Читать книгу Hard Road to Glory - How I Became Champion of the World - Johnny Nelson - Страница 13

I must have been seen crying on the bus one night because Brendan called me over and asked me what was wrong. I told him I was getting beaten up every day and didn’t know what to do about it. Most trainers would have just told me not be soft and to get on with it, especially if it was their top earner who was doing the beating up, but Brendan is a different class.

‘Start doing the weights and building yourself up,’ he said. ‘People will tell you that you shouldn’t be doing it, that it will slow you down, that you’ll become muscle-bound like Frank Bruno, but you just ignore them. Don’t tell anyone I told you. Just start working on the weights and see what happens.’

I did as he told me. Every day, I spent some time going through a routine with the weights and after a while I could feel the difference. I started to bulk up a bit and got stronger. I was still a crap boxer and my punches weren’t especially powerful, but at least, when I was sparring, I could hold on a bit more and my opponents didn’t find it quite so easy to hit and hurt me.

One day, Herol said, ‘You want to stop doing those weights – they’ll only slow you up.’

I was chuffed to bits. Brendan had been right. That night, I told him what Herol had said. He smiled. ‘That means it’s working. He’s finding you harder to handle. Just keep doing the weights,’ he said.

The first person I became really friendly with at the gym was Mark Willie, who joined just after me. He was one of the guys who never boxed but he was super fit and over the years he and I would train together all the time. We first met at the Columbus youth club. I’d heard some of the other kids in the road talk about hanging out there and decided it might be somewhere else I could make new friends. It took me a while to find the place but I eventually went in and Mark and I clicked straight away. He was already very fit and I persuaded him to come to the gym. Willie, as we always called him, was different from most of the other guys. I remember phoning to persuade him to go to a nightclub with me but he said, ‘I don’t go to clubs. I train, I go to work and I come home. On Sundays I go to church.’ That surprised me because we’d reached the age when we didn’t have to go to church any more but I still liked him and gradually it got to the point where, if you saw one of us, you saw the other too. Together we discovered the things young men discover, like girls and mischief. We brought out the best and the worst in each other.

Strangely, although we were so tight, we were in different gangs. He was with the Reggae Boys while my other mates and I were the Funky Boys. Both groups would hang out on Saturday in a precinct in Sheffield called Fargate, much to the annoyance of the local shopkeepers who hated all these black teenagers milling around outside their shop scaring off their nice white customers. We Funky Boys wanted to be the last word in cool but in our hearts we knew we were not a patch on the Reggae Boys, who were more streetwise than we were. While we were skinny and had little or no fashion sense, they were older than us and always in the latest gear. It was men against boys. Willie was their main man. He always bought clothes one size too small for him, so all those muscles looked as though they were straining to burst through the material. The Reggae Boys looked down on us and mocked us in public but he and I remained close.

Even if I had wanted to match the Reggae Boys’ dress sense, I had no money to spend on clothes. I needed to get a job. I’d twice been to sign on the dole and never felt so humiliated in my life. It was such a depressing, hopeless place. You were treated as if you were sponging off the state, yet there was so much unemployment in Sheffield, they had no work to offer you. As I stood there in the queue for my hand-out, I felt worthless. I went home and told Mum I would never sign on again. I didn’t care if I starved, I would never feel that inadequate again.

Finding work wasn’t easy because training was already starting to dominate my life. While I still didn’t enjoy the boxing, I loved the business of getting fit and I didn’t want anything to interfere with that, so I got a series of part-time jobs that I could fit round the gym. I worked in a shoe shop, selling trainers, a Next clothes shop and in a Wimpy burger bar.

I had the job with Wimpy for two or three years and, if Willie or my other friends came in, they would just order a few chips and I would slip them a burger ‘on the house’. That stopped the guys from teasing me too much but I never felt comfortable when people I knew came in and would try and stay round the back. You can imagine my horror, therefore, when I was told I had to dress up as ‘Mr Wimpy’ and go out into Fargate to hand out leaflets. Fortunately, the costume was all enveloping and, by making sure I stayed in doorways as much as possible, I managed to get away without any of the Reggae Boys or Funky Boys realising it was me.

Another of Mr Wimpy’s jobs was to entertain the children at birthday parties, which were held in a room above the restaurant. On one occasion, I had managed to hand out the ice creams without mishap but as we were playing Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses one of the kids pulled off my glove. She yelled, ‘Mr Wimpy’s black!’ and all the other kids started to scream as though the Devil himself had invaded their party. The boss hustled me into the back room, told me to get changed and go back downstairs behind the counter while he tried to quieten down the children. To my horror, some of my mates were in the restaurant and, when the children came down and started pointing at me, saying, ‘That’s Mr Wimpy,’ they sat up and took notice.

Willie eyed me suspiciously. ‘Was that you in Fargate, handing out leaflets?’ he asked.

I tried to laugh it off, saying the kids had been messing about but none of the lads was convinced.

