by Carl Merritt
As I got out, all heads turned towards me. Bill appeared alongside me from the other limo. ‘You alright, Son?’ I’d never felt more relaxed in my life, but I didn’t want to admit that to Bill. ‘Fine.’
I began my warm-up by stretching my body over the bonnet of the Citroen. When I looked up at the ceiling I noticed it was very high for an underground car park and the organisers had bolted extra lighting to overhead beams to improve the atmosphere.
It was only then I saw my opponent on the other side of the cage. He was kicking into the air with a bunch of flashy looking warm-up exercises. He looked like some kind of street fighter because they always use their legs like that. Silly bastard was showing off in front of a bunch of gorgeous-looking birds standing nearby, but all he was doing was giving away his trade secrets before we’d even got in the cage.
His jet-black hair was so over-slicked back, he looked like he’d just dipped his head in a bucket of olive oil. And he had a gleaming body that looked more suited to page seven of the Sun. Obviously, he fancied himself as a bit of a Claude Van Damme. I sized him up carefully but kept myself very low profile in comparison, which suited me just fine. He was so up his own arse I’m not sure he even noticed me. ‘Look at dat bumba clot [“wanker” in Jamaican],’ chuckled my mate Wayne, moving into full West Indian mode.
Next to me Bill handed over a wad of bank notes to a bookie in a £1000 suit. Then he nodded towards us and said: ‘Follow me, lads.’
The cage had been very carefully constructed with mesh and metal bars expertly bolted together. This time the entrance doors were taller. At least I wouldn’t have to stoop so low to get in. Just then a compère started babbling in French on the PA system. Less than a minute later, he dropped his hands as we both entered the cage through our separate doorways.
‘Watch his feet,’ screamed Neville as he slammed shut the gate.
‘Allez!’
It was only then that my slicked-up opponent actually looked me in the eyes. And he didn’t keep it up for more than a split second.
The crowd went completely silent at first, then some of them began shouting in French.
Mr Smoothy came straight at me with a bunch of – surprise, surprise – side kicks. He completely missed me as I ducked away with an immaculate Ali shuffle to one side. Then I caught his knee with my arm and grabbed his leg so he couldn’t get away. I punched him twice straight in the face and he fell backwards but I still had his leg in my hand. The crowd was getting noisier. I could tell they were annoyed I was in control. Then I let Mr Smoothy crash to the tarmac, dropped to my knees and bang, bang, straight up with my fists into his pretty little face. He went out like a light.
The crowd went hysterical. They’d all just lost a bucket-load of dough in a matter of seconds. Many of them, including some of the women, grabbed onto the mesh of the cage and peered in at us like we were wild animals in a zoo. They were trying to shout him out of his unconscious state but he remained out for the count. I stood waiting for the nod to end the fight or to have another whack at him if he woke up. Just then his manager got into the cage and crouched down to examine Mr Smoothy. Another fella then appeared who must have been a doctor.
The coked-up crowd continued rattling the cage. Bill waved me out and I headed for the door. By now the punters were rocking the cage so much it was quite tricky getting out of the door. Bill had a big Cheshire-cat grin on his old, haggard face as we moved through the crowds.
‘That was a piece of fuckin’ cake,’ yelled Bill.
‘Yeah. Too fuckin’ easy,’ I snapped back.
Just before we got to the limo, a blonde and a brunette appeared out of nowhere. Bill smiled and moved to one side to let them get closer to me. In broken English, one of them said to me, ‘Come with us to a party.’ The other one handed me a card.
‘No thanks.’
‘Come on. We can ‘ave some fun,’ said the brunette. ‘Shame we can’t take ‘em back with us in our suitcases,’ grinned Neville, who was right alongside me like a good minder.
‘Here’s their card,’ I said. ‘Be my guest.’
Truth is, when you’re at an illegal fight in a strange country filled with cocaine-snorting hoods, the last thing you want is to start partying with their molls. In any case, I was a newly married man!
