Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read

by Paul Connolly

  ‘Well, like I said, I’ll have to check my schedule,’ I answered, although inside I was rejoicing.

  Wow. Was this really me? Paul Connolly from St Leonard’s children’s home? Was the loser, the reject, the kid whom nobody had ever loved or wanted, really being asked if he would like to work with a world-famous supermodel?

  As I said, I had been approached by Pickwick Pictures because boxing had suddenly become hugely popular, but very few trainers knew how to apply boxing techniques to the prospective buyers of the video that Elle MacPherson was planning to make. I was one of the very few in the world and at that time probably the only suitable fitness expert in the United Kingdom. They needed someone who would be able to tailor-make a fitness programme for the general public that could be done at home with no supervision and no risk to anyone’s health and well-being. This was quite a demanding challenge, as the exercises that boxers have to do can cause a great deal of strain to ordinary bodies.

  The pilots that I made were shown to Elle. She liked them and they were duly used in shooting The Body Workout video. After we had worked in London for quite a while, once they were completely happy with the product, they flew me out to Miami to make the pilot video proper. Until then I had not travelled very widely, and Miami was a tremendously exciting place for me to visit. Of all the cities in the United States, it is the most ‘Latin’, with vibrant colours and smells and sounds unlike anything I had seen or heard before.

  As the pilot had gone so well, it was decided that the video would be made and marketed. The Body Workout was shot in New Zealand with Karen Voight, who is a very well-known trainer in America. I was supposed to be credited as the boxing expert on the video, but, when it eventually came out, my name wasn’t on the box or the credits; I watched them a few times just to make sure. This makes me wish that I had had the business knowhow in those days to realise that I needed an agent who would have taken care of my rights and career.

  Still, I have all the paperwork and my involvement with The Body Workout video launched my career on this side of the Atlantic. I had a connection with a serious video production company and with one of the most famous supermodels on the scene. Astonishingly quickly, people seemed to know who I was and to want to know what I did. A series of newspaper and magazine articles about me and my services followed. I was invited on daytime television regularly, and my career really seemed to be taking off in a big way. The networking opportunities, as they say, were phenomenal. Today, The Body Workout is still one of the top-selling exercise videos of all time and I am very proud of my role in the making of it. It was a thrill to see myself featured in the Sun’s fitness section, Bodyworks, on 26 July 1994. The article went into my involvement with Elle and Pickwick Pictures in some detail:

  Elle MacPherson may have the world’s most amazing body… but keeping it in shape doesn’t come easy.

  So the 30-year-old supermodel, dubbed The Body, turned to British fitness expert Paul Connolly and his new boxing workout.

  Aussie Elle had piled on the pounds for her role in the sizzling new movie, Sirens, but when filming finished, she needed to tone up fast for her next project, a new health and fitness video.

  Paul flew out to Miami where her video was being shot to show her the ropes with his new Boxerobics workout.

  Paul Connolly pulls no punches when it comes to exercise. The former boxer and fitness instructor is creator of Boxerobics, the variation of the punchy US craze Boxercize that is fast catching on across the UK. A challenging combination of boxing moves and aerobic exercises, Boxercize originally caught the fitness world’s attention after actresses including Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher used it to tone up for film roles.

  When Health and Fitness first reported the arrival of Boxercize in the UK it was an unsafe workout, often taught by boxers or fitness instructors with little knowledge of each other’s profession. This was where Connolly’s credentials gave him a head start. He switched from boxing to a career in fitness when an accident meant he had to give up hopes of turning professional.

  The Sun was perhaps the most widely read of all the articles about me and my work, but it was just one among many. Success breeds success, and the more I was featured in newspapers and magazines, the more the journalists seemed to want to know. In Time Out in January 1994, I received a typical, enthusiastic response to what I had to offer. The article said, in part:

  Former boxing champion Paul Connolly, who teaches his own rigorous system of ‘Boxerobics’ at Danceworks in London says that [great results] are accessible to anyone – so long as they do not have specific health problems and are prepared to train sufficiently hard. Boxing, combined with vigorous circuit training, is rivalled only by squash in providing the most comprehensive total-body workout. And it is particularly good for women, since speed and agility of movement prevent muscles from getting bulky…

  Over and above such body-shaping benefits, the women I talked to in Connolly’s class – which is made up equally of both sexes – valued the cathartic effects of discharging pent-up anger and aggression by punching, hissing and shouting. Fatigue dissolves in minutes, they say, and is replaced by a long-lasting adrenaline ‘high’. Confidence grows too, as one’s skill and coordination improve.

  I tried to stay nonchalant about the attention I was getting, because I knew that I had worked hard for it and that nothing lasts forever and that I would have to continue to work hard if I wanted things to keep going well.

  But I did wonder, sometimes, if any of the people from the life that I had left behind me long before had come across the articles about me. Did Bill Starling read the Sun? Did Auntie Coral? They might well have done. Would they have recognised the man in the photographs as the miserable, underweight child whose life they had made so very unhappy? And, if they had, would they have cared? I didn’t know the answers to these questions, but they continued to come to me, unbidden. And what about my parents? I had no contact with either of them, but somewhere they were continuing to live their lives. Did they know that I was doing OK, despite them? Did they care?

