Читать книгу Record Breaker - He is the Fittest Man in the World, and He's Got 125 Records to Prove It - Paddy Doyle - Страница 10

I STOPPED GOING to judo with my cousins when I changed schools at eleven. I was small and stocky and always fighting people who were bigger than me, often in David and Goliath situations. Not long after I got to senior school, I started getting a name for myself as a bit of a rebel. The lads wanted to sort me out. All the violence escalated from there really.

I was often marched into the headmaster’s office, asked about my offence and caned, usually six times on the hand. I just accepted it. One time I remember, I didn’t do my science homework and I got the slipper, again about six times. But I wasn’t interested in science or any other homework. Sport was the only part of school life that counted for me. I’d already got a bit of a reputation at my primary school, and some of the boys who’d been there went on to Jaffray School with me. Jaffray had a bad reputation, anyway, as far as education and discipline were concerned. It wasn’t the best of schools, but there I was. I think my father regretted that I’d gone there, but he never said anything about it. We weren’t great communicators about subjects like that. Conversation was minimal, although it was never unpleasant or hostile. Dad looked after me well.

It was when I was about twelve that I started to take sports seriously. We were doing different sports at school, such as gymnastics, and we were encouraged to develop our athletic skills. Trampolining was something I enjoyed: the buzz of jumping up and down and doing back flips; the skill of it. Trampoline work is about strength and flexibility and focusing on a centre line. It’s about balance and technique, co-ordination and combination. I didn’t think I was any good at the sport but I was selected to represent the school.

We went along to Castle Vale Senior School for the area heat of the Midlands Schools Championships. The event covered the north of Birmingham. In the competition, you had two minutes each to demonstrate your skill and versatility, just as you do in other gymnastic competitions. If I got through that, it would get tough because the finals would place take in Greater Manchester. Well, I got through to the finals at Washwood Heath School, and I got a bronze medal at the Midland Schools Championships.

I also represented the school in athletics in 1977 and 1978, when I was thirteen and fourteen, in the fifteen hundred metres and the long jump. At my primary school, sports had been organised as team games; athletics wasn’t encouraged as much as football. At senior school, athletics, a sport for individuals, was more to the fore and that appealed to me. I found that in team games I kept arguing with people about whose fault it was when something went wrong. I hated that. I just wanted to get on with the job. I’ve always been like that.

But I had to put a lot more time in for training, especially after school. As you got bigger, the competition grew harder. I didn’t always win. Then I’d feel disappointed and frustrated. I always felt I could have done better. I told myself I had to work harder. But the PT teachers at Jaffray encouraged and motivated me. They wanted me to do well. They saw I had potential and that was job satisfaction for them. Jaffray may have been a rough school, but it had a reputation for success in sports.

I played soccer for the school, even though I’m not naturally a team player; I must have been doing something right. We were in the Midland Schools Championships, so I must have had some ability. But I was never a keen watcher of football. I was much more interested in boxing and the martial arts. The martial arts include ju-jitsu and tai-kwando, and there’s a new category called freestyle martial arts, which is a combination of judo, tai-kwando and karate. Judo involves a lot of groundwork, while ju-jitsu is more about grappling and holding and throwing. Karate is punching and kicking. Tai-kwando is a combination of punching and kicking, similar to karate, and is an Olympic sport now. I enjoy karate and still go to a club around the corner and train with senior instructors.

When I was at school, all my friends would be going out to play in the evenings and weekends but, if I wasn’t training, I’d go off for a run. It might only have been a mile run, but it seemed like ten miles at that age when my body was still undersized. My dad would say, ‘Where are you going now, Patrick?’ And I’d say, ‘Off for a run, Dad.’ He couldn’t understand it. And I’d be doing press-ups at home, upstairs in my bedroom. I hadn’t read about training in a book, I just enjoyed doing it. I was so full of energy. And I felt I had something to prove to myself. I was going in two directions at once: there was the sport and there was the violence. I had so much energy that I was looking in every direction for an outlet.

When I was twelve I joined the Royal Engineers Army Cadets at their Erdington branch. This was an evening activity, separate from school. I think it was a school friend who mentioned it to me, so I went along to their Nissen hut and applied to join. The boys there were aged between twelve and sixteen. We did marching drill and army cadet exercises and went away to military camp. They soon saw my aptitude for sport. Next thing, I was representing them in cross-country running and won a couple of medals, including a team competition at Sutton Park. It was a Midlands Army Cadet Championship, and there were about a hundred other competitors. We entered as a team of four and came away with the gold medal.