There was another occasion when I would have been delighted to have Mr Wimpy’s disguise. It was over a girl I’d got to know at school. We went out a few times but I was so naive the relationship never got beyond third base. We dated a few times after school when things progressed a bit further but I quickly realised there was a reason she was so popular with all the boys and dropped her.

At about the same time, a gang of guys from London started to come to the clubs where my mates and I hung out. They were hardcore and certainly not coming to Sheffield for the air. Suddenly, the Funky Boys and Reggae Boys became the best of mates, realising there was strength in numbers against this new threat but we were also aware we were no longer in control of the local scene and certainly not the local girls.

One day, my former girlfriend came into the Wimpy Bar with a big guy in his mid-twenties who I recognised as one of the leaders of the London gang. She looked across at me, then turned to him and said something. He came up to the counter and said, ‘Give us some food.’

I was trembling, but I wasn’t going to be intimidated and said he’d have to pay like everyone else.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘we’ll wait for you outside.’

I knew the Funky and Reggae Boys had deserted Fargate since the Londoners had arrived, so there would be no back-up there. I was in for a beating just to satisfy an ex-girlfriend and as a reminder to others that we were no longer top dogs in Sheffield. Not if I could help it. I persuaded my boss to let me leave by the fire exit. As I came out at the top end of Fargate, one of the gang spotted me and they all started to chase after me. This was no time for diplomacy. I ran. My knowledge of the area, my fitness and pure fear helped me get away but I was sick that I’d been chased off my own patch and for the next few days it was shame that made me work even harder in the gym.

As I was only in part-time jobs, I had a lot of time to hang out with my newfound mates. They were all older than me but they put up with me because, even though I was stick thin, I was tall and looked the part. Some of them came from Kelvin Flats, the lads my mum had always warned me against when I was at school, and most were out of work. We were bored and restless and these days would probably be prime targets for ASBOs. Back then we would hang about the East Star café, playing pool, rough-housing and being noisy.

One of my mates wanted me to go to Sheffield Wednesday with him. ‘You’ll enjoy it – it’s great,’ he assured me.

Although I’d been quite good at athletics at school, I’d never developed much interest in other sports – I thought rugby was too rough and was so useless at football that I never got picked for teams. Still, it might be OK, so I agreed to go to a game.

It was a freezing cold day and, even though everyone else was jumping up and down and obviously into the match in a big way, I just didn’t get it. I was also conscious there weren’t many black people in the crowd apart from me, while the few on the pitch were the subject of abusive chants. It was very intimidating. I was thoroughly miserable, freezing my rocks off and wishing I was at home or in the gym. Before half-time, I said I was going to the gents but had made up my mind to go home only to find all the gates were locked. I had to climb over in order to escape. As I made my way home, I decided football was probably not a sport for black people. Even though there are many more black players these days, I’ve noticed on the few occasions I’ve been to watch matches that the crowds are still largely white and, when a black player from the visiting team gets the ball, you can still hear the old verbal ignorance. It’s still not really the sport for me.

But I did have a real passion for music. I’ve always envied people who can sing well and think it must be terrific to stand on stage and have an audience in the palm of your hand, able to make them happy, sad, romantic or excited just by your choice of song and how you voice its emotion. My inability to carry a tune meant I was never going to be on Top of the Pops as a singer, but I did have ambitions as a dancer and could visualise taking over where Pan’s People had left off, stealing the show with some smooth moves.

There was a big punk scene in Sheffield and later New Wave was enormous there, but I was into R&B. Allan and Brenton would go to the northern soul all-nighters and I longed to tag along but Mum wouldn’t allow it until I told her there were dance competitions where I might win some cash. That swung it for me. Once we got inside, the others would go off and leave me but, while I loved the buzz and throb of the place and enjoyed joining in the action, I couldn’t cope with the pace and by two in the morning I’d be curled up on some chairs in a corner, fast asleep despite the noise going on around me.

Allan could get me to do anything he asked, so, when he told me he had entered me in a dance competition at Tiffany’s in Sheffield and was going to be my choreographer, I readily agreed. The £50 first prize also played a part in my decision. He dressed me as a baseball player complete with cap, fashionably on back to front, and football boots with the studs taken out, and we worked out a funky routine to one of my favourite tracks, ‘I Love Music’ by the O’Jays. On the night, it went like a dream. I was super-fit and full of energy, could do the splits and wowed the crowd with my moves. Towards the end I took some Monopoly money out of my pocket and pretended to bribe the judges, which raised a laugh from the audience. I thought the £50 was as good as mine – less Allan’s commission, of course. To my amazement, the judges gave the prize to some girl with a silver scarf dancing to Saturday Night Fever. Apart from a great body, I thought she had little to offer and I was gutted.

It was on one of my trips to an all-nighter at Clifton Hall in Rotherham that I first realised many people had a different sense of values from me. Ever since listening to Mum and Benjie rowing about money, I’d developed a real sense of how much everything was worth, and to this day I know the value of a fiver. This night, one of Allan’s friends turned up at the club clutching an old 78rpm Motown record he’d been after for some time. This was a precious item, a record for collecting, not for playing. I was amazed when he told me he had paid £80 for it. I thought of the things I could do with that kind of money and all of them seemed to be more worthwhile than buying some old record. That feeling was reinforced when we left the club because he slipped on some ice, the record flew out of his hands and smashed on the pavement. I just looked at the hundreds of black shards scattered at my feet and thought, That’s 80 quid.

