Known as the “Tarmac Warrior” due to his “have-fists-will-travel” attitude, Billy earned his living the hard way, on both sides of the Atlantic, making his name on the Extreme Fighting circuit in the US, and challenging men of all shapes and sizes in the UK.
I WAS BORN to a Romany family in 1949. My mother was from a Jewish background. Mum’s grandmother was what was known as “granny-raised” within the gypsy community. My father was Romany. The Nazis would have had a nice crack at me during World War Two, wouldn’t they? I would have been dissected and gassed by now. My family travelled until I was about 14 years old, picking fruit or hops, sometimes working the seafront on the Isle of Wight selling toys to the tourists. Not many people went abroad in them days. In the winter months, we would turn to a more local-based means of earning, since we travelled only from April until October.
The family came initially from Cumbria and our family lineage is Taylor, Stewart, Gray, Dunn, and McCann. There were also Lees, way back four generations since. My own family moved gradually south, eventually settling on our own land in Northamptonshire during the mid-Sixties. Many of the Taylors, however, moved in to south and east London. Horses were always our greatest love, well mine and Dad’s anyway. We would always have a good stallion or two to put to service and would have mares puvved all over Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Cambridge where friends and family would keep an eye on them. Puvving the gry we call it, which is poggardi jib (English-speaking Romani language) for grazing the horse.
There were many other things we did for wonga (money) of course, like tarmac-laying to industrial estates and driveways, carpet-selling on the knocker or in office blocks, selling gold and jewellery round the building sites. We just did what we could to make a living. Our women often went dukkering, which is telling fortunes, and did quite well. The family would always pool its income at the end of the day – my brothers, sisters, mum and dad. It was a bit like that programme on TV, Bread. No one objected. I learned to read and write properly when I was about 24 and have been hungry to learn ever since. I trained to become qualified in counselling whilst living in the USA but between the fight scene and my current way of living I had a good and long career in comedy entertainment. I still write comedy for radio and television.
The first real fight I ever saw was a great gypsy man called Hughie Burton, I am pleased and honoured to say. It was a fight on the hills of Appleby [in Cumbria, the scene of a big annual horse fair] at around 5.30am, dew-laden grass and the smell of excitement in the air. I guess I was about six then. Mum wasn’t too happy about it but my Granny Taylor talked her into letting me go with my dad and his brothers. It was an awesome sight and although it didn’t last very long, it stayed in my mind as a mass battle. I guess that’s a kid’s-eye view of things. I will never forget that day and I am sure that any man you speak to who saw him fight will say the same. Burton’s fights were always considered classics.
My own first actual fight was when I was 14 years old. My father was challenged by a young lad of 17 or 18, but he felt he couldn’t fight the boy as he would humiliate him by knocking the granny out of him, so he came up with what he thought was a great compromise: “Fight my boy and beat him and I will fight you tomorrow.” That got Dad out of it all nicely but landed me firmly in the shit, as I was never really an aggressive boy. I knew how to hold my hands up of course but I was better at talking than fighting. Now I had to defend the family honour and myself in my first-ever real fight. I was under a lot of pressure but fortunately won the day. The boy made so many silly mistakes, the main one being trying to put the nut on me. First of all, the fight was to be a straightener and I was annoyed that he sneaked in a dirty play, and second, it’s stupid to try and put the nut on a man six inches smaller than you. I just stepped aside as he toppled forward and lifted him up the side of the head with a right-hander. I sparked him good.
I have never felt such exhilaration. As I approached the fight area, I began to feel a stranger inside me, an aggressor within me that I had never known. I was sort of frightened but not of my man, just of failure in the family’s eyes. I seemed to go deaf all during the fight as I concentrated on my job, but as I realised I had sparked the man, the sounds of cheers and shouts brought me in to a new life. I was not looking back and that had been my wakening to a destiny. My heart was pounding. Grandad, Dad and the brothers were lifting me high and patting my back. I was covered in claret and felt fantastic. Dad and grandad threw me into an old water trough to clean me up and I just lay there laughing, with claret floating around me in the water. Straight after the fight though, I was over the moon. No one could ever take that moment away from me, it was mine for life. I ached like hell the next day though.
