Читать книгу The Tax Man - The True Story of the Hardest Man in Britain - Brian Cockerill - Страница 10

SOON AFTER LOSING these competitions, I took a doorman’s job and changed my training regime. Things have to be right when you train or what’s the use of training? It is like when I went to jail: I was 22 ½ stone and when I came out I was a skeletal 18 stone! There were a few people having a go at me in prison, but I was still the top fucking fighter and I was still strong. It was just you weren’t taking in as much food and you were eating shit food. I was still training hard, doing an hour’s circuit a night. I was running about like a lunatic, doing circuits and 500 sit-ups a day and 500 press-ups and mad things like that, but when you’re in jail there is nothing else to do.

Back to my life outside: I was now in training with George Fawcett and I was doing a few competitions. John Garland was another lad who trained with us.

I was about 20 when I first worked on the doors, at a place in Redcar called Leo’s that stayed open until 1am. I asked for the job and the lad who gave me it was called Peter Rhymes. I worked with Jeff Robinson, who was sound as a pound and about ten years older than me.

I was green as grass in this job. I’d never gone to nightclubs in my teens; I never drank, never took drugs. I was just a lad who had trained all my life and there I was on the nightclub scene working the door. I remember clearly the first fight I had to break up. You are nervous because you don’t know what to do – not scared, just nervous. There was this big lad, about 15 stone, who grabbed me and was pulling me. I went to throw him out but he grabbed a rail and I couldn’t get him down. I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t know how to throw punches properly as they didn’t train you in boxing and I just did weights.

Grabbing at him wildly, I put him out but he ran at me, so I nutted him and he fell to the floor like a stuffed doll and that was it. After that, there was fight after fight after fight to deal with, but I was still wrestling because I didn’t know how to punch. I was just a brute of a lump!

I stayed at Leo’s for several years and I was doing three jobs, still working at the racecourse and at the gym as well. I was pulling in about £200 a week – a lot of money 20 years ago. Every penny went on training and eating. I only paid a tenner a week for my flat, remember, because it was a lad’s council flat.

About £150 a week went on food. I was constantly eating and getting bigger. I used to go and buy the stupidest things, like protein and all sorts of vitamins. I used to take about 40, 50 vitamin tablets a day. It was all bullshit, because with all the food you are eating you don’t need all those tablets: you are getting enough from the food. Your body can only handle about 20 grams of protein in one meal, so what’s the point of having 100 grams when you can only digest 20?

It is only in the last ten years that I’ve got into proper dieting. When you eat every two or three hours you don’t need to eat massive dinners with 20 eggs and so on. People think that you have to eat big meals, but you are better off with six normal meals than three big meals.

When I first started training, I was doing sets of ‘tens’. We didn’t know about all these things like triple drops and mid-training, but we were still strong. I was a rock-solid 14 stone at 20, which is a lot of weight.

I trained in the Olympia and at the time I remember Dave Williams was the best fighter in the area, and, I would say, he was like a body-builder called Tim Belknap, an old-school body-builder. Williams was 15, 16 stone and about five foot eight, with massive forearms, and he had punched George, my mate. He was the best fighter in the area and he beat Pete Hoe, who was the best fighter in Eston [in Middlesbrough]; he beat him twice and was the kiddie in the area.

I remember, when I was 19 or 20, spilling Williams’s drink at the nightclub and he tried to bully me. He brayed everyone, and he could fight. He had done a bit of boxing and he was the best fighter locally for years.

My mate, John Garland, was Scottish, and I worked with him on the door at Leo’s for years. But then I nutted someone and dropped him and fractured his skull and the police were after me. So I moved to Philmores, working on the door Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Everyone got on with me, but the first person to say something wrong, I would knock them out.

I think it was partly a lack of confidence, because when you’re older you get cockier, and you think, Well, I could destroy you if I wanted to but I don’t have to. You were paranoid and you wanted to defeat them to show them that you were the best. Just like Tyson wanted to be the best fighter in the world when he was 20. But when you get older you are not as bothered. People bump into you now and you are not as bothered, but then it was, ‘Who are you fucking pushing?’

I moved on to the Top Deck and various other clubs; nearly every club in Redcar in fact. Then I started working in a pub and seeing this girl and when I fell out with her I stayed at my mate Little Frankie Atherton’s house. A lovely bloke, he is about 70 now. Frankie taught me loads, how to box, how to throw punches, because he was a professional fighter when he was younger. He was only 17 when he became a boxer. He was married but his wife fucked off and he had kids to look after, and he came to live in Redcar.

When I was about 23, I went to Ray Hood’s gym in Lingdale and started boxing there. I wanted to be a boxer but I just couldn’t get my weight down enough. I managed to get down to about 17 stone, though that was still a lot for a heavyweight to carry back then.