Nightclubbing was fun but less for me than for Allan because I was still struggling to make a real breakthrough with girls, although I didn’t admit as much to the other lads at the café when I related tales of my colourful nightlife. When we got bored with hanging around, trying to top one another’s stories of events that only seemed to happen when we weren’t together, we roamed the streets, looking for something to amuse us. We discovered a public lavatory where gay men would meet up and we would hide in the bushes until they came out and bombard them with mud bombs. It was the kind of mindless prejudice that seems strange to me now but which I never questioned at the time.

On one occasion, we saw a guy go in alone and one of the lads suggested we should rob him. The rest of us agreed, especially when he said he would go in first. We waited in the bushes in case he needed back-up but what happened next wasn’t in the script. The two of them came out of the toilet, got into the guy’s car and drove off. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. We couldn’t work out why our mate wasn’t trying to get away; the bloke didn’t seem to be holding on to him or forcing him in any way. We hung around for about half an hour, then made our way back to the café. I was worried he might have been kidnapped but someone else suggested it was more likely he’d forced the guy to go and get some more money. About two hours later, our friend arrived back with a pocketful of cash and a story of how he’d beaten the man up. We accepted this at face value but the more I thought about his story, the more questions it raised in my mind and I wasn’t at all surprised to hear a few years later that our friend had ‘come out’ and was living with another man.

Benjie also had an experience at that toilet block. He stormed into the house one day, muttering and cursing, and ran upstairs into the bathroom. He grabbed his cutthroat razor and started to sharpen it on his leather strap, all the time saying, ‘I don’t believe it. I’ll kill him.’

Mum asked him what was going on and he replied, ‘I went into the toilet for a pee on my way home and some man came towards me and said, “What about it?” He said that to me! What the hell does he think I am? I’m going to chop his dick off!’

Mum managed to persuade him to leave the razor behind and, by the time he got back to the gents, the guy had gone but it took Benjie some time to recover his composure.

He also got upset when Mum caught a local tradesman shagging our dog, but not nearly as upset as I was. Leo was a beautiful Newfoundland, weighing as much as a lightweight boxer but tremendously friendly and cuddly, a real gentle giant. I loved that dog so you can imagine how I felt when Mum phoned me at work and asked me to come home because she had caught the guy molesting him. I was steaming and immediately phoned the police only to have my story met with a snigger and the phone being hung up. I rang back and got the same reaction. I couldn’t believe it. This man had shagged my dog and no one cared.

The third time I rang, I said, ‘Before you hang up, this is not a joke. It’s true and just think, it could have been a child not a dog.’

That seemed to get through to them and they finally sent someone round to take statements. We thought they would take action against the man but two mornings later I saw him coming down our road again. That was it. I went outside, determined to get justice for Leo. From the upstairs window, Benjie was yelling, ‘Go on, Johnny, kill him!’ while downstairs Mum was crying, ‘Johnny, come back! You’ll only get in trouble!’

I grabbed the guy, pulled his face right up close to mine and screamed at him, ‘How dare you show your face round here after what you’ve done to my dog?’ He protested his innocence, pleading to be allowed to get on with his business but I yelled, ‘Get out of here, you pervert. If I ever see you anywhere near here again, I’ll beat the shit out of you.’ The language was a bit more colourful than that, if you get my drift, but it certainly did the job.

With that, he scurried off, helped by a boot up the backside from me. I could never look at Leo again without thinking what had happened to him.

Several of the lads at the café messed about with weed and drink when they could afford it, and probably nicked stuff to sell when they couldn’t, but I didn’t ever consider it. I was no saint but at the back of my mind there was still a fear of what would happen if I got caught and I already realised Brendan found out almost everything that happened in Sheffield if any of his fighters were involved. I remember going out to a club one Saturday night and not getting home until around four in the morning. I was shattered the next day and decided to do just a light workout at the gym but Brendan put me in to spar and kept me there for two hours. I felt sick. When he finally let me out, he said, ‘I hope this will remind you what’s important the next time you’re tempted to stay in Isabella’s until dawn.’ I still don’t know how he knew.

My main reason for keeping away from drugs and alcohol was because I knew they would hamper my training. I got such a buzz out of working out at the gym that I didn’t need any artificial stimulants to get high. I was also lucky to have Willie as my friend because he felt the same way. He had a physique to kill for and could run forever, and he and I spent hours running and working out. Keeping fit became a way of life, as natural to me as walking and talking, and if I went a couple of days without going to the gym I would get withdrawal symptoms and become edgy.

With all that training, I inevitably became stronger and Brendan finally decided I was ready to have some amateur bouts. It was time for me to get into the ring competitively. But with no real wish to hit anyone and, more importantly, a massive desire not to be hit, it was far from clear how I would do.