Читать книгу Chris Eubank: The Autobiography - Chris Eubank - Страница 11

In my first amateur fight, the referee stopped the contest after only 30 seconds . . . and declared me the loser. The guy wasn’t the same weight as me, perhaps only ten pounds heavier, but that is a big advantage in the ring. He hit me in the chest with a perfect punch and I was so startled by the weight behind it that I stuttered back and froze. I couldn’t move, so the referee stopped the fight. I won eight amateur bouts on the trot after that, all three-rounders, stoppages or decisions. My amateur career consisted of 26 fights, seven of which I lost and the remainder I won. I was already incredibly focused, but now I was beginning to develop some momentum.

One day after training, I was in the McDonald’s on 149th Street and 3rd Avenue, South Bronx. I was carrying two heavy gym bags and was leaning up against the counter where a section is hinged for staff to push up and walk out. I was looking out of the window and didn’t notice a man who worked there waiting for me to move so he could get in behind the counter. He tried to lift it which startled me, so I turned to see what was happening. He stared at me and said, ‘Move out of the way, nigger! Move out of the way!’ I said, ‘What?!’ His aggression took me by surprise, so I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ to which he replied, Oh, what? You want some? Right, if that’s the way it is, I’ll go and get my boys.’

At that point, I knew this was a situation that had to be confronted. I pulled my shoulders back and held my head up high, chest proudly puffed out. My arms dropped down by my side and as they did, the bags dropped down my arms and finally fell off the wrists, leaving me standing there in that peacock pose that I later became famous for. If you had frozen that moment in McDonald’s, it would have been no different to how I looked in the ring against Benn for the world title in 1990. That was my natural stance. A porcupine puts his spikes out, a dog growls and shows his teeth – this was my stance of protection. I never held my hands up – with my arms so low and open, the message was very clear, ‘Let’s do this, whatever you’ve got, I’ll have it.’ You’re showing that person conviction, plus you’d be surprised what you can do from that position, if you know your boxing. I think someone tipped this fellow off about the fact I was an amateur boxer, because he went out the back to get ‘his boys’ but never came back.

By the age of 18, I was sufficiently skilled to make it through to the light-middleweight final of the prestigious Spanish Golden Gloves tournament, widely seen as a testing ground for future champions. The semi-final was very tough – for the first time I sensed the flickering of white lights in my head that would have gone on to become a knock-out if I had not eluded further punishment. Fortunately, I went on to get the decision and won the light-middleweight belt. The final was just as tough. I was getting punched left, right and centre. I won because of my aggression; the judges appreciated the fact that I was always taking the fight to him. That was a landmark victory, the first rung on the ladder so to speak.

I had just gone 19 when I turned professional. I was still at Morris High School but the decision to turn pro was simple – I needed the money. I was due to earn $250 for my first fight in Atlantic City. The day you turn pro is not the day you sign the contract, or get your license, it is the day you actually fight: for me this was 3 October 1985, at the Atlantis Hotel, against Timmy Brown. I was absolutely petrified. You are taught to exude confidence in boxing, but that is something which you don’t possess at first. You hear about all these great fighters who have 35-0 records, but all you want to do is have yourself respected and win your first fight. At the time, Thomas Hearns had this awesome record and I was just astounded that anyone could be so phenomenal. He was a great champion. You’re not thinking of being champion, you just want the first win and to pocket a few hundred dollars.

They left me in a room in the Atlantis Hotel by myself beforehand for probably only half an hour, but it seemed like an eternity. I went through a searching, emotional self-examination. I really put myself through the mill: Are you going to do this or are you going to bottle it? Are you going to have courage or are you going to be a wimp? My heart was pounding almost out of my chest. I was going into the unknown, something that has always made me uncomfortable.

The hardest thing about boxing is the unknown. Before every fight you get extremely nervous; there’s the pressure of the fight, the ring entrance, everything that comes with a bout, so you are naturally terrified. That only ends when the referee says, ‘Box’. At that second, I always had pure peace, blissful, sweet peace. Once he said that, I knew the territory, everything was a reaction, he made a move, I reacted, he made a wrong move, I scored a point. The chess game had begun and I knew I played exceptionally well. I always savoured that word, ‘Box’: it brought such serenity.

It was a four-round fight and I won on points. That first purse was $250, which was a lot of money to me, but I had already spent it! I had been calling a girl in the UK called Carol Chevanne on the school phone and had racked up quite a bill. The school authorities found out and I apologised, explaining that I would pay back every penny. It was a serious enough offence to be expelled but they gave me the chance to keep my word. I won the fight and so paid the bill. So even when I did slip up, I was doing all I could to make amends. This first success was later followed by four more four-round points victories against Kenny Cannida, Mike Bagwell, Eric Holland and James Canty, all in Atlantic City.