That night I eventually rolled home in the early hours to find Carole fast asleep. It made it all worth it when I saw her lying there. As far as she was concerned I’d been out working the door at a West End club. The next day Bill bunged me an envelope containing £6000 for that fight in Paris. Not bad for under a minute’s work. I gave Neville and Wayne £500 on top of what they no doubt earned from Bill. They were worth every penny of it.
And I kept up my own limited training schedule by spending at least one hour every day in the garden using mild weights. Nothing too heavy because I didn’t want to bulk up and lose my speed. Then I’d run two or three miles every day, usually around Wanstead Flats. In the middle of all this I did a lot of stretching and side bends. And I kept my muscles toned at all times. I also went to the local baths and swam up to fifty lengths and then had a session on the running machine.
On the food front, I stuck to a diet of mainly pasta, potatoes, rice and white meat, with lots of milk for the calcium. Definitely no fry-ups and no burgers.
Shortly after the France fight, I met Wayne and Neville for a beer and they let it slip that quite a number of fighters had popped their clogs at bouts organised by Bill.
‘But it ain’t your problem, bruv,’ said Neville.
I shrugged my shoulders and tried not to look too bothered. But inside I was well upset. I never wanted anyone to die although I knew that the fighters I faced wouldn’t have thought twice about finishing me off. Neville felt bad about blurting this information out. Bill had no doubt tried to keep the truth from me about the deaths because he didn’t want me to be put off.
A few weeks later I confronted Bill about the whole business. He admitted he’d heard from one of his people that the other fighter I’d knocked out in my first fight had died from a brain haemorrhage. When Bill told me he patted me on the back as if to say well done for killing that poor bastard. ‘Fuck off, you prat,’ I snapped back at him. ‘D’you think I wanted him to die?’
I was gutted when I heard about that other fella. And it could so easily have been me. Hearing about that other fighter’s death made me decide I had to get out of the game. Then my younger brother Ian got me a job at a well-known hotel in the West End as a handyman. It was a full-time job and I hoped it might help keep me off the circuit now I was happily married and settled with Carole.
But it’s almost as if trouble just followed me around because on my second day I bumped into a chef who I’d boxed when he was at West Ham Boys’ Club. He was organising illegal fights in the basement of the hotel.
He offered me £500 to fight the following week. Everyone was in there: the managers, valets, even a few snotty guests making big bets – you name it. It turned out the hotel had been running illegal fights for two hundred years: it was as traditional as strawberries and cream. The fights were held at 6.30pm every few months. I fought another chef who specialised in pastry and – sorry about this – I gave him a right pasting inside a minute. A lot of punters made a packet by betting on me and I was given the red carpet treatment by the other staff from then on.
But having a full-time job didn’t really suit my mentality and, within a couple of months, I’d quit that posh hotel up West and gone back to the building game. It was almost as if I was trying to find an excuse to fight again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Emerald Isle
In the winter of 1988 the same old pressures started mounting yet again and I fell for another bucketload of dough being dangled in front of me by Bill. This time we flew over to Cork, in Eire, for a fight that featured the sloppiest cage I’d ever seen. Bolts were sticking out of it and some of the wire mesh hadn’t even been properly smoothed down. But none of that
seemed to bother the big, fat, wobbly, ginger-haired gypsy who’d been lined up to teach me a lesson. The fight took under two minutes and I came out £8000 richer.
But that bout will always stay with me for a much more sinister reason. As I was being whisked to the local airfield after the fight, the crowd of mainly farmers and gypsies ripped the cage to pieces because they’d lost so much money betting on their boy. Then they grabbed him – he was still out cold from our fight – from the floor and dragged him outside where they slung him in an old car and set fire to it. He burnt to death. That was even heavier than a fella dying inside the cage.
