I don’t have a problem with people who steal things. Well, don’t get me wrong, stealing is wrong but shoplifting at the time was justifiable to me, I was a kid. Anyway, I knew that the mark-up on some of those clothes was 400%, so I just thought of it as stealing from the rich to give to the poor, namely me. People need to make a living, it’s nothing personal, it’s not you they want, it’s just the money. However, if someone steals and hurts a person in the process, that is totally unacceptable, and against everything I stand for. I abhor that.
After Maximo I trained myself. When I started working in the Jack Pook gym in Brighton, my brothers, who were boxing themselves, introduced me to a trainer called Ronnie Davies. He had been Southern Area Lightweight Champion himself in 1967, so he knew the business. I was constantly in the gym, but Ronnie worked as a site manager for a building company. He toiled a long day on site and would come to the gym, back bent double, and work with me. I used to say, ‘Come in from the cold, stick with me, I’ll take you to the top.’ And I did.
He said to me, ‘You only need to train four days a week.’ I replied, ‘You can come in four days a week, I will be here seven days a week.’ Ronnie wasn’t training me. I knew how to box, all I needed was someone to be my eye outside of the ring, because there are certain things you can’t see. I would come back to my corner and his perception and observation would be very enlightening, because he could see things I was too involved to catch.
Ronnie was also a brilliant bodyguard. By that, I don’t mean personal security, rather a man who knew which fighters were dangerous, which ones were under-rated or over-hyped. Plus, he could protect me from the litany of problems, situations and liabilities that boxing exposed me to. There would be so many people trying to get to me, hangers-on, charlatans and takers, and Ronnie had a faultless radar for that, he sniffed them out immediately. He always watched my back against things like that. He was a very good companion. I will always love Ronnie Davies.
Ronnie also made me laugh. His humour was so cutting, so dry, that he would regularly have me roaring. Over the years, we had so many hilarious times, nights when our sides would ache from laughing, where we would fall asleep still sniggering. One time, we were planning to fly back from Portugal to Heathrow via Dusseldorf, but I had lost both the passports at the airport in the Algarve. So we had to disembark in Germany and wait overnight for the passports. I have never laughed so much as that night. From the moment we walked off that plane, we cried with laughter.
We went for a walk around the streets of Dusseldorf and I was telling Ronnie, ‘You mustn’t eat pork.’ I have always had a love-hate relationship with pork and had recently been listening to certain people who would not touch it. I was saying, ‘It is not a clean meat, Ronnie, never touch it again, if you know what’s good for you!’ He was laughing at me about it but I really wanted to win him round to not eating pork. They’d offered us pork on the plane and I was saying, ‘This is a very dangerous meat, Ronnie.’ As we were strolling past all these shops and restaurant windows, we stopped near one which had this big spit roast of pork going around on a skewer, crackling skin and juices sizzling. I walked in, got their attention and, said, ‘Yes, sell me all that’s left of the pig!’ Ronnie was doubled over in stitches.
A few more shops down the road, we were walking past a kebab shop and there was this big German guy shaving slices off the revolving meat. Despite this being Germany, as he saw me a bright light of recognition lit his face up and he immediately struck up my peacock pose, complete with kebab knives in hand. Yeeaahh!
That night we were sharing a twin room and we took this Haagen-Dazs ice-cream back for our night-cap but it took hours to polish off because we were laughing so much. Eventually I said, ‘Quiet now, Ronnie, we need to get some sleep.’ I switched the lights off but after about ten minutes he just burst out laughing again. Another twenty minutes later I went to get some water out of the mini bar, but dropped the bottle, so more hysterics. My sides were aching more than after any body shot! Ronnie took the monotony out of boxing – that scathing sense of humour sliced the tedious side out of my spartan life.
The public perception was that Ronnie was my trainer, so as soon as I could, it made sense for me to have Ronnie styled to suit my team image. He had his hair cropped very closely and began wearing immaculate suits too, no more training bottoms. When I went on to win the title, I insisted he bought a Jaguar too – it was far more stylish and made for a better show. This was all part of the business plan. It was about showmanship. All my team had to be well turned out, not just Ronnie.
I had hooked up with a local promoter by the name of Keith Miles and he started to help me get fights. I worked two jobs, in Debenhams and the other in Wimpy, because the money I was earning from fighting was simply not enough. However, this was very tiring and coupled with my obsessive training, I knew it could have detrimental effects on my performances. So I voiced my fears to Keith Miles, who agreed to pay me £120 a week as an allowance.
It was at this time that I first met my future wife, Karron. Her sister, Phillipa, used to go out with my brother, Simon, one of the twins. One day I glanced through into his kitchen, saw Karron and thought, ‘What a beautiful woman. It would be a dream to be with a woman like that.’ But this was an impossibility. She was, and is, a gorgeous woman. What was I? Nothing. I had no self-esteem, other than my belief in my boxing ability. Back then, no one else knew that either. So, at first, to be with her was just an impossible wish.
By coincidence, Karron had actually seen my seventh fight, against Winston Burnett at Hove Town Hall, back in March 1988. She’d come to watch with a male friend of hers. She wasn’t dating him but I still had not even spoken to her at this point. I had seen her since in a supermarket but couldn’t pluck up the courage to speak to her.
I didn’t have a car as yet, so I used to walk everywhere. People began to notice me walking around Brighton, strutting even back then. Jack Pook used to train my brothers at the time and he said that I walked, ‘as if I owned the United Kingdom.’ I walked everywhere like that. I was always very, very proud, no matter how difficult my circumstances. One day I had walked about three miles into Brighton and as I was coming back past my brother’s house in Portland Road, I saw Karron talking to Peter. I was wearing a nice black cloth coat and went up to them and said, ‘Hi Peter,’ before turning to Karron and saying, ‘Hi, would you give me a lift please?’ She said, ‘Well, I am talking.’ I said, ‘Well, when you’ve finished, if you don’t mind, would you give me a lift back to my apartment? I’ll be in the 7–Eleven, buying a Lucozade.’ She looked stunning.
Shortly after, she came and picked me up from the 7-Eleven in her old black, banged-up Fiat and took me to my apartment in Trafalgar Street. When we pulled up outside, I turned to her and said, ‘Did you come to my last fight?’ to which she said, ‘No’. So I said, ‘Would you like to see it on video?’ I was delighted when she said, ‘Okay’.
She came up to the apartment, but while we were watching the video she began to have a severe headache and neck spasms. I gave her some painkillers but the headache just got rapidly worse. By now I was thinking: Okay, I’m a minority in this country, and where I’ve been living in New York, this kind of thing happens all the time, people get blackmailed or conned. I called an ambulance and they took her to hospital, where it became apparent that, fortunately, she was being genuine. At that point, Ronnie walked in and said, ‘What have you done? What did you do to her?’ to which I vehemently protested my innocence. What had happened was, unbeknown to her, she’d suffered a trapped nerve the previous day when, during a scuffle at the jewellery shop where she worked, one of the owners had accidentally hit her on the back of the neck as he was grappling with a robber.
Keith Miles found out about what had happened and assumed the worst, so I had to tell him too, ‘I didn’t touch the woman, she broke down.’ They were all very suspicious. The next