Although I was aware what steroids were, I had never taken anything like that, so I stayed off them and I trained at a gym with a lad called Tony Buxton, who was the training instructor there. He was about 15 ½ stone, he was ripped and shredded and he looked really good. Tony helped me along and I trained with him for a few years.
After that, I trained with a lad called George Fawcett, who has just won Over-50s Mister Britain. We would train twice a day. When we went out on the town together they used to say, ‘Oh, look, Twit and Twat,’ because we were from the local Gold’s gym.
I promised myself that I would work up to show standards. There was only ten days before a body-building competition I was keen to enter. You can diet in ten days and lose a stone. I went in for this contest and weighed in at 14 stone and four pounds; I had dropped over a stone, as planned. It was the Mr England at Gateshead, run by Matty Boroughs, himself a former champion body-builder. When I got there, the stadium was packed.
I had entered the Under-21s competition and 21 guys were vying for the title. Back in those days, it was a massive contest because everyone wanted to be a body-builder.
I can tell you, it took some guts and heart to stand up on stage with just a pair of fucking underpants on, greased up, in front of 2,000 people, with cameras on you.
I didn’t win but I came fifth or sixth.
I went on to enter the Mr Skegness competition, where I was fourth or fifth. Next came the Mr Crowtree competition at the local leisure centre, with about 20 in the line-up. All my uncles were there to see me, so I had to do well. But there I realised that it was all about who you knew!
The lad who was on stage with me, I thought I was better than him, and everyone else knew I was. I’m not blowing my own trumpet but, although the lad who won was excellent, I was sure I was in the first two or three and I was placed a disheartening fifth.
The lad who came second, his dad was one of the judges. I knew then that you couldn’t win with odds like that stacked against you. So I thought, Fuck this body-building malarkey.
I didn’t expect to win, but I thought I was doing better than him and when I was ranked fifth there were about 200 people booing at the result. But at least I’d been up there and had a taste of it.
I went on training hard and the most I ever weighed was 23 stone and 10 pounds, which was getting ridiculous. The only good thing I can say about being obsessive was that you were never happy, you were still hungry to achieve more.
Next year I will have been training for 25 years and I’m still going strong. But you would be down in weight one month, to 23 stone, and then you would go on the gear (steroids) and then come off and you might go back down to 21, which is what I am now.
The drawback is, when you get an illness, you still want to do it and to stay hungry. You get fighters wanting to be the best and I can understand why Mike Tyson just wouldn’t yield his title. It is hard to train, it is hard when you are getting there and it’s even harder to stay there.
5 THE EAGLE DOES NOT CHASE AFTER FLIES
SOON AFTER LOSING these competitions, I took a doorman’s job and changed my training regime. Things have to be right when you train or what’s the use of training? It is like when I went to jail: I was 22 ½ stone and when I came out I was a skeletal 18 stone! There were a few people having a go at me in prison, but I was still the top fucking fighter and I was still strong. It was just you weren’t taking in as much food and you were eating shit food. I was still training hard, doing an hour’s circuit a night. I was running about like a lunatic, doing circuits and 500 sit-ups a day and 500 press-ups and mad things like that, but when you’re in jail there is nothing else to do.
Back to my life outside: I was now in training with George Fawcett and I was doing a few competitions. John Garland was another lad who trained with us.
I was about 20 when I first worked on the doors, at a place in Redcar called Leo’s that stayed open until 1am. I asked for the job and the lad who gave me it was called Peter Rhymes. I worked with Jeff Robinson, who was sound as a pound and about ten years older than me.
I was green as grass in this job. I’d never gone to nightclubs in my teens; I never drank, never took drugs. I was just a lad who had trained all my life and there I was on the nightclub scene working the door. I remember clearly the first fight I had to break up. You are nervous because you don’t know what to do – not scared, just nervous. There was this big lad, about 15 stone, who grabbed me and was pulling me. I went to throw him out but he grabbed a rail and I couldn’t get him down. I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t know how to throw punches properly as they didn’t train you in boxing and I just did weights.
Grabbing at him wildly, I put him out but he ran at me, so I nutted him and he fell to the floor like a stuffed doll and that was it. After that, there was fight after fight after fight to deal with, but I was still wrestling because I didn’t know how to punch. I was just a brute of a lump!
I stayed at Leo’s for several years and I was doing three jobs, still working at the racecourse and at the gym as well. I was pulling in about £200 a week – a lot of money 20 years ago. Every penny went on training and eating. I only paid a tenner a week for my flat, remember, because it was a lad’s council flat.
About £150 a week went on food. I was constantly eating and getting bigger. I used to go and buy the stupidest things, like protein and all sorts of vitamins. I used to take about 40, 50 vitamin tablets a day. It was all bullshit, because with all the food you are eating you don’t need all those tablets: you are getting enough from the food. Your body can only handle about 20 grams of protein in one meal, so what’s the point of having 100 grams when you can only digest 20?
It is only in the last ten years that I’ve got into proper dieting. When you eat every two or three hours you don’t need to eat massive dinners with 20 eggs and so on. People think that you have to eat big meals, but you are better off with six normal meals than three big meals.
When I first started training, I was doing sets of ‘tens’. We didn’t know about all these things like triple drops and mid-training, but we were still strong. I was a rock-solid 14 stone at 20, which is a lot of weight.
I trained in the Olympia and at the time I remember Dave Williams was the best fighter in the area, and, I would say, he was like a body-builder called Tim Belknap, an old-school body-builder. Williams was 15, 16 stone and about five foot eight, with massive forearms, and he had punched George, my mate. He was the best fighter in the area and he beat Pete Hoe, who was the best fighter in Eston [in Middlesbrough]; he beat him twice and was the kiddie in the area.
I remember, when I was 19 or 20, spilling Williams’s drink at the nightclub and he tried to bully me. He brayed everyone, and he could fight. He had done a bit of boxing and he was the best fighter locally for years.
My mate, John Garland, was Scottish, and I worked with him on the door at Leo’s for years. But then I nutted someone and dropped him and fractured his skull and the police were after me. So I moved to Philmores, working on the door Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Everyone got on with me, but the first person to say something wrong, I would knock them out.
I think it was partly a lack of confidence, because when you’re older you get cockier, and you think, Well, I could destroy you if I wanted to but I don’t have to. You were paranoid and you wanted to defeat them to show them that you were the best. Just like Tyson wanted to be the best fighter in the world when he was 20. But when you get older you are not as bothered. People bump into you now and you are not as bothered, but then it was, ‘Who are you fucking pushing?’
I moved on to the Top Deck and various other clubs; nearly every club in Redcar in fact. Then I started working in a pub and seeing this girl and when I fell out with her I stayed at my mate Little Frankie Atherton’s house. A lovely bloke, he is about 70 now. Frankie taught me loads, how to box, how to throw punches,