Bouncers and Bodyguards

by Robin Barratt

  Contracts are ongoing and continuous until you resign. You are staggered with your team – on and off at the same time; rest and recreation at the same time – so you really form a close working relationship with your colleagues. Some companies don’t do this. They chop and change teams, and you never know who you might be working with from one contract to another, but CRG do their best to keep you in the same teams until your resignation.

  After one more tour, I will have enough to pay my mortgage off and will come back to the UK and to my girlfriend and look for another job. The trouble is: what is there to do after the excitement of Iraq?

  15

  WORKING AT WIMBLEDON – WHAT A FARCE!

  ANONYMOUS

  A pair of bright eyes beneath an ill-fitting, wide-brimmed cap poked sheepishly out of a frosted-glass door. Autograph hunters of all ages and nationalities began to gather outside the door, situated beneath the walkway to the new Millennium Building, which replaced the old No. 1 Court and was officially opened by the Duke of Kent. The rumour of a big name’s imminent appearance was being eagerly passed around. Suddenly, the door burst open, and a stream of blue-and-yellow uniforms with a streak of white in their midst poured through. The lady in white was Maria Sharapova, who immediately set off a strobe effect of camera flashes, a surge from the crowd and an eruption of ecstatic cheering as the uniformed group barged their way through the throng and out to the main concourse. With the walkways between courts at Wimbledon being barely wide enough for single file, there were another two or three claustrophobic encounters with the excitable fans before the group finally made it to the assigned drop zone at Court 13.

  Once Sharapova’s feet had touched the turf, the uniformed guards disappeared, fading into the background. They were scheduled to return to pick her up an hour later. In the meantime, you might have expected that they would keep a watchful eye on the crowd, attempting to identify potential threats to their charge. Not likely; instead, they sloped off to watch the tennis, sleep off the heavy night before or go hunting for food in the hospitality tents. If they remembered to get in position when Sharapova was ready to leave, she could count herself lucky.

  When the threat to the biggest tennis stars (particularly female) was never so great, the protection that they could expect at the sport’s premier tournament was provided by lazy, opportunistic and untrained students looking to earn some pocket money during the summer. I know, because for two years I was one of them.

  While I worked at Wimbledon, a security company was contracted with ensuring the highlight of the tennis calendar passed off safely. Along with the more typical responsibilities associated with a sporting event, including ensuring spectators got in and out of the complex as quickly and safely as possible, the company was charged with providing security for the players on their journeys between changing room and court. That meant that the positions filled by the company ranged from bag searchers and security guards to the job that I did: player escort.

  Efficient and intelligent application of human resources should have made the staffing of these diverse roles a fairly straightforward task. Anyone with a brain and bit of training can perform basic crowd control or keep an eye open for sharp objects in picnic hampers. However, when it came to the protection of the players as they made their way around the complex, you might have thought that more would have been asked of the guards, especially in a job that required ‘access all areas’ security clearance, and that security professionals with bodyguard training would have been brought in to manage the potentially dangerous interface between the stars and their fans. You would have been wrong.

  The shocking truth was that the recruitment process for these highly sensitive positions was arbitrary, unvetted and completely open to abuse. Amid an unprecedented climate of fear of terrorist attack, coupled with the ever-present danger of stalkers, people wandered in off the street and were given jobs – jobs that granted unfettered access to some of the biggest names in sport. My story is neither exceptional nor exaggerated.

  Having applied for the job of security guard through a website, I received a tip-off from a friend who had worked at The Championships before. He claimed that if I followed up my application with a phone call stating that I was taller than six foot, I would be considered to join the player escort team. I was dubious, but given the stories I had heard about guards spending two weeks minding fire extinguishers or endlessly burrowing through hampers I made the call. It worked like a charm. On the first of our two induction days, both my friend and I were immediately informed that we had been selected to be player escorts.

  Although I was pleased, I was slightly apprehensive about the prospect of extra training and perhaps having to go through a short course in the technicalities of guarding. I needn’t have worried. The only consequence of my new status was to be in a group that undertook the same generic training as all the other guards – a tour of the grounds, a lecture in basic customer satisfaction, and a pep talk on discipline and presentation by the self-appointed ringmaster of this ‘circus’.

  So, with my references unchecked, completely bereft of experience and having just set foot on the Wimbledon turf for the very first time, I landed one of the top guarding jobs in the business solely on my physical appearance: six feet four and sixteen stone. The way in which I had eased my way from student to sentry came as a rather worrying surprise.

  Fortunately, on the first day on the job, my fears were put at ease. ‘Remember, you are only getting £7 an hour for this. If someone comes at you with something nasty, then get out of the fucking way!’ The instructions from one of our managers left no room for interpretation. Having reputedly come by the job (also with no experience) after meeting one of the senior managers in a notorious Sunday drinking hole, he was neither willing nor able to offer any further guidance. Although I could see his point, this advice to abandon ship at the first sight of trouble was yet another twist to an already bizarre story. It was becoming clear that the job we were being asked to perform was purely role play. It was an act. With an access-all-areas pass and a lot of time on our hands, it was not long before the actors turned to clowns.