In the summer of 1986, I graduated from Morris High. I had been a good student in as much as I didn’t have any friends, not even any acquaintances really, to distract me. My personality in regards to succeeding in church, school and boxing was very focused and I suppose that alienated people. I always felt like my school mates were just kids – in England I had been living like an adult for years, feeding myself, earning my own money, looking out for myself.

Succeeding at school hadn’t been easy, especially as my academic life in the UK had not been well spent. However, as I was training to box in parallel with my studies, I very quickly found that the same principles of application, repetition, hard work and perseverance paid off in the world of academia too. Boxing is like that – its philosophy is a blueprint for so much in life.

Immediately after graduation, I began a course at SOBRO College of Technology in the South Bronx. I was on a course for six months learning on a Wang word processor, aspiring to become accomplished with computers.

To bring money in, I also did various jobs. One year before I was to leave New York permanently, my mother introduced me to Alan Sedaka, who owned a building company called Durite. One job I took was on a building site run by Alan’s firm. I looked after this office block in Long Island and was paid quite handsomely. My father was in New York at this time and was working on the job with me. He used to wind me up all the time.

Another part of the job was to make van deliveries, even though I had never driven in my life. One day I was given an automatic – which I tried to think of as just a go-kart! I got in this van and was doing okay until I hit the town and began to feel a growing sense of panic as the congestion built up. I stopped at some traffic lights but overshot and found myself in the grid where people walk across. So I reversed back – the van had no rearview mirror so I was only looking in my wing mirrors . . . Crash! There was an almighty bang as I hit a motorcyclist. This angry guy wheeled his motorbike round and parked it in front of my van so I couldn’t move. ‘Look what you’ve done to my bike!’ he snarled.

Already I was thinking about what on earth to do. I was an illegal immigrant without a green card, no driving licence: we were talking deportation if the police got involved. The guy said, ‘Listen, what are you going to do? You hit my bike?’ So I said, ‘Yes, I’ve got my insurance papers and everything in here, let me just pull around the corner, we’re holding up the traffic, everyone is beeping, this is ridiculous.’ At first he wouldn’t hear of it, but I persisted and eventually after about five minutes he got on his battered bike and began to wheel it out of the way . . . Screeeccchh! I zoomed off into the distance!

I was doing well at my studies, I had money from jobs and the fights I was winning, but this was all keeping me very busy. Alan Sedaka was always very keen to see me do well. His brother Maurice was also a kind man and one day he took me to one side and gave me a priceless piece of advice. He told me to choose studies or boxing. To use his words: ‘Put all your eggs in one basket or risk being mediocre at both.’ I thought about what he said and knew that he was right. So I made my decision. It was a relatively easy choice when it came down to it: one was safe, one was dangerous. I will always go for the danger: my grain has always been to take the riskier, harder route. I have always lived in black and white, hot or cold, violence or silence. If you just want to exist you have to just stay in the grey area. Easy is just existing. I don’t want that. I want to make a difference. Boxing was an extreme but fulfilling life. Plus, the potential earnings far outstripped any wage as an office worker. My mind was made up. Boxing it was.

People often ask me what my mother thought of what I did for a living. She accepted it and prayed for me. She would have prayed for me whatever trade I had chosen, that is the way she is, intensely spiritual. I remember coming back from my seventh amateur fight.

‘How did you get on?’ she asked.

I told her I had won.

‘Well, what about the other boy?’

‘Well, I beat him,’ I said.

‘What is going to happen to him?’

I explained that he had lost the fight and that I would move onwards and upwards as a result. She just quietly said, ‘Well, remember he has a mother too.’ That is how a mother looks at the world. There’s a quotation by one of the great philosophers which goes like this: ‘The tragedy of woman is that they become just like their mothers. The tragedy of man is that they don’t.’ I have become like my mother in many respects and that I believe is a strength.

Shortly after graduation from Morris High, I had started travelling back and forth to the UK. I had lived in New York for three and a half years straight, but for the next 18 months I bounced back and forth across the Atlantic. I found that because of a lack of money, I sometimes started to get pulled back into the old lifestyle of shoplifting.

Ironically, one day back in New York, where I had always managed to steer clear of trouble, I had a near-miss when I was playing dominoes at a club in White Plains Road. For this particular match I was on song and winning. There were four of us playing cut-throat, it was very tense. This one onlooker was looking at my hand and said, ‘This guy can’t play, he just happens to be pulling it off, he’s making lucky money.’ He was jealous of me making cash because it was a Friday and everybody was losing their hard-earned cash to me. Deliberately confrontational, he said to me, ‘You can’t play,’ so I replied, ‘Rather than talking, why not just play and put your money on the table.’