  FLYING HIGH

  I must have inherited the Irish gift of the gab because the important people I was meeting now all seemed to like me, and to want to hear what I had to say, particularly my views on and input into the world of fitness. It felt good to be listened to with respect and to know that I warranted that respect, although there were often times when I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with my new surroundings.

  Now that I was a known quantity with a product and a service that was fashionable, and that cutting-edge people wanted to buy, important, educated people started approaching me with requests that I write articles for boxing workouts that they were preparing for this or that magazine. It was wonderful, especially for someone like me who had spent years of his life feeling and sometimes even behaving like the sort of person most decent individuals will cross the road to avoid. At times it seemed surreal to think of myself writing for magazines and other publications that thousands of people would read, when just a few years earlier I had had to submit myself to the embarrassment of an adult literacy course, because I couldn’t even read well enough to make my way through a tabloid newspaper or figure out the signs in shop windows. I had to use spellcheckers a lot but the excitement of being able to express myself clearly in written English never wore off.

  I was approached by Cosmopolitan magazine, probably the most influential of all the women’s magazines on the market at the time. The health and fitness editors at that time were two women, Mary Coomer and Eve Cameron, who wanted to know if I would write a regular column for their readers, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to reach a wider audience through the pages of their magazine.

  BoxerobicsTM was suitable for clients of both sexes, but women in particular seemed to enjoy it, probably in part because it gives them the means to work some aggression out of their systems, which is something that a lot of females appreciate, having less opportunity than men to be aggressi
ve in their daily lives. The Cosmo editors liked the work that I did for them and the response from the readers was very positive.

  Then Mary rang me up. ‘Get yourself a passport,’ she said, ‘because we need you to start travelling with us.’

  I had never travelled very much until then, and, although I was an adult, I was as wide-eyed and excited as a child to arrive in San Francisco and see the Golden Gate Bridge and all the sights. There I worked at an upmarket private health and athletics club in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was booming at the time, and there was money everywhere and lots of very well-heeled computer aficionados (or ‘geeks’, as I call them) who wanted to look buff despite their desk jobs.

  I was amazed by the difference in attitude between London and San Francisco, in particular among the people working in the world of fitness, which is a competitive arena with a lot of egos involved. Back home, if I said, ‘I worked on the pilot for Elle MacPherson’s video,’ other trainers would shuffle away muttering, ‘Who the fuck does he think he is? Thinks he’s better than the rest of us, does he?’ and I would be left feeling as though I had been showing off unnecessarily. I don’t like that about the United Kingdom. One person’s success is seen to diminish the other people he knows. In America, it was different. Will Willis, one of the guys I worked with – a former Mr U.S.A. and therefore no slouch himself – saw my CV one day. ‘High five, buddy!’ Will said. ‘Elle MacPherson. Right on!’

  In America, people like to be around success, so, if you are successful and you are their friend, they feel that some of it rubs off on them. In Britain, they just don’t want you getting too uppity.

  I continued to travel quite widely for a time, and I believe that this was the best education I ever had, because it opened my eyes in a way nothing ever had before. I saw vast swathes of America. I saw the Caribbean. I saw most of Europe.

  Experiencing other cultures, other people and other ways of doing things showed me how tiny and insignificant my part of the world was by comparison. This in turn made me realise that the people, places and things that had always intimidated me were not actually that scary at all. Who cared, outside East London, who was in and who wasn’t? Who cared who was able to take on whom and come out the best? Who cared where I had grown up? Outside Britain, nobody knew that I had grown up in a children’s home. Nobody knew that I had been thrown out with the rubbish as a baby or that nobody had ever wanted me. Also, outside the United Kingdom, few if any people could tell from my accent and the way I talked, walked and behaved that I was anything other than an educated, sophisticated individual like themselves. In fact, I was now good friends with people from all walks of life and all parts of the world – bankers, technology professionals and architects. If they didn’t look down on me, why should anyone, and why should I?

  My life had gone crazy as I was launched into a glamorous world where I often felt I didn’t belong, although nobody else seemed to share that view. Following my success in the print media, I was contacted by a television production company to see if I would be interested in making some live appearances on television. Of course I would! Soon I was on Channel Four’s Big Breakfast show with Paula Yates every morning as fitness expert of the week. The Big Breakfast was enormous in those days, so this was a major coup for me. I had the experience of working with Paula out in front of the cameras and got to know her a little by spending time chatting with her both before and after my appearances. Paula was a lovely, sexy woman who was a lot of fun and not vain or standoffish in the slightest, but completely approachable and down-to-earth. Unlike a lot of television ‘personalities’ who think that being in the public eye means that the sun shines out of their arse, Paula had no vanity about her, but instead treated everyone the same.