  During the two years I worked as a player escort, there were countless incidents of incompetence, negligence and wilful disregard for the risks to players that we were supposed to eliminate. Having been informed by managers that we were a sham, and in many cases proving to be nothing more than a hindrance to the minor players who could otherwise move around without attracting attention, it was inevitable that liberties would be taken. First, there was the almost constant attempt to forage for food. The media centre was usually the place to begin in the mornings. A plentiful supply of coffee and croissants on the roof terrace made it an excellent alternative to the staff canteen. Sue Barker, John Inverdale and Alistair McGowan would routinely share our choice of venue, once more highlighting the limitless possibilities for a huge security incident that our all-area passes had given us.

  Once play began, we would return to the escorts’ base, conveniently situated next to the female seeds’ changing room, to receive our list of jobs for the day. For me and my star-struck colleagues, the most important issue to be resolved at this stage was who would get the big-ticket escorts. Who would be accompanying the matches most likely to get us on TV or our face in the paper? Offers such as ‘I’ll swap you a Davenport for an Agassi’ could regularly be heard deep in the bowels of the players’ area. Occasionally, our boss would have an input, insisting on the ‘big meat’ being used to escort Anna Kournikova, who caused our only problems when she began to progress in both doubles competitions. This success resulted in regular visits to the outer courts through large excitable crowds. Unsurprisingly, there were no shortage of takers for this assignment, resulting in a chaotic scene of six or seven burly students trying to march a rather frightened young woman through throngs of people whilst paying most attention to trying to get noticed by nearby TV cameras. Jonas Björkman, her partner, would trot unaccompanied beh
ind in tranquil amusement.

  The other most interesting escorts were those of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. Serena was the only player to have her own permanent bodyguard, Darios, and it did not take a genius to work out what this ex-boxer from Brooklyn made of the spotty students charged with assisting him. ‘Amateurs!’ he raged after one escort back from a practice session had taken the Wimbledon champion on a five-minute detour of the hospitality tents. ‘Anything could have happened out there! If you guys don’t get the next one straight, then I might have to give you some training of my own!’ No one was under any illusions that this would be an hour’s study of the map of the complex.

  Venus, on the other hand, was more than happy to let the escorts take care of her safety, and on one occasion she appeared in our waiting room and said, ‘So, which one of y’all is going to take me and my mom shopping?’ I was lucky enough to be conscious and uniformed at the right time and took on the task with another couple of eager opportunists. Sadly, the expedition was not as glamorous as we first imagined. In fact, the former champion just wanted to make an unscheduled visit to the Wimbledon shop, a ridiculous idea in itself, but made all the more farcical by three uniformed bumblers trying to force a path through what is one of the busiest spots on site at the best of times. Whilst Venus and her mum shopped for videos of herself (I kid you not), the shop eventually had to be shut to prevent a crush incident that a riot squad of fully trained personnel would have failed to control. The whole episode could so easily have ended in disaster.

  It was not only the players who suffered as a result of our play-acting. All-areas pass aside, it is surprising what an unsuspecting public will let you get away with if you are wearing a uniform, walkie-talkie and earpiece. In teams of two, we would frequently amuse ourselves by heading down to the morning queue to pull people out and ‘scan’ them with our walkie-talkies. (We’d remove the aerial to make the device look more like a magnetic scanner.) Pushing the button to make the handset beep at unlikely places around the body, the challenge was to see what state of undress or distress you could get the unfortunate punter into before they cried foul.

  Another classic ruse was to play out the Trigger Happy TV sketch by sending one guard over towards a distinctively dressed member of the public with his radio on full volume. The second guard would then put out a call over the escort signal to apprehend someone for beating up old ladies on the North Concourse, for example, describing the offender standing next to the first guard. Meanwhile, the poor victim would be listening in on the transmission in confused horror. In one case, an escort who was not in on the joke replied with a transmission saying that he had the described felon in his view. A cruel but inevitable reply to ‘take him down and ask questions later’ resulted in an ill-fated attempt at a citizen’s arrest and the end of one escort’s summer of fun.

  These moments of crisis and amusement, along with witnessing such things as Richard Krajicek smashing up three rackets in succession in the tunnel and Elena Dementieva in a towel, helped hold off the urge to simply sleep off the night before. When play was suspended, there was time to gloat at the court coverers, whom we often competed with for the title of easiest job in Wimbledon. Meanwhile, the real scandals took place in the little nooks and crannies around the complex. I knew of at least one incident of escorts having sex in the No. 1 Court players’ waiting room, and it became standard practice for escorts to use their all-areas privileges to dupe guards into letting mates in for free through the less well signposted gates. I could go on.

  For any security professional, there is nothing worse than seeing your work undertaken by amateurs. Not only does the employment of underqualified people reduce the number of positions available for those fit for the job, but when those without adequate training or experience take up roles they are unprepared for there will inevitably be a devaluation of the profession as a whole. This is what made the situation at Wimbledon even more tragic.

