We’re in this hotel room, which is very nice, and this fella is pointing out all the obvious things, like the mini-bar and the safe, and just as I’m about to ask him if there’s a kettle and some shortbread, he opens up this big box and starts pulling things out. I’m standing there with the missus thinking, ‘What the hell is he up to?’ And then it dawns on me: it’s a sex-toy war chest.
I’m from Preston, where ribbed condoms are the height of sexual experimentation, so I haven’t always been so open-minded. But here’s this fella showing us all these dildos and vibrators and lots of other things whose correct usage I couldn’t even guess at, some of them in shapes I didn’t even know existed. There are handcuffs, blindfolds and rings for just about everything. If Willy Wonka did sex hotels, this place would be it. I thought it was a normal hotel, but the missus obviously got a good deal on Teletext.
For the next ten days, I lie by the pool and do not move. There are celebrities and footballers roaming all over the place, and as each day goes on, the pool turns into a nightclub. There’s all sorts going on, so that it gets to the point where I think, ‘I’m not swimming in that.’ I drink rosé from 10am until I go to bed, undo all the training I’ve done, so that when I finally prise myself away from the sunbed and catch the plane home, I’m fatter than I was before.
I think nothing more of it for a while, just chalk it up as getting beaten up for two days with a free holiday in a high-class porn dungeon tagged on the end. But a few weeks later, I receive a message from someone at WWE, saying they’ve seen my piece to camera, seen me wrestle, and really like me. I can’t do my documentary because I’ll give all their secrets away, but they do want me to ‘join them’. I tell them I don’t understand what they mean – join them for what? – and they say they want me to come to wrestling school, and that they’d like to fast-track me in 18 months. They’re promising me Wrestle-Mania, Royal Rumble, millions of dollars, the lot. I’ve never seen money like it.
Problem is, we’re in Dubai, and planning to move home because we really want the kids to grow up in England. And I’m bored of sitting on the beach all day eating £5 grapes. I’ve got no friends and no life, but I don’t want to up sticks and move to Tampa, where people drop their guts, right out in the open, and think it’s normal. And because they pay their wrestlers so much, WWE essentially own you, you’re at their beck and call, and it’s me who’d be running about in my underpants in front of millions of people.
I politely decline, but they leave the door open. Apparently, wrestlers are in their prime between 35 and 45, so I’ve got plenty of time. I’m not really one for quotes and mottos, but six years on, I have a couple: ‘If you’re going to be bad, be confident. And if what you’re doing is rubbish, at least try to be funny.’ That motto served me well in Tampa and has done ever since.
* * *
When I played cricket, I was out of my comfort zone every day. Every time I went out to bat or came on to bowl, I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I’ve never been further out of my comfort zone than when I was at school. The school I went to was on a rough estate and notorious in Preston. It was one of those schools that nobody wanted to go to, but I did, because it was just around the corner from my house, I didn’t have to catch a bus and as soon as I was out of there at three o’clock, I could go and play cricket.
But because cricket was seen as a posh game for posh kids, my schoolmates thought I was a wrong ’un. Being different is never a good thing at school. I was like Billy Elliot, except cricket was my ballet dancing. I actually think it would have been easier being a ballet dancer – that lad had it easy. I was also pretty much a straight-A student – when I first started secondary school, teachers were talking about me going to Oxford or Cambridge – until cricket started getting serious.
I was an outsider, not one of the cool kids, a shy kid who barely spoke. It was only on the sports field that I came to life. Strangely, the fact that I played chess for Lancashire (my brother played for England) was acceptable, because some of the hardest kids at school played as well. One day you’d be involved in a life-or-death game of chess with one of the roughest kids in your class, the next he’d be trying to draw something rude on the back of your shirt. Looking back, it was quite an unusual place.
I played football to try to fit in. I was quite good at it, played for the oldest year in the school when I was only in the second year. I was big, played centre-half, and something happened to me when I went on the football pitch, as if I turned into a completely different animal. If we got beat, it was usually the goalkeeper’s fault, but if it wasn’t, the blame usually worked its way out from the back, so the centre-halves were next in the firing line. So nothing got past me, which won me some leeway with my would-be bullies. I was such an angry footballer, used to shout and scream at people and pick fights, because I knew the other kids had my back, and I suppose I was trying to impress them.