Being so small, I had to learn a lot of little tricks, especially if I thought I was in for a long haul. One trick that always fared me well was to work the opponent’s arms. If you punch someone in the arms long enough, they can’t lift them. Sometimes I couldn’t just go steaming in so it was work low, then work up and underneath. I guess it depended on whom I was fighting. This is where psychology, technique and structure were to play a big part in my life.
I began working full-time at around eleven years old, as most gypsy kids do, and although I could hardly read or write, driving a car or working a mark (punter) was no problem. I was always on the lookout for good earners. Often, though, this took me on the wrong side of the law. I had the gift of the gab and started working some traditional cons when I was older such as the “over-order” scam. My brother and myself would drive to the carpet mills in Worcester and buy some cheap end-of-line carpet for a few pence a square metre. Then, dressed in a convincing workman’s boiler suit, we’d pull up at an office block or even stop people in the street and show them a swatch made from the carpet. The patter that followed would involve a tall tale about having just completed a contract to fit out some smart offices but having over-ordered the amount of carpet. We would be in really big trouble with our employer if we returned with the excess. The carpet, we assured our target, was worth £20 a metre but we were “willing” to let them have it for “only” £2.50 a metre. The office girls would fall for it every time.
When the various scams came to an abrupt end with the imprisonment of my young brother and cousin, I turned to the occupation of road tarmaccing. I went to work with other family members on a contract resurfacing the A1 road, the drom to nowhere, my uncles called it, drom meaning road. Working on a road like the A1 seemed a never-ending project. At a roadside cafe one lunchtime, as we tucked into our fry-ups, a group of truckers started making remarks about “fucking pikeys”. My gypsy honour was offended so I waded in. A tear-up began; there was claret everywhere, with sauce bottles being used as bludgeons. It also became my showcase for an opportunity to make big money as a fighter. A highly respected fighter happened to witness the brawl and was impressed enough to introduce me to a fight manager called Benny Harris.
Benny’s plan was to take me onto a new circuit based around the network of motorway service stations and A-road cafes up and down the country. My first fight as the “Tarmac Warrior” was on a patch of concrete in a desolate corner of the Blue Boar service station, off the M1 near Northampton. It was where I knocked out a trucker who called himself “Tattoo”. This sparking was convincingly executed with a good right hook. That night, back in our trailer, my manager flung a fat wad of notes on my bed. My first fight had netted me £500. I was hooked, eagerly embracing my new career as a professional bareknuckle fighter. Although still leading a nomadic way of life, I had unwittingly now left the gypsy culture behind. I travelled the English motorway network in search of contests arranged by my manager, who paid all the expenses in return for half the purse and all the lucrative side bets, a share of which I could also expect.
We’d take on all comers. It might be someone who thought he could fight and they’d see the size of me and say, “Yeah, I’ll have it.” There were no rounds or anything, you’d just fight till you couldn�
�t get up, and you’d had enough. If you gave best you’d just say something like “You’ve fucking done, me mate.” And that was it. There were enough wins though and as the Tarmac Warrior I built up a good reputation until one day I found myself in a lay-by off the M62 near Manchester. A ring was formed from steel posts taken from a roadside working. Some rope was strung up and I was matched against “Midnight”, a black Brummie who did martial arts. Now martial arts were pretty unheard of at this time and I didn’t know what to expect. He did cop me with a few nice roundhouses, though I stuck to him like glue. But before either man could get the upper hand, the gavvers (the police) stumbled on the scene and all hell broke loose. By the time everyone had fled, one of them gavvers had been speared with a metal stake and another had received horrific facial injuries. Benny, my manager, had been taken away before and did time so he didn’t want to go down again, for sure. I was wrapped up with him because he was my manager, my brain. He was my living and I was his, so when he said run, I ran and we drove off down that road like a bat out of hell. I didn’t know where we was going and I didn’t much care, weren’t my job to think.