I lost a fight I had at 24 because the lad was one of those people who would jump and move all the time. I would have knocked him out if he’d stood still. I lost the fucking fight on points and I thought, This is not for me. I was better just grabbing hold of them and fucking braying them. I wanted to bash the bastards and smash their faces off the floor and pull their fucking arms out or bite their noses off. If it had been a street fight where you’re standing fighting, I would have won the fight because you couldn’t have got away, but the referee used to pull you all the time. It was just fucking shit. So I went back to about 19 stone and I was working in Philmores for a while. It’s now a hotel and bar.

Philmores was a funny old nightclub where you would be fucking fighting with everyone. It was along the coast from Redcar, in Saltburn, an agricultural area with a lot of farmers wanting to fight. I was assigned the upstairs part, working on my own. There were six men on the door, so I was fighting the whole fucking nightclub on my own. I would be fighting every fucker and knocking them all out. By now, I was getting a big reputation. I beat everybody in Redcar and now I beat everybody in Saltburn too.

People used to say, ‘You’re not that fucking hard.’

I remember this lad came up to me and said, ‘You’re a big lad, but I bet you can’t move fast …’

Boom! My fist travelled from 0 to 60 mph in a millisecond and I fucking knocked him out with my right hand.

When he woke up I asked, ‘Was that fast enough for you?’

Nowadays that wouldn’t bother me, but back then it was, ‘Look, you daft cunt, who are you talking to?’ and I just hit him. You are more aggressive when you are younger, more like a warrior, but when you get older you realise how much you have got to lose. Without controlling my punches, a man of my size could kill with one blow! When you are young, you are not worried about it.

I have knocked down a lot of people, fractured their skulls, broken their jaws and put them in comas. I have put legs and arms out and bitten off people’s noses, lips and ears. When you are doing that, the last thing you are thinking about is the judge sending you to prison. The way I looked at it was, even if I got jail for it, that was better than being beaten. No, that wouldn’t matter: you just think, Fuck that, he is going to try to do it to me.

There has to be a point, though, where you change from being careless to being careful. You don’t know how good you are because you think, Well, I might have been lucky there, but you can’t be lucky in the middle of your fucking fight. There is a big difference between thinking, or hoping, you’re good and actually knowing how good you are. It’s being able to assess this that makes all the difference.

Nowadays, I know I can beat anybody and that is what is firmly in my mind, but in those days I didn’t carry such a positive thought with me. When you are young and somebody says something that gets to you, you think you have to prove something. You go round punching people for just that reason.

I never ever lost a fight. No matter who it was that I came up against, I beat them. Sometimes it would be easy, sometimes it would be hard and sometimes I would come out with a black eye and have a broken cheekbone or broken nose. I have never had a broken jaw, never been knocked out. I always used to win, no matter whether the fight was sloppy or I knocked them out with one shot. I might have a fight with someone weighing 20 stone. Boom! They would be knocked out. Or I might fight someone of 14 stone and it would take about a dozen punches because you can’t always get your best shot in easily. Later on, you learn all this and so you don’t lose, you go in and use all your adrenalin and the fight is over within a minute.

Now I don’t think there is anybody in the country that could beat me, and people would say things like, ‘Nobody in Teesside could beat you.’ They would say that I would be one of the top-ten unlicensed fighters in Britain. This was no-holds-barred, anything-goes fighting. Nobody would beat me, they said, because I was just so fast with my hands and had been hit by the best fighters. You have taught the best fighters and you have beaten the best fighters, they would say. You have been hit with bars and they still couldn’t knock you out. It’s not just luck, is it? It can’t be fucking luck all the time: hundreds and hundreds of fights and I have beaten them all.

So, I’m working in Philmores, I’m about 24 and I’m still boxing and doing the weights. I wouldn’t say I was a great boxer, because I wasn’t, but my hand speed was phenomenal for my size.

I remember Lee Duffy saying to me, ‘How do you have hand speed that fast and be that big? You beat the laws of physics!’ I went to Little Frankie’s house. How he could work up in Spennymoor, I don’t know. It was a fucking nightmare! Dead rough. For those who don’t know it, Spennymoor is just a little village, but it is a village with a lot of boxers all trained for fighting and a lot of gypsies from Bishop Auckland and places like that – a whole load of good fighters. Also, when I was a kid a lot of National Front people lived there.

I met this man called John Black, the best fighter in Middlesbrough, and got a job with him. We worked from his house with John Watson, Paul Cook and Gerry Russell. There were about 20 doorman in all but only seven worked on the door at one time, and they called us ‘The Magnificent Seven’.