It shook me to the core when I heard about it from a mate of Bill’s, who I happened to be speaking to some time later. It turned out Bill was desperate for me not to know what had happened to that poor bastard because he didn’t want me quitting on him.
Yet again, I confronted Bill. He denied it had even happened, but I knew from the look on his face that he was lying. I now knew for certain I couldn’t trust Bill to look after me. Maybe I’d end up being burned to death in a car if I lost a fight and, with it, lost Bill a load of money? No doubt one day I’d come up against a tastier operator than myself. It was just a matter of time, wasn’t it?
One day I asked Neville and Wayne what they reckoned. ‘Hope you wouldn’t let that happen to me,’ I said to them. ‘No way, bruv,’ they both replied. And I believed them. But Bill was my paymaster whether I liked it or not and, just so long as I needed the money, he’d be there looming over me like the grim reaper.
Away from the fight game, I remained close to my mum and brothers and sister. That meant I occasionally got called upon to sort out a few domestic problems.
Shortly after I got back from that fight in Ireland, my mum called me up in a right state. My sister Lee – who’d just turned fifteen – had run off with an older boy and she was worried sick like any good mum would be. Turned out this youth – his name was Alex – was also suspected of knocking my sis around. Now that’s simply not on in my book. Any man who hits a woman or child has got it coming to them.
Lee had already been missing for an entire night and Mum was worried she might not see her again. Lee had never been home late before, let alone spent the entire night out. So me and my brothers began our hunt for her by knocking on the door of every friend of Lee and her boyfriend. In the middle of all this, Lee phoned home and announced to Mum she was never going to come home again.
Now I have to tell you here and now that I’m very protective towards my kid sister. Us boys were brought up by our mum to look after the women in the family, no matter what. She was only a kid so we knew it was our duty to get her home.
Many of Alex’s mates denied knowing anything about them, but I soon ‘persuaded’ them to change their minds, and it emerged on the grapevine that Lee was living with this boy in Brixton – not the sort of place anyone wants their fourteen-year-old sister to hang around. As far as I was concerned anything south of the river was foreign.
It also turned out this boy’s dad was a screw at Pentonville Prison, so he wasn’t exactly the most popular bloke in his street in Forest Gate. The old man had the front to tell me to fuck off when I first called round at their house. He even threatened to call the cozzers. So I retreated to reconsider my actions.
Meanwhile my dear old mum goes and gets the law involved herself. I was a bit peeved with her at first because she’d asked me to take care of things. We’d always been brought up to look after our own and not involve the police, but I guess she was worried sick about her little baby.
Then Lee put in a second phone call and says she wants to come home, but she’s scared this boy might do something to her if she leaves him. It seemed like he had some kind of hold over her. I didn’t like the sound of it one bit.
‘But I don’t want you to hurt him,’ Lee told me as she sobbed down the phone.
‘All we want is for you to come home. We don’t want you stuck out there in Brixton,’ I said, trying to be reassuring.
‘Brixton?’ she says.
That’s when it turned out she was living just round the corner from our gaff. Anyway, less than an hour later, she came rolling in, full of tears and remorse. But I could see that boy had scared her out of her wits, which wasn’t on. Lee still begged me not to hurt him. ‘Just tell me where he is,’ I asked. ‘I need to have a chat with him.’
But Lee wouldn’t tell me where I could find him so I put some feelers out in the hope of getting a fix on his location. A couple of days later we were holding a farewell party for my older brother John, who was off to live in California, when a mate knocked on the front door and said this boy Alex had just turned up at a nearby boozer called the Camden Arms. I had a quiet word with my younger brother Ian out of earshot of my mum and Lee. Then I told Mum we were going to run out for some more beers.
We got to the Camden Arms to find this kid standing outside chatting to his mates with a pint mug in his hand. Ian jumped out of the motor before I’d even parked up and laid right into him. I joined in moments later.