Benny came up with a great idea. Since we were making ourselves scarce, we could find a living fighting on the cross-Channel ferries. In the winter months, with few tourists and “normal” people about, the dank cargo decks in the bowels of the ferries became barefist arenas. This sea-going variation paid very low rent, with fight purses as low as £40. Benny would put out the challenge to the lorry drivers on board. One of them will have a go, once they’re pissed. Things gradually improved, with purses often part-paid with goodies rifled from the truckers’ loads. Once we got two sheep from a French freezer truck as part of a bet. We had beer, wine, bloody all sorts of stuff that we had to sell afterwards to turn into hard cash. International fights with Germans, Dutch and French drivers drew good crowds, £1,000 paydays and the odd battering. I had my head pulled down on one of those bars that hold the Continental trailers together and my mouth was in bits, but you don’t feel it until afterwards. I lost my front teeth that way.
Fighting became my life. I just couldn’t get enough. I was working in the Canary Islands when some expatriate gangsters invited me to a bareknuckle fight night. I sort of got carried away when watching the fights: in the excitement of the evening, I jumped into the ring and ripped off my shirt. “I’ll fight any man for a monkey,” I said. An American stood up and shouted, “I’ll make that a grand, winner takes all.” Now that was serious money at that time.
A man climbed in through the ropes, a fellow bouncer who happened to be psychotic – and my greatest mate on the island. He was a Geordie called “Makka”. We had done a bit of sparring together but it was always in sort of earnest fun, as men do. I thought we were just going to go at it for a while, a bit more than usual, serious but not too damaging. What I didn’t realise however was that my pal had a cocaine habit that left him in a lot of debt. He needed that money bad. We moved around for a minute or so. Crack! The first blood went to Makka. He caught me on the forehead. Then I put together a nice combination, throwing him backwards. Makka came back with a flurry of poorly aimed punches. He was angry and wasn’t thinking. His blows went nowhere, while I remained calm and focused. I countered and caught him with a nice blow to the nose and the claret washed over his face. Makka came towards me. I was ready to sidestep him but he anticipated my move and brought his knee up into my left side. I went down. He had cracked a rib and punctured a lung. I was fighting on fifty per cent breathing capacity and pure adrenalin.
As I got up, he came down with the nut. I stumbled backward and ripped off some of the tape covering my knuckles. I moved round the ring backwards as I fumbled trying to tie the rag around my head to stop some of the blood. I just wanted to redirect the flow from my eyes so that I could see properly. The blood was everywhere and the screams from our pals were deafening. Makka lurched forward and sunk his teeth into my shoulder, causing a searing pain to go down my arm. I grabbed his head and pulled it into my face, taking off the tip of his nose. I don’t know why, I just couldn’t reach anything else. We rose to our feet and were still fighting. We had gone beyond pain. Sheer determination and hatred was driving us now. I cupped my right hand and lifted it smartly under his nose – what was left of it anyway. That filled his eyes with tears and caused temporary blindness. He brought both his hands over his face in agony. I gave one more hit to the body, a straight-fingered blow under the ribs as hard as I could. He spun in agony, not knowing whether to hold his face or clutch his body. That was it. I came up with the left and across with the right and he hit the ground, out cold.
It was following this fight – and after leaving hospital – that the Yank that upped the purse hit me with a proposition to go to America to fight. Now, any young man with only his self to keep would jump at the chance of going to the States. This was like a lottery win to me and I jumped at the chance.
I fought in three distinct arenas in the USA. First of all, I fought in Florida, down at the Keys. The Florida scene was very laid back and proper. I then travelled up to New York City, where it was much more organised and controlled. This was my first brush with real violence, I suppose. I was fighting in a syndicate-controlled circuit where you did what you were told unless you wanted to feel severe pain. I was made to fight day after day there until I could fight no more: my hands seized up and I was fucked for fighting. I had to lay off until I recovered. The syndicate only wanted winners. Their whole motivation was money, as I guess mine was by that time.
I had entered the world of extreme or reality fighting. These days that same circuit survives as Ultimate Fighting, only now it is a little more sophisticated and controlled. Ultimate has huge following capacities from state to state in the USA and has a pay-per-view contract with cable TV. The fight scene I had joined was pure sleaze, extortion, drugs and violence. I had joined a world I didn’t understand and didn’t like but I was making money. The crowd was aggressive, and they knew the game.