But off the pitch, it was a case of fight, run or hide. I mostly hid, fought when I absolutely had to, but never ran. I kept my head down and went about my business, but I never knew what was going to happen – whether I’d come home with my nose straight, my teeth intact or my shirt torn to shreds.
The bullies were usually small with an army behind them, which was the problem. None of them have been in contact since my cricket career took off, although I wish they would. I hate bullies, they’re the worst kind of people. Even I feel a bit guilty that I bullied people on the cricket field. People say bullying is just part of professional sport, but that doesn’t really make it right.
I was vocal on the field, but never abusive. Actually, there was one time. When we played India in the Twenty20 World Cup in 2007, my ankle had gone, I thought it was going to be my last game ever and I was in a very bad place. When Yuvraj Singh started hitting sixes all over the park, and being cocky with it, I threatened to wring his neck. He came down the pitch and started waving his bat at me. Next over, he hit Stuart Broad for six sixes. Every six he hit, he gave me a smile, and after the fourth, I was clapping.
Most of the time I used my size to intimidate the opposition, while trying not to be a dick. But my first Test against South Africa taught me that other teams played by a different moral code. They called me every name under the sun, there were C-bombs exploding all around me, it was awful. I looked around at these people and I wasn’t upset, I was disappointed. I was 20 years old, I’d watched them on the telly, I liked and respected them. Now look at them.
Daryll Cullinan was meant to be religious, always talking about God, but he was the worst of the lot. That lad must say a lot of Hail Marys. I was in shock at what he came out with, thinking, ‘Did he really just say what I thought he did?’ I felt like saying, ‘Come on, lads, I’m only trying to have a bat.’ I mentioned it once in the press, and it got back to him. He did this interview accusing me of trying to make a name for myself. I thought, ‘If I was trying to make a name for myself, I’d pick a player who people knew. Of all the names I could have chosen – Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara, Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis, Inzamam-ul-Haq – why would I choose someone as obscure as you?’
In comparison, most other countries were tame. Whenever I came out to bat, Pakistan fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar would call me ‘fat boy’ or ‘chubby’. During the third Test in Lahore, I was walking to the middle, he started chirping, and I turned around and said, ‘You know what, Shoaib? You look like Tarzan but bowl like Jane.’ He put his run-up back by about ten yards, came charging in, let fly and splattered my stumps. As I was walking off, he shouted, ‘Oi! Fatty!’ I turned around and he started making that noise that Tarzan makes.
The Aussies were fine, aggressive but not abusive. When Shane Warne was chirping away, I’d be looking at his gleaming white teeth and fake tan and thinking, ‘Mate, you bowl spin, you can’t even hurt me.’ Glenn McGrath was the world’s worst sledger. He just shouted random expletives at you, as if he had Tourette’s. And if you went back at him, he didn’t know what to do. It was as if you’d scr
ambled his hard drive, he’d start looking round at his mates for someone to reboot him.
Glenn wasn’t the brightest, but he was horrible to bat against, the only bowler who made me feel inadequate. He just bowled it where I couldn’t hit it, and every time it did hit my bat I was relieved. The Aussies’ intimidation came from them being good and knowing it. The verbals were just to put you off, distract you, make you question yourself. So there was no having a go at your mum or wife or anything along those lines. They were in your face, no doubt, but I can’t remember ever walking off and thinking, ‘That went too far.’
Other people might have had different experiences, and certainly Ian Bell copped it a bit in 2005. Then again, they were only calling him the Sherminator, from American Pie. That was actually quite funny, because they had a point. First time it happened, he came into the dressing room and said, ‘They were calling me the Sherminator, what’s that about?’ I was thinking, ‘Belly, have you looked in the mirror lately?’
