I turned pro after missing out on the Moscow Olympics. I figured there was no point in hanging round the amateurs for 1984, and another Olympics that were likely to be a political football. So I got into a gym at Broughton. No contract, no benefactor or manager, just a promoter willing to pay my expenses in advance so I could go to my first pro fights.
Six months of running round Boggart Hole Clough and lifting weights, and I was a middleweight pro rather than a light heavyweight amateur. Two four round fights in Stockport and Ashton, and I was a full licence holder.
A month later I was on my way to York Hall in Bethnal Green. I was a book one, get one free fighter. Our gym had a decent lightweight who was taking on the southern area champion, and I was to go down with him for six rounds against a local novice who'd had a shock defeat last time out. He'd had five fights, and was supposed to be hot property. What mattered to the London promoter was that he was from a gypsy family who'd buy loads of tickets and fill the hall on a lacklustre bill. There was £100 out of that ticket money on the table if I could get a win. Any result on points was out of the question for me; if the ref didn't end the fight early I was going home skint.
Fourteen hours after we left Manchester I was £75 richer, and my promoter had some return on his expenditure. The local hotshot had a glass jaw that no amount of bravado and boasts about bare knuckle experience could hide. It took me three rounds to find the weakness, but by the middle of round four even the most generous ref Bethnal Green could boast had to rule it off. By the time I came out of the dressing rooms, hands iced and a bump under my left eye colouring up nicely, our lightweight had lost his fight on points, and we were off to a pub where we'd been promised a late night behind closed doors supper and a bed for the night.
The pub was on one of those long, 1930s roads heading out of London to the north. Doors to the lounge and bar at either end of the pub, and a car park that wrapped all round the back of the building. Terry the trainer parked the Cortina behind the pub, and we went in through a door adjacent to a flat roofed extension that smelled of fried food. I was as hungry as a boxer who'd made the weight on the day of the fight could be; stale chip fat and burned meat smells made my mouth water.
The lights were dim in the pub. The brewery had stripped out the partition walls, so the difference between the bar and the lounge was the condition of the carpet and the pool table at the bar end. Two tables at our end of the bar were laid up for food. Behind the bar a blonde woman in her 40s was holding court, all false nails and lacquered hair with the glitter of finger-loads of nine carat gold and cut glass costume jewellery. Next to her was a bloke who looked like her husband, with a badly disguised bald spot and a collar that reeked of 1976. I'd seen her in about the tenth row at the fight, as I'd walked to the ring, but not Baldy. There were a couple of lads in the shadows around the pool table, but I couldn't make them out much, and I wasn't much bothered. My first knockout as a pro was making my head spin. I felt as if, finally, I knew I could make a job of hitting people more professionally than I did working as a bouncer.
Terry was fussing about not drinking alcohol, and eating sensibly while Blondie fussed about whether we fancied steak and mushrooms with chips. Within five minutes we were sat around the tables while a mousy looking girl served the food and made eyes at the lightweight. He was welcome to her, spots and all, even though I was starting to get that post fight euphoria that starts in the groin and builds until you feel you're glowing like a Ready Brek kid. Terry engaged me in conversation while the lightweight ran his hand under the mousy girl's skirt. She didn't seem to object, and I started to change my mind about where my euphoria might lead. Within two minutes the lightweight and her were off to the gents toilets, and Terry was looking away as if he'd seen it all before. He had, apparently. Third time the lightweight had been in London in four months. They'd stopped in the same pub each time. Terry finished explaining that, and then the two guys in Harrington jackets appeared out of the shadows round the pool table, heading for the gents at our end of the bar rather than theirs.
Terry tried to put them off, but the one with the scar that looked like it came from a Stanley knife growled 'If my sister's in there he's dead...'
Terry looked nervous. I looked towards Blondie and Baldy. Blondie was watching, intense, absorbed but unmoving. Baldy looked like he'd shit himself. I stood up, thought about the purple bruises over the knuckles of my right hand, the ache in my left wrist. I wasn't used to the lighter pro gloves yet. It wouldn't make sense to mess my hands up further if I didn't have to.
Scarface saw me coming, and tried to step round me, as if a glare would stop me. A roundhouse forearm into his top lip stopped him in his tracks, and preserved my knuckles. His pal looked at Scarface spitting teeth through the ragged remains of his top lip, and shaped to hit me. He watched my hands, like you would with a boxer. I turned my shoulders as if I was going to go southpaw and throw a left. Then I kicked him in the balls. The Marquess of Queensbury didn't do rules for pub fighting. If he did, he'd probably start with the first rule being there are no rules except survival.
Scarface shaped for another go, and got the back of my forearm in his throat, off centre so it knocked him down but didn't crush his windpipe. Since the other one, who looked like a younger brother brought along against his will, was struggling with the idea that the lump in his throat felt like his bollocks he wasn't a problem.
With Terry's help we got both out of the doors, and bolted them. Baldy and Blondie had come out from behind the bar. Baldy still looked shit scared, as if he expected his backbone to run out of the bottom of his flares. Blondie was looking at me, and talking. The adrenalin was still singing in my ears, and her words weren't making a lot of sense. Like tuning a radio in, the words gradually formed shapes.
'They're not bad lads, you shouldn't have messed them up...'
'I don't care if they're your boyfriends love they need teaching, and they've just had a lesson. Mind if I finish my supper?'
She looked at me as if I'd slapped her, but not like she was angry. It took a while but I recognised the look. The landlady in Get Carter, the one Carter fucks after having a wank on the phone with Britt Ekland. That made me wonder. Finishing my supper gave me time to think. Not about reheated rump steak and tinned mushrooms with chips, but about sex and violence. Blondie had known something was going to happen. She hadn't minded if it did. That asked its own questions.
I finished the food, and sat and watched as Terry lit up a No. 6. He was usually good value for boxing lore after a fight. He looked across at Blondie, then Baldy, then back to me.
'She's right. You didn't need to mess them up son. You fight first and think second. End of the first round I was telling you that gyppo would go to an uppercut. You battered his head for another three rounds cos you were enjoying scrapping, not boxing.'
I tried to ignore the smell of the cheap tobacco, the acid flavour of fried tomato in the back of my throat.
'She wanted to see trouble. She set him up for a battering.'
Terry looked away, then lit a second fag from the butt of the first.
'He's been here twice before with me, it's the same routine each time. I usually talk them down, and they shout the odds at the landlady. You've just hospitalized two dickheads who just needed a threat.'
I looked across at Blondie. She tried to look disinterested, as if she just wanted to get the ashtrays emptied and get to bed. Baldy had disappeared somewhere. Judging by the state of the pint I was drinking it wasn't to clean the beer lines. The lightweight and the mousey girl had reappeared from the toilet; her blouse was misbuttoned. I was decided, and if the lightweight got hurt, well, that was his problem.
'You finished son? My turn with her then.'
I was watching Blondie's face as I spoke. She wasn't happy.
'No, she's my niece, not some cheap slut.'