That’s where I got the hammer in my head. A claw hammer came down out of the crowd as I headed toward the arena and knocked me completely sparko. The motive for the attack was revenge, I guess. The friends of a fighter I had injured badly had returned to settle the score. My assailant disappeared into the 500-strong crowd, leaving me with a fractured skull. My handlers rushed me to a private hospital where I was taken in the back door and patched up, but it took me almost five months to completely recover. By then, I had my own score to settle when I discovered that my American manager, who had claimed that my passport had been lost, had in fact got it all the time. I had been kept there like a prisoner. I really lost it after that, and I did his hands in the boot of a car and headed for the airport.
Leaving New York, I headed toward California, where I still live most of my life. It was there I found the cult circuit, and to really do the circuit justice, you will have to read my book; it would take forever to explain the complexity of the system there. A gay guy in San Francisco, just outside Roc Morais, ran the cult circuit. I lived then in Modesto, kept like a lord with everything I wanted. I fought in front of stars there, especially when we fought in Nevada, as the laws were more relaxed. I fought in front of Frank Sinatra, Jack Nicholson and even Joe Louis, the great boxer, who was then, I believe, working in the casinos of Las Vegas. The cult circuit was weird, a voyeuristic sport that could only come from the dreams of La La Land. There were events such as hang-fighting, where the two fighters hung from their ankles and fought at close quarters; The Tank, which was a little like the cage only it was a Perspex tank; and The Yard, where two men would be joined at the ankles by a yard of leather and then had to fight. It was all so weird and eventually killed my best friend.
Well, it isn’t hard to work out that to fight in any of the ways I have described, you had to be off your nut, and I don’t mean just mad, I mean drugs. Now drugs were a no-no to the gypsy way of life in those days. We never heard of drug abuse then, well I never had, anyway.
That’s the good thing about travelling: if you ever had bad neighbours, Dad would just hitch up the trailer and pull away. My first close encounter with drugs was in the Canaries, long before the California scene and where I was involved in timeshare protection, but that was only someone else taking the stuff then, not me. Then I was introduced to Dexedrine to lose weight after a long spell of dossing around the beaches of Venice Beach, California. The Dexedrine had the effects of speed and I grew to like it. Now once I joined the stable of the gay feller, cocaine was laid on for all to abuse. It was in your house, at the parties, in the RV (recreational vehicle) that the company owned to ferry the fighters about all over the state. Everyone you fought would be on “charlie”. Now I don’t know if you have ever tried knocking someone out while they are on that stuff, but the fuckers just keep getting back up again, you can’t hurt them. You had to be on charlie to just be equal, it wasn’t enough to be good or brave, you had to be stoned.
My last real fight was in California. I fought in the sandbox [in which two opponents fight in a box that gradually fills up with sand, slowing their movements until they are virtually static – JD]. This was a particularly hard fight and a way I had never seen before. After my fight I found out that my greatest friend, Berrie, was killed. We usually fought on the same bill but this day I was the only man from our stable fighting in Nevada. When I returned to California, I telephoned the home we all shared and found that Berrie had died from internal bleeding after fighting a glass-fist battle [in which the bandaged fists are coated in resin and then powdered glass! – JD].
I was devastated and went up to Carmel to live for a while, then joined a commune. There I found salvation in the shape of a beautiful teenager called Sweetness. She was an angelic Jesus freak and she converted me, the little renegade gypsy, into a born-again, happy-clappy Christian. I admit that the “Jesus thing” saved my life. I joined the commune, which was based in Monterey, and lived with Sweetness. I prayed every day for my own salvation. I even stopped swearing, which sounds silly but was a real tough thing for me. But then I found out my teenage angel of mercy had begun sleeping with another woman. I thought, fuck that! I just couldn’t get the hang of the commune stuff and so I headed for the airport, taking the few dollars I had left after the commune had leeched most of my savings away. I flew to San Diego and got my head round counselling and psychology and became qualified to practise. I guess my faith hadn’t been strong enough to maintain the religious thing. I felt sort of let down after losing Sweetness, although looking back now, I’m thinking how much more could the Lord have done for me? I was discovered as a wreck on a beach and was delivered back into society as a sound human being again.
Streetfighters: Real Fighting Men Tell Their Stories Page 23