When I was about 23, I went to Ray Hood’s gym in Lingdale and started boxing there. I wanted to be a boxer but I just couldn’t get my weight down enough. I managed to get down to about 17 stone, though that was still a lot for a heavyweight to carry back then.
I lost a fight I had at 24 because the lad was one of those people who would jump and move all the time. I would have knocked him out if he’d stood still. I lost the fucking fight on points and I thought, This is not for me. I was better just grabbing hold of them and fucking braying them. I wanted to bash the bastards and smash their faces off the floor and pull their fucking arms out or bite their noses off. If it had been a street fight where you’re standing fighting, I would have won the fight because you couldn’t have got away, but the referee used to pull you all the time. It was just fucking shit. So I went back to about 19 stone and I was working in Philmores for a while. It’s now a hotel and bar.
Philmores was a funny old nightclub where you would be fucking fighting with everyone. It was along the coast from Redcar, in Saltburn, an agricultural area with a lot of farmers wanting to fight. I was assigned the upstairs part, working on my own. There were six men on the door, so I was fighting the whole fucking nightclub on my own. I would be fighting every fucker and knocking them all out. By now, I was getting a big reputation. I beat everybody in Redcar and now I beat everybody in Saltburn too.
People used to say, ‘You’re not that fucking hard.’
I remember this lad came up to me and said, ‘You’re a big lad, but I bet you can’t move fast …’
Boom! My fist travelled from 0 to 60 mph in a millisecond and I fucking knocked him out with my right hand.
When he woke up I asked, ‘Was that fast enough for you?’
Nowadays that wouldn’t bother me, but back then it was, ‘Look, you daft cunt, who are you talking to?’ and I just hit him. You are more aggressive when you are younger, more like a warrior, but when you get older you realise how much you have got to lose. Without controlling my punches, a man of my size could kill with one blow! When you are young, you are not worried about it.
I have knocked down a lot of people, fractured their skulls, broken their jaws and put them in comas. I have put legs and arms out and bitten off people’s noses, lips and ears. When you are doing that, the last thing you are thinking about is the judge sending you to prison. The way I looked at it was, even if I got jail for it, that was better than being beaten. No, that wouldn’t matter: you just think, Fuck that, he is going to try to do it to me.
There has to be a point, though, where you change from being careless to being careful. You don’t know how good you are because you think, Well, I might have been lucky there, but you can’t be lucky in the middle of your fucking fight. There is a big difference between thinking, or hoping, you’re good and actually knowing how good you are. It’s being able to assess this that makes all the difference.
Nowadays, I know I can beat anybody and that is what is firmly in my mind, but in those days I didn’t carry such a positive thought with me. When you are young and somebody says something that gets to you, you think you have to prove something. You go round punching people for just that reason.
I never ever lost a fight. No matter who it was that I came up against, I beat them. Sometimes it would be easy, sometimes it would be hard and sometimes I would come out with a black eye and have a broken cheekbone or broken nose. I have never had a broken jaw, never been knocked out. I always used to win, no matter whether the fight was sloppy or I knocked them out with one shot. I might have a fight with someone weighing 20 stone. Boom! They would be knocked out. Or I might fight someone of 14 stone and it would take about a dozen punches because you can’t always get your best shot in easily. Later on, you learn all this and so you don’t lose, you go in and use all your adrenalin and the fight is over within a minute.
Now I don’t think there is anybody in the country that could beat me, and people would say things like, ‘Nobody in Teesside could beat you.’ They would say that I would be one of the top-ten unlicensed fighters in Britain. This was no-holds-barred, anything-goes fighting. Nobody would beat me, they said, because I was just so fast with my hands and had been hit by the best fighters. You have taught the best fighters and you have beaten the best fighters, they would say. You have been hit with bars and they still couldn’t knock you out. It’s not just luck, is it? It can’t be fucking luck all the time: hundreds and hundreds of fights and I have beaten them all.
So, I’m working in Philmores, I’m about 24 and I’m still boxing and doing the weights. I wouldn’t say I was a great boxer, because I wasn’t, but my hand speed was phenomenal for my size.
I remember Lee Duffy saying to me, ‘How do you have hand speed that fast and be that big? You beat the laws of physics!’ I went to Little Frankie’s house. How he could work up in Spennymoor, I don’t know. It was a fucking nightmare! Dead rough. For those who don’t know it, Spennymoor is just a little village, but it is a village with a lot of boxers all trained for fighting and a lot of gypsies from Bishop Auckland and places like that – a whole load of good fighters. Also, when I was a kid a lot of National Front people lived there.
I met this man called John Black, the best fighter in Middlesbrough, and got a job with him. We worked from his house with John Watson, Paul Cook and Gerry Russell. There were about 20 doorman in all but only seven worked on the door at one time, and they called us ‘The Magnificent Seven’.
On my first night we were standing at the door and these wankers at the front of the queue were throwing stones and coins at us and I said, ‘Fuck this!’
I jumped out and brayed six lads, one after the other, and knocked them on their arses.
One lad shouted at me, ‘You knocked me down, but you didn’t hurt me,’ and as he was running across the road a fucking car knocked him over and broke both his legs.
Later, a copper came by on his beat and told me the ironic thing was that it was the lad’s own car. It was his mate who was coming to pick him up and he knocked him over and broke his fucking legs. No, I thought, I didn’t hurt you, but that fucking hurt, didn’t it?
For fighting, that club, the Top Hat, was probably the roughest I ever worked in. I had never seen anything like it. It was a pub downstairs and you would go upstairs and it was full of gypsies; 20 would come to the door and they were fucking game. Then one night about 20 fucking bikers turned up and we fought with the lot of them.
I had drink thrown in my eyes – a pro bar-fighter’s ploy. I think it was just cider or something but I could hardly fucking see and I was getting hit with all sorts. I was trying to open my eyes to fight. Anyway, we were dropping people left, right and centre. Chairs were bouncing off my head, Grolsch bottles and fucking glasses, and girls were throwing things at you. We were punching away like in the cowboy films and it was just mad.
I also worked at another nightclub for John, the Down Town in Stockton, when he owned that. That was where I met Amanda, my wife. I used to work in Down Town first and then I would go to Water Front to make sure everything was all right there, and then to Henry Africa’s, which was a big nightclub and a rough place because it was in a tough area of Stockton. Then we would go on to Spennymoor and later, on the way back, I would pop into the nightclubs in Billingham. I used to do five or six clubs in total, making sure they were all right.
One time when we were working in Henry Africa’s there were maybe 10 or 12 army lads in there. They were standing there and this band was on, a bit like Hot Chocolate, and this woman said, ‘I want to go backstage and see them.’
My eyes caught hers and I told her, ‘Well, you can’t, they’ve come straight here from another gig and they just want to get away.’
She insisted, ‘I want to go in. I’m coming in. I’ve paid.’
As she tried to hit me with a glass, I pushed her and she went down. Then her boyfriend came over and I knocked him out and dragged him and his girlfriend out of the place. Just as the eagle does not chase after flies,