaswegian (a former trainer) but for now he is speaking with a distinctly Scottish accent, explaining why he almost didn't become a boxer.

“My dad was born here, my grandad was born in Barga in Italy. He died when I was young. He owned Mario’s Plaice, the fish and chip shop on Byres Road. It was called something else then. My dad worked in the chippy but they ended up selling it and it became Mario’s Plaice.

“My dad told me he was going to be a boxer but his dad had a big broken nose and he said he didn’t fancy having one like it. He was too pretty for it. My maternal grandfather, who came from Ireland was a boxer, too, and so were both my great-grandfathers. But my dad wasn’t. He didn’t want me to do boxing. I would plead with him but he wouldn’t take me to the gym. He wanted me to play rugby and I did for Hillhead/Jordanhill. I was 12 years-old and it was my mum who took me down for the first time. I was always the wee guy in the gym asking everyone to spar. I’d go for them and they would take it easy on me but then as I got a bit better I used to get hidings all the time.”

Earlier Lazzerini had bounded up the steps of Bellahouston Palace of Arts, where he has trained since his mother agreed to his pleas all those years ago, greeting one of his two trainers James McCosh with an outstretched hand and the semblance of a grin. The Palace was opened to host Glasgow’s art collections to celebrate the Empire Exhibition of 1938 but today it has a more utilitarian purpose, housing training facilities and, of course, Bellahouston Boxing Club. This is no dingy downtown sweathouse. The building sports a beautiful art deco frontage on the outside; the gym's elongated windows mean it is bright and spacious on the inside and the ring is cascaded in light. The setting sits well with Lazzerini's sunny disposition.

McCosh, himself a former promising boxer who represented Scotland at 75 kilos, trains Lazzerini in partnership with Danny Lobo, another well-kent face on the Scottish amateur scene. They expect their protege to win a medal in the Gold Coast to add to the Commonwealth Youth Games gold he won in 2015 and the European Youth Championship bronze he claimed the same year.

“Everyone who has seen him knows he has something special,” says McCosh. “He has this lightning combination. It's the fast-twitch muscle fibre, it's part of his DNA.”

Last week Lazzerini trained with the British Olympic team in Sheffield under the guidance of head coach Robert McCracken. Next week, the light-heavyweight will travel to Hamburg for the World Championships with Scottish team-mates Aqeel Ahmed and Lee McGregor, where he has hopes of going further than his run to the quarter-finals of the European Championships which were held in Ukraine in June.

His performances in Kharkiv secured him his berth at the worlds and also a degree of notoriety on social media after a breathless three rounds against Spain's Alejandro Camacho following that rarest of occurrences in the ring – a Rocky-style double knockdown. The Scottish national elite champion is honest enough to admit that he was the real injured party, catching the full force of Camacho's right hook just as he landed a punch of his own.

“I had never been down. Ever. I was absolutely gone to be honest. Wiped. I didn’t even know what had happened. I could see myself heading for the floor and I knew I’d been hurt. I went into automatic mode in that fight. I was hurt, I was very dizzy and I was lucky it wasn’t stopped because my legs were like jelly and often they just say ‘nope’ when that happens. When I got out of the ring I couldn’t remember anything that had happened. Honestly. The whole fight. I was in Ukraine for a month but for a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was and when I got out of the ring there was another boxer, a really good amateur called Peter Mullenberg from Holland and even though he was on the other side of the draw I thought I had fought him when he walked into the changing room.”

Lazzerini had duly scraped himself off the canvas and, boxing from muscle memory and instinct, scrapped his way to a points decision.

One flurry of combinations in the comeback against Camacho marked Lazzerini down as something special and already there is talk of interest from promoters intrigued by how those flying fists might be marketed in the pro game. But Lazzerini knows there is plenty of work still to be done. Currently he is occupied with how to get inside those longer rivals such as Joe Ward, the world No.1 from Ireland, whom he may have to beat if he wants to win the worlds and the man who ended his gold medal bid at the Europeans.

“In sparring, I have been trying to think more about placing my punches and about my feet. I’m short for the weight and when I fight guys like Ward that are tall, I need to think about getting inside. I’m thinking about feinting, about different things. You do all this training and you can apply it in sparring but the only time you know whether it has worked properly is in a fight. The three three's can go like that [clicks fingers] so you need to make sure what you do is working.”

His toughest opponent might be the bouts of nerves he suffers before fights which seem to intensify in the unique conditions that competition boxing such as he will encounter next week in Hamburg brings.

“I get really nervous. I count down the hours. I look at my watch. I find myself going to the toilet all the time. I’m peeing constantly. I find that I can’t stop moving, I don’t want to sit still but at the same time I don’t want to burn too much nervous energy because that then might show in the fight. It’s a horrible feeling. At different times of the day I’ll feel anxious. When I hear word of the draw, who I am fighting, and at that moment I’m like ‘whoaah!’ Then at the weigh-in you’ll walk past the guy you are meant to be fighting and you’re thinking ‘oh, here we go’. I don’t like to be thinking about it constantly or it playing on my mind. It is mentally draining.”

Lazzerini is no prototypical boxer. At 5ft 10ins, he is undersized for a light-heavyweight and his build is often different to his rangy opponents but there should be no ambiguity: he is a pitbull inside the ring. His shoulders and neck are that of a gymnast, his biceps sit like two wrecking balls on his bulging arms, and he is incredibly powerful because he does not struggle to make the weight.

His shape is, perhaps, a legacy of regular workouts at the Western Baths in Glasgow's West End where Lazzerini can regularly be seen working his way along the trapeze bars that overhang the club's swimming pool.

But he looks after himself in other ways, too. He loves his grub, his “favourite food in the world is gemista, an amazing vegetable dish which is stuffed with mince and rice” which the grandmother of his Greek girlfriend, Anna, is an expert at making.

“I still try to eat healthily. You need to eat. I see a lot of boxers these days not training for boxing but training to lose weight, it’s that bad. I don’t see how that is good for you. I don’t see how that is good for your sport or your health. It takes the enjoyment out of it as well.”

What with the West End club, the rugby, the art deco gym and the multi-cultural influences, the mild-mannered, well-spoken Lazzerini is acutely aware that he does not fit the stereotype but it is clear boxing is as much a part of his fabric as his Italian and Irish heritage.

“I always used to think that I had to try harder because I didn’t come from a poor background. I would hear these stories about old boxers like Roberto Duran coming from poverty and how hard it was to get to the top but there are more distractions these days: in a way it is harder for someone like me because I could easily go to college, university or settle for a nice job like all of my pals. I have to make sacrifices every day.”

Like giving up teeth.