At least this little runt took his punishment like a man. We were careful not to go over the top. We just wanted him to get the message – don’t hit Lee or any girl for that matter. After I’d decked him out with a right hook I looked down at him lying on the pavement outside the boozer and said: ‘I don’t want to see your face again in Forest Gate.’ He left the manor shortly afterwards.
Next day, after seeing my big bruv John off at the airport, I told Mum and Lee what had happened. Lee wasn’t too happy but, years later, she thanked me for what I’d done because she could have so easily destroyed her life with that young wally. That night my mum came up to me in the kitchen and whispered, ‘Thanks for sorting it all out. I love you, Son.’ And I knew she meant every word.
Strange thing is that this boy’s family also moved off the manor soon afterwards. Might have had something to do with the fact I’d threatened to tell every ex-con in Forest Gate where that bastard lived. Screws are not popular people round there.
I’ve told you what happened with Lee because it’s important to understand that, in the world I live in, you look after your own. It’s something I’ve been brought up to do and it’s never left me. I’d do the same for anyone in distress.
By the autumn of 1989 I’d taken a break of almost a year from the fight game simply because Bill couldn’t come up with any more mugs for me to KO. No one seemed keen on spending any time in the cage with me. Funny thing is that I’d never even talked to any of my opponents. I had no idea what happened to older fighters, but I did know from Bill that no one was keen on meeting me because I was unbeaten. Suppose it’s tricky trying to get some bets going if you know it’s going to be a one-sided contest. Looking back on it, I don’t know how I could be such a mug and not take more interest in the whole illegal fight game – especially since I was putting my life on the line every time I got in the cage.
So after a long gap without any dough, I was happy as pie when Bill came up with a £5000 pay packet for a job just up the road at Dagenham Docks. It sounded like a piece of cake. Bill told me I’d be the second of two fights on the night and insisted it was a properly organised, full-on sort of gig, so I was happy.
By now Bill was fairly open about who I was going to fight as I wanted to avoid the sort of problems I’d experienced earlier in my career. He said my opponent was a local fella and that I’d cruise it like all my previous fights. I was still working the building sites in the day and training flat out four evenings a week, so I was brimming with fitness – and confidence.
That evening, Bill and I cruised down to Dagenham Docks in his sparkling silver Merc, complete with driver and my two old muckers, Wayne and Neville. It was dark and wet by the time we turned onto the dockside right alongside the Thames, where rusting yellow and orange containers were stacked about 200 feet high. You could smell the river wafting through the car as we drove along the shiny, wet tarmac. I looked at Bill’s car clock – it
was 10.30 pm.
Then we turned a corner and drove down a narrow lane between two more huge stacks of containers. At the end of the lane stood at least 250 fellas. I mean real, tasty, hard cases and they were being very noisy. The cold night air was full of rasping steam. And not one woman was in sight. This was going to be a serious evening. Amongst the punters were a lot of godfather types in long Crombie coats, with gold jewellery dangling off their wrists and long, fat cigars sticking out of their big, ugly mouths.
‘Watch yourself. This bloke’s fit,’muttered Neville, just out of Bill’s earshot as we glided to a halt. I nodded. I then spotted the cage set up on the dockside. Alongside it was the fella I presumed was my opponent. He was well built with at least a 54-inch chest. Big arms, big oak-tree legs. And wearing the traditional T-shirt and jeans.
Just then the car doors opened and me, Neville and Wayne were surrounded by six even bigger geezers. They moved with us as we walked towards the cage where my latest opponent was waiting, calmly pacing the other side.
‘Go on, my son,’ one old lag shouted through his clenched teeth.
‘Get in there, boy.’
There was no ringmaster this time. And I knew that once we’d clambered into that cage I was on my own. My opponent came at me with a flurry of punches within what seemed like a split second, not even giving me the customary amount of time to settle. Then he kneed me sharply in the ribs. I was winded and doubled up. He followed that up with two ferocious headbutts. I was staggering all over the shop. I hadn’t got one decent punch in by this stage.