I don’t feel particularly unfortunate or special for being bullied at school, because it happened to pretty much everyone, even to some of the bullies. It was a rite of passage, and it just so happened that it was my turn to get bullied quite often. But it wasn’t just at school where I didn’t fit in. While the kids at school thought I was a weirdo because I played cricket, I didn’t have anything in common with the middle-class kids I played cricket against either, because I was a wrong ’un from an estate. So I ended up floating around between different tribes. From the age of nine or ten I was playing men’s cricket with my dad, but I didn’t fit in with them either. I saw, heard and learned things I shouldn’t have in dressing rooms and clubhouse bars, which didn’t really tally with what was going on in the school playground.
I looked at some of the other kids doing drugs or robbing cars, and I didn’t want to be like them. I remember getting into a car one night and realising it had been nicked. I got home and thought, ‘You know what, that’s not what I want to be doing and that’s not who I want to be. I hate this.’ But it takes a certain kind of strength to be your own person when you’re just a kid.
It was an odd situation, but a great grounding. I was able to plough the lessons I learned from the tough times at school into everything I’ve done since. I wouldn’t go back and change a thing, because it made me resilient, made me realise that if I’m passionate about something, even if everyone else thinks it’s strange, I’ve got to cling on to it. That’s my way out. Not fitting in at school is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be your salvation in the long term.
When Daryll Cullinan and his mates started abusing me in Nottingham, I thought, ‘Lads, you really should have found out where I came from, and what I had to go through to get here. Say whatever you want, I’m really not arsed.’ Nothing could have been as tough as some of the situations I’d been in. Being bowled a 90mph bouncer has more in common with being jumped by some kids on the way home from school than you might imagine.
Everything was beyond my control on the cricket field as well, regardless of how well I prepared and how good I was, but I enjoyed being out of my comfort zone in cricket. At school I spent a lot of time hiding, but there’s no place to hide on the cricket field. If you try, you get buried. So I had to fight, and I learned to take the aggressive option. And while my ability to play a cover-drive or a pull or a hook doesn’t really carry much weight outside of cricket, I was able to carry that aggression into the next part of my life.
CHAPTER 2
AT LEAST I’VE GOT A FUNNY STORY
A brief history of boxing
Not long after my trip to Florida, after changing management to focus on TV more, I made a documentary for the BBC about sportspeople and depression. One of the interviewees was Barry McGuigan, who killed an opponent in the ring and was still struggling to come to terms with the fact his brother had taken his own life a few years earlier.
We went down to Barry’s house in Kent, met his son Shane, who was training Belfast’s future world champion Carl Frampton, and after we’d done the interview I said to Barry, ‘Can I just hit the pads with you holding them so I can tell my mates?’ I hit the pads for a minute or so, and Barry said, ‘You’re actually all right, you’ve got a decent right hand.’
Barry shared the same management company as me, and about a month later we just happened to be in the office at the same time, so I popped my head around the door and jokingly said, ‘I’ve just had a meeting about having a fight…’ Afterwards, we had a chat in the corridor and Barry said, ‘Would you be up for it?’ I really wasn’t, but this was Barry McGuigan, British and Irish boxing legend, so I didn’t want to say no.
I was winging it, but we pitched it to Sky as an alternative to the wrestling documentary, and they liked the idea. A few days later, Barry arranged for me to travel to Essex to get my head kicked in. The plan was for me to do five rounds of sparring, to see if I could take a punch. I seriously thought about feigning injury to get out of it but ended up in the ring with this lad called ‘Biggy’, a 21-stone Nigerian, who knocked me around for 15 minutes. My mouth was bleeding, my nose was bent, but I was still standing at the end of it. So Barry said, ‘Yeah, I reckon we can do this’, and put together a three-month training schedule.
I was 18-and-a-half stone, so had to lose weight and get fitter, and while I enjoyed the training, not least because I’d always wanted abs, the actual boxing was horrific. I’d never done any boxing, and the McGuigans weren’t really interested in schooling me in the finer points of the game. Other than a little bit of technical advice on the pads, their approach was to chuck me in at the deep end and see what happened, which meant that every spar I had was a fight.