  Despite all of the above being revealed to managers over a pint every evening, I was offered the job of escort team manager a year later. This fact alone suggested that policies and practices were unlikely to change any time soon, making the All England Championship a high-profile accident waiting to happen. However, the introduction of SIA licensing meant that within a couple of years the approach to security at Wimbledon was completely revamped and thoroughly professionalised. Just as well, really.

  16

  WHAT THE BLOODY HELL AM I DOING HERE?

  BY DAMIEN BUCKWELL

  How many times had I asked myself the question, ‘What the bloody hell am I doing here?’ God only knows. These days, however, I don’t need to ask that question as much as I used to. Going from operations to administration and then into training over a 12-year period means that I now have something of a luxury ride. Monday-to-Friday hours, holidays with the kids and only the occasional weekend interruption when courses are on or we are undertaking professional development with our trainers, clients, etc.

  My venture into the world of security and close personal protection has been an eventful one – nothing spectacular or heroic, but a steep learning curve nonetheless. And my experience in a multitude of security activities over 12 years has led me to where I am today. I give lectures, write training materials, design e-learning content and undertake a whole host of educational tasks related to delivering training for the purposes of being issued a security licence in New South Wales, Australia.

  Twelve years ago, you probably wouldn’t have bet two bob on me making it through in one piece, let alone getting to where I am today. Well, I am here to tell you that you should have bet the farm on me – you’d be filthy fucking rich by now!

  It all started in 1995. I had just finished a stint working as a pathology courier, driving around to doctors’ surgeries, picking up pathology materials and taking them back to the labs. On the return trip, I would drop off the results. Anyway, long story short, shit happened, and I took my then employer to court for allowing me to be potentially exposed to pathogens. The union was as weak as piss and didn’t defend me, even though I had photographic evidence. I went on stress leave and eventually left the job, and the missus and I ended up moving from the sunny northern beaches of Sydney to a place two hours north on a lake. It was a beautiful spot, but there was one big problem: I had no fucking job. Great!

  I applied for roughly 300 jobs of varying types: delivery driver, office clerk, sales rep – hell, I even applied to sell bloody cars! No takers what so bloody ever. Not a single call back. The arseholes didn’t understand common decency.

  By that point, I was pretty much all at sea, and I decided to try an advert for security-officer training. If only I had known then what I know now. I rocked up keen as mustard, ready to be the best I could be – sound familiar, anyone? – but I was dismayed to find that I had to fill out reams of paperwork over the course of two days and then sit an exam. Struth, I had been charged up to throw people around and be all Starsky and Hutch on a brother’s ass, but instead I found that I had to do schoolwork. I mumbled under my breath as I found a seat near to someone whom I considered to have equivalent bodily hygiene and prepared myself to be dazzled by the lecturer’s renditions of cop-type stories.

  It turned out that the lecturers were in fact actual cops, from the robbery squad of all places, moonlighting at the weekends as instructors. It also became apparent that it was an open-book exam in which you could check the answers. If you could read, you would pass, so to speak – unless you were a complete stargazer!

  After passing the exam, I was given a serious-looking certificate that I took to the cop shop, where I filled out some more forms, and, voilà, I was licensed to work. I had a choice of licensed categories I could apply for: static guard, armed guard, bodyguard or bouncer. I figured what the hell and ticked all the boxes. And that was that. I was licensed after just two days’ textbook training. I had no practical instruction and no experience, yet I could legally offer my services to provide the li
censed activities listed above! Luckily for me (and for the rest of the free world), I wasn’t satisfied with just two days’ theory and began a quest to find mentors in the business to teach me how the job should really be done.

  My search wasn’t always successful. Being something of a rabbit caught in headlights, I was taken for a ride by some bastards, but overall I met and learned from some very switched-on people, many of whom I am honoured to have known, let alone worked with.

  At one point, it got to the stage that I had six different uniforms in my car, and I seemed to be continuously wearing a duty belt (fully equipped with holsters, handcuffs and all the ‘works and jerks’), a firearm, dark blue pants, black shoes and a T-shirt. I’d get a phone call and be told what uniform to put on, and off I’d go into the blue yonder. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, day in, day out. I loved it. I was doing everything a boy could wish for: working with ‘stars’, doing all sorts of covert stuff, getting mentored by the best of the best and loving it. However, there were many occasions when I thought I was centre stage in a Frank Spencer show but still managed to walk away as the ‘hero’.

  I remember my first cash-in-transit job. It was a typical day. I was at my boss’s house, all tarted up but with no place to go, when another guard dropped round. We started to have a chinwag, as you do, when lo and behold the phone rang. It was a job: two armed guards were required to transport a consignment of cash from a vault in one bank to another vault in another bank. It sounded simple enough. So, after taking no notes during the briefing, my newly acquired buddy and I jumped into his car and made our way to the job, which was about 40 minutes’ drive away.