On my first night we were standing at the door and these wankers at the front of the queue were throwing stones and coins at us and I said, ‘Fuck this!’

I jumped out and brayed six lads, one after the other, and knocked them on their arses.

One lad shouted at me, ‘You knocked me down, but you didn’t hurt me,’ and as he was running across the road a fucking car knocked him over and broke both his legs.

Later, a copper came by on his beat and told me the ironic thing was that it was the lad’s own car. It was his mate who was coming to pick him up and he knocked him over and broke his fucking legs. No, I thought, I didn’t hurt you, but that fucking hurt, didn’t it?

For fighting, that club, the Top Hat, was probably the roughest I ever worked in. I had never seen anything like it. It was a pub downstairs and you would go upstairs and it was full of gypsies; 20 would come to the door and they were fucking game. Then one night about 20 fucking bikers turned up and we fought with the lot of them.

I had drink thrown in my eyes – a pro bar-fighter’s ploy. I think it was just cider or something but I could hardly fucking see and I was getting hit with all sorts. I was trying to open my eyes to fight. Anyway, we were dropping people left, right and centre. Chairs were bouncing off my head, Grolsch bottles and fucking glasses, and girls were throwing things at you. We were punching away like in the cowboy films and it was just mad.

I also worked at another nightclub for John, the Down Town in Stockton, when he owned that. That was where I met Amanda, my wife. I used to work in Down Town first and then I would go to Water Front to make sure everything was all right there, and then to Henry Africa’s, which was a big nightclub and a rough place because it was in a tough area of Stockton. Then we would go on to Spennymoor and later, on the way back, I would pop into the nightclubs in Billingham. I used to do five or six clubs in total, making sure they were all right.

One time when we were working in Henry Africa’s there were maybe 10 or 12 army lads in there. They were standing there and this band was on, a bit like Hot Chocolate, and this woman said, ‘I want to go backstage and see them.’

My eyes caught hers and I told her, ‘Well, you can’t, they’ve come straight here from another gig and they just want to get away.’

She insisted, ‘I want to go in. I’m coming in. I’ve paid.’

As she tried to hit me with a glass, I pushed her and she went down. Then her boyfriend came over and I knocked him out and dragged him and his girlfriend out of the place. Just as the eagle does not chase after flies, I left them lying there.

It was raining cats and dogs and the pair of them were strewn like discarded party poppers in the puddle outside. When I walked back in, this army lad ranted, ‘I’d like to see you do that to the paratroopers!’

‘Fuck off, you knobhead,’ I shouted at him.

He ran at me and … boom! I hit him and he went down like a broken statue. Next, I gave his mate a bare-knuckle ride and dropped him too. I grabbed the first one, picked him up and gave him a crash course in the art of precision plastering as I rammed him headfirst into a plaster wall. I fucking threw his mate the same way. Then the rest came over and I stamped my mark of authority on their faces with my boot and brayed them all over. Fucking paratroopers. This lot would lose a fight with a parked car!

I had to fuck off because the police were after me. A friend gave me a hand to get over the back wall, which was about 12 foot high.

Remember how I told you about getting bullied as a kid? Well, days later I recognised one of the bullies in the same club. When I was about ten, his brother wanted a fight with me and I used to be able to beat this lad, who was the same age as me, but the bully was about 15 or 16 and he did his younger brother’s fighting for him. He had one of those fucking faces that never change, so ten years later it was instant recognition.

I went up to him, reached out to his shoulders and gently gripped them with my hands, locked my eyes on his and said softly, ‘Now then, wanker, I can fill you in.’

‘How do you know that?’ he said, his tortured words barely audible.

I gangster-slapped him and he fell into a phone booth. As I looked at him, I just saw a frightened rabbit with a thousand-yard stare. I dropped him like a bag of shit, knocked him clean out.

‘You won’t bully me again, you bastard,’ I snarled.

At that time, you didn’t need a council badge to work on the door as you do now. Now you have to tell them who you are and where you live, and you are working more with the police.

During the course of my work, I have been bashed with hammers, smashed with bars and shot at, but I don’t make statements to the police and get people put in jail. The way I look at it is, if you live in the fast lane of life, that is the life you have chosen.

Sometimes, when the police have had me up for something, they have said, ‘Well, if you give us a bit of information, those driving offences will disappear.’

My answer is always that I would rather go to fucking jail than sit here and think I have put other people in prison.

What’s good about getting yourself off the hook at the cost of someone else’s freedom? I am old school, like Spencer Tracy and James Cagney. None of them was a grass, but all that has fucking gone now.

I remember the gangster movies where people got away with bad things, and all the kids in America wanted to be like them. But then the film companies changed it: they made one where Cagney goes to his death on the electric chair. You can’t win against the police, it said. The goodies always win.