  Paula used to come in to work at five or six in the morning with her bleached platinum-blonde hair on end and bags under her eyes, looking as though she had been up clubbing all night – which, knowing Paula, was more than likely. Five minutes later, hair and make-up done, she was looking spunky and beautiful and ready for the cameras and whatever the day was going to throw at her. She was a natural in show business; her energy lit up the screen. Paula knew that I was nervous, so, to put me at ease, she flirted with me and pinched my bum until I was laughing too much to worry about what was going on. I had been anxious about doing live TV in the beginning, but Paula got me to relax with her high jinks and soon I felt very much at home under the bright lights of the television studio.

  I met Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters, Robin Williams and Michael Hutchence. But much more than any of them, I was bowled over by the puppet duo Zig and Zag. Zig and Zag, the brainchildren of a couple of Irish blokes, were hugely popular at the time, and it was hilarious watching the filming and seeing both the characters come to life and the puppeteers, lying on the floor out of view of the cameras. Having said that, Julie Walters was lovely too and I certainly don’t mean to put her in second place to a pair of puppets. We chatted in the Green Room for ages, and she was so far from putting on airs and graces that I didn’t even realise who I was talking to until later! Pierce Brosnan and Robin Williams were extremely personable and friendly in the brief time that we spent together.

  I also worked with presenter Gaby Roslyn, but she was a lot more reserved than Paula, Chris Evans or any of the superstars, to put it mildly. The impression one got from the established stars was that they felt no need to be standoffish, because they were good at what they did, and very comfortable in their own skins.

  Featuring on The Big Breakfast turned me into a recognisable face and a sellable proposition. Media types are lazy, so, if someone has been on one show and gone down well, they’re more likely to invite them on to the next show rather than look for someone else. This was good for me. The next thing I knew, I was on all the morning shows because all of a sudden everyone wanted a piece of the boxing mania. From initially feeling quite overwhelmed about the whole thing, I started to feel that I was operating in an environment in which I belonged. I featured on Under the Moon on Channel Four with Nigel Benn, a middleweight boxing champion, and Tom Binns, a sports presenter. I had to take my Boxerobics class, composed of men and women, into the studio and do a class for them. Under the Moon was a lads’ show, all boobs and sport with cheerleaders and sportsmen.

  I was also invited to feature as an interviewee on The Word, a Friday-night show with Dani Behr, but that was a bit of a disappointment, as I should have realised from the show’s target demographic of late-night drunks. I thought that I was going to be given a serious interview, but, when I got to the studio, I was asked to strip down to the waist, run on to the set, pick up Dani and run off the set with her. In the end, I never made the cut because the show ran out of time. What a waste of energy!

  I had to go to Birmingham to feature on the Anne and Nick Show. We had a boxing ring set up, and some of the girls I was working with did a boxing routine for the cameras – I also chatted with Jeremy Beadle who was another really nice bloke. A while after that, I was on the Ross King Show featuring BoxerobicsTM for the BBC.

  I occasionally wondered if anyone from my old life had seen me on television, but I never tried to find out for sure.

  Flushed with success, I applied for a trademark for BoxerobicsTM and set up a company that ran courses in the London boxing gyms aimed at the city trainers who would each pay me a hundred pounds a day to do a course. Using boxing techniques as part of an everyday fitness routine was the latest best thing and all the trainers wanted a piece of the action. Luckily for me, I was one of the very few people around with the proper qualifications to teach them what they needed to know. Suddenly, at a time when most trainers were getting twenty pounds a class, I was making a hundred and twenty and bringing in five or six grand a week. It was like a dream come true.

  Another dividend of this success was that being on television and in so many magazines and newspapers meant that I could sleep with pretty much any woman who caught my eye, and usually did. I remember one girl who
always wanted to have sex with me in the gym just before the rest of the class arrived, because she liked the thrill of nearly getting caught and was turned on by the characteristic smell of the rubber floor mats. I wasn’t going to argue; if that was her dream, who was I to stand in her way?

  There were times when I would wake up in the morning and wonder if this was really me, the little shit from St Leonard’s whom nobody had ever loved. Had Starling or Coral seen me on television and wished that they had been a little bit nicer? The bastards!

  If I’d had an agent back then, I am sure he could have kept the ball rolling. I am the first to admit that I had very little in the way of business know-how. Boxing as part of an everyday fitness routine continued to be popular, and I soon acquired competitors. Still, I made enough money to buy my first house, in cash. Getting the keys to my own home was a very important moment for me and it was wonderful to know that I had shown myself and the world that I could stand on my own two feet and make a success of myself.

  I almost ran into trouble when one of the newspapers ran a story about me and one of the celebrities I worked for, implying that there was more going on between us than met the eye. The implication in the article that we had, in fact, slept together was very clear. Of course, nothing of the sort had happened, but the woman’s boyfriend was furious and my good relationship with my client suffered badly as, despite all my protestations to the contrary, there remained the lingering suspicion that I had made false claims. I was furious. The newspaper had to print a retraction and, although I had neither slept with the woman nor suggested that anything untoward had happened between us, I ended up losing that particular job. I have been very wary of journalists ever since, having seen for myself how words can be twisted to mean something completely different.