I turned up at Aldershot army barracks, loads of squaddies were in the gym, and while none of them were heavyweights, they could all box a bit. I got speaking to one lad from Manchester and thought he seemed like a decent bloke. He was from my neck of the woods, we seemed to get on well, so I thought he’d go easy on me. But just before the spar, he disappeared with his gloves, and the next time I saw him we were in the ring together. I looked at his gloves and thought, ‘Hang on a second, they’re not the ones he was wearing before.’
Shane sent me out for the first round and when this fella hit me in the face, I could feel his knuckles. After the first round, my head was aching and the bones in my face were hurting, and Shane said, ‘He’s done us here, he’s taken the padding out of his gloves.’
‘Let’s go home then.’
‘We can’t, it’s all about image and saving face.’
‘I’m not bothered about that, he’s going to kick my head in.’
‘No, you’ve got to do your five rounds…’
So I did my five rounds, got my head kicked in, and afterwards I had this headache that just wouldn’t go away. The following day, I played in a charity cricket match in Sheffield, and my mate Mungo, who was the cameraman for the documentary, said, ‘Are you all right, mate?’
I replied, ‘No, I’m not, my head really hurts.’
I was in bits, properly broken, had never felt anything like it.
I also went to the Peacock Gym in East London, which has hosted some of Britain’s best boxers. I fought a lad there who claimed he’d had 40-odd unlicensed fights and had ‘ASSASSIN’ tattooed on his chest in three-inch-high red lettering. He was the only person I wanted to hurt in a ring. For all his talk, he wasn’t very good, and at one point I had one glove behind his head and was punching the shit out of him with the other one. That felt good.
Another sparring partner was a six foot ten Ukrainian, who wasn’t quite as good as Vitali Klitschko but who kept making me miss by about two feet. At Shane’s gym in Battersea, I sparred this frightfully posh rugby player who worked in IT and had done a bit of Muay Thai. I hit him with a short right hook, his legs started wobbling and Barry started shouting, ‘Get in there! Finish the job!’ Instead, I stopped boxing and said, ‘Sorry, mate, are you all right?’ I didn’t want to finish him,
I just felt bad at having hurt him in the first place. He was a nice lad who had taken the afternoon off work to come and have a spar, why would I want to knock him out? Barry wasn’t very impressed, but he wasn’t the one in the ring.
This was very deep water I found myself in, well above my head. Some days I swam, some days I sank. It got to the point where I was driving from my home in Surrey to the Peacock, and the journey would get slower and slower, because I didn’t really want to arrive.
One morning, I turned up late, the six foot ten Ukrainian had to leave, and I thought, ‘That’s no bad thing.’ But then this other lad asked to spar me, who was about 250 pounds of pure muscle, as nice as pie, but with a reputation for banging people out in the gym. He absolutely destroyed me. At one point, I saw this right hand coming at me, ducked, and he hit me on the top of the head, so that it went back into my neck, as if I was a cartoon tortoise. When it popped out again, I sprang back into my corner and he beat ten bells of shit out of me. It felt like I had whiplash, so I instinctively took a knee before telling Shane I was done.
The day had been a real struggle even before that, and there’s nothing worse than getting in a boxing ring when your head’s not right. I felt depressed, but Shane didn’t know that and wasn’t happy about me wanting to call it a day. On the cricket field, I could still bowl when I had all those negative feelings, but I was highly unlikely to get badly hurt playing cricket. Yet here I was, jaded before I even got into the ring, getting battered into a state of ever-increasing numbness. That was the only sequence that didn’t make it into the documentary. It was messy, I looked terrible, and I don’t think anyone wanted to see me like that. Except maybe Daryll Cullinan.
A week before D-Day, they told me I was going to fight some American lad called Richard Dawson at the Manchester Arena. They said they’d been scouring the world for an opponent, as if I was Apollo Creed in Rocky, and now they’d finally found one. I’d never heard of him. I didn’t really want to know anything about him anyway. Unless it was the same Richard Dawson who used to bowl spin for Yorkshire and England, I wasn’t interested.
Do You Know What? Page 2