He obviously didn’t have the money so this was embarrassing for him. They all knew I was boxing at this point and he said to me in Jamaican, ‘Yu kyan fight wid yu fis’ dem, but . . .’ – at this moment he pulled out a ratchet knife – ‘. . . yu kya’ fight dis. Gwaan a Inglan, Inglish bwoy.’ I said to him, ‘Where I come from in England, if you pull a knife you should use it, otherwise put it away. I haven’t done you any wrong, you have no reason to be pulling a knife on me.’ Fortunately, he bottled out and that was that. Or so I thought.

A couple of weeks later, I went back to the same club. I started down the stairs and, as I did, I noticed the man who had pulled the knife on me and one other man. When I got to the basement, there was no one around so I headed back up to street level. As I emerged, one of these men blocked my path in between this Space Invaders machine and the bakery next door. He said, ‘Eh bwoy, yu a eedyat. Mi a go kill yu bwoy!’ He said he was the brother-in-law of the fellow with the knife and it was clear he had taken our little confrontation as a slight on his family which, of course, it wasn’t.

Being as righteous as I am, I explained, ‘Listen, he pulled a knife on me, I didn’t do him any wrong,’ but he was totally disinterested and as I spoke to him he pulled out a .38 calibre gun, calm as can be, right in the middle of the street. I immediately ran around this Space Invaders machine to try to get into the bakery. The lady who worked there had seen what was going on and said, ‘Leave ’m alone. Him a good bwoy, let him go!’ He cornered me and grabbed my T-shirt, ripping it in the process, and thrust the gun under my chin. ‘Mi wi’ kill yu bwoy!’

I knew the law of the streets in New York, so I was well aware that people got killed when they were not remotely in the wrong, it was just a matter of violent ignorance. I pulled myself away and started to walk across to my cousin Woodia’s house. I was not strolling, I was walking as fast as I could while still keeping my dignity and not looking spooked. The first time someone pulls a gun on you, you’re shaking, you’re genuinely terrified. With typical Jamacian humour though, these two big ladies in their 30s were watching this scenario play out down below and as I walked very quickly across the street they were laughing. ‘Look ‘ow faas’ ‘im a waalk!’ New York . . . boy, it can be a tough place to live.

A year later, I was in the same dominoes club playing a game with a man I was quite friendly with. He had heard of my close escape and knew the chap who had thrust the gun in my face. He told me that about three weeks after he threatened me, the same fellow had been killed in a shoot-out. The lesson to take from this was simple: if you are a bad guy, an inconsiderate ruffian or a bully, there is always someone nastier, more malicious just around the corner. That’s what happened – he got killed. You reap what you sow.

My cousin Woodia, who had pulled me on that banana leaf all those years ago in Jamaica, lived in and ran his business from New York. He sold drugs. That was his trade. My business was training, succeeding at school and keeping out of trouble. These had been my obsessions. Despite my substantial dalliances with the criminal life, I could never have been involved in selling drugs, it wasn’t part of my make-up. Shoplifting I could do. Selling drugs was just killing people and bad karma, totally different. One was preying on the weak, the other was stealing to feed yourself.

Although these were the very circles I was trying to avoid, Woodia was family: I loved him. After I had made a different life for myself and my family in England, whenever I was in New York I would always go and visit old friends, some of whom were still wrapped up in the darker side of life. On one trip I went to see Woodia at the house where he lived and from where drugs were sold.

It was a basement apartment with a wire mesh covering the streetside windows. I rang the bell and noticed several faces peering through the meshed glass. The door buzzed and I started to work my way down the dark stairs, but halfway down Woodia’s friend, Freedom, met and escorted me towards the thick door at the bottom. He knocked twice on the door and I went in – next thing I knew, I had three guns pointing at my forehead, an Uzi, a Colt 45 and a .38 calibre pistol. I said, ‘Hey! Woodia! It’s Chris, I’m your cousin, man, what’s all this?’ He said, ‘That doesn’t matter, Chris, this is my business.’

Woodia died prematurely, aged 27. The word was that one of his girlfriends had poisoned him. One night, while eating a Chinese take-away, he died where he was sitting. One of the regrets in my life is that I didn’t go to his funeral. Forget a man’s wedding, they come and go, people get married several times. Always see a man off, it only happens once. I thought, wrongly, that I was too busy to fly to New York for his funeral. I was wrong: you can never be too busy for the people you care about.