I was over the moon when we won that medal, even in the disciplined structure of a team effort. With cross-country, you still have to run as an individual, even though you collect points for the team. You don’t run at the same pace as anyone else; you still go out there and bust a gut for two or three miles. I was never a particularly fast runner over short distances, but I’d overtake the sprinters on a longer course. Even then, I realised I was best at endurance events.

The army cadets come under the umbrella of the Territorial Army, the TA. The cadets were set up to encourage young people to join the military later on. It’s different from your Boys’ Brigade or the Scouts; it’s more disciplined. You’d have a fourteen-year-old cadet corporal telling you what to do. And I accepted the discipline. I thought it was great. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and stayed on for two and half years, until I changed school.

Unlike at school, in the cadets I felt I was being encouraged to do something. It was different thinking. At school I wasn’t encouraged in subjects I was weak in. And if you’re not encouraged, you lose interest. We’re all human. Everyone needs to be motivated with a pat on the back, whoever they are.

But one day I gave the sports master a lot of cheek. He whacked me so hard around the ear that it got infected. At fourteen and a half, after two and a half years of fighting in the playground and getting the cane, I was sent to another comprehensive, a Roman Catholic school called Saint Edmund Campion. I’m a Catholic but not a practising one.

My new school, also in Erdington, didn’t inspire me sportswise. I didn’t represent it in any sports. The sports teachers at Jaffray had encouraged me to enter competitions. They hadn’t pushed me into anything but they’d encouraged me to do what I wanted to do. This new school lacked the kind of PT instructors I needed. Jaffray had been a rougher school, but it shone in sports and that had motivated me. This school was nowhere in the school football league. So I lost interest and did my own thing.

The violence started to escalate after that. It was around this age that I had my first street fight. It was one street gang against another. Lads of about eighteen were fighting other young lads. It was gang warfare in Erdington High Street and the surrounding area. I was fourteen and getting stuck in and loving it. In one particular fight, I remember, a guy went to punch me.

I kicked him and he went down. That’s what street fights are: anything goes. There are no rules. These fights aren’t planned. And this one just happened that night. The other gang hated the guys I was with, and the fighting developed from that. I was part of one gang and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to stop and think whether it was anything to do with me. They weren’t even friends of mine, but I stood by them. It’s being part of a gang. I followed it through. It was teamwork, but I really enjoyed the aggression.

At the time I was mostly running on my own and doing exercises at home in my bedroom. It was personal choice. I’d go for a run around the local streets and do press-ups and sit-ups at home. I concentrated on strength and stamina exercises, seeing how much I could do, how far I could push myself in a certain time. If I did one hundred press-ups one day, I’d go for double the next. I enjoyed seeing myself improve and kept a record in my head of how I was progressing. I felt stronger and more confident in myself and I ended up with a high level of stamina and fitness. And this was to stand me in good stead later on.

I wasn’t ever really a smoker. I’d tried smoking at school, but the thing I was best at was coughing up my guts after a ciggy. I was just experimenting with fags; you had to follow the crowd. I smoked because everyone else did, but not much. My lungs stayed clear. They got decoked every time I ran down the street. Self-discipline came naturally to me. I was happy to run and run. I wore the usual trainers and tracksuit bottoms or shorts. I didn’t keep track of how many miles I was doing; I just headed out and came back.

I don’t know if anyone else was running around that area. I think I was thought of as a bit of a head case. They’d call me ‘crazy’ or ‘Mad Paddy’ or ‘Paddy Whack’. But, although I was still a rebel at school, I’d also started to become a bit of a peacemaker. I used to pick on the school bullies who picked on the weak kids.

A nice thing happened to me about seven or eight years ago. I was out shopping one day and a guy came up to me. He said, ‘Paddy, you don’t remember me, do you?’ I told him I didn’t and he said, ‘You used to stop me getting bullied at school. You used to step in and stop the bullying. I just want to thank you for it.’ I thought it was great that he remembered that.

There was always at least one cock of the yard strutting about the playground. They were the big guys and they could see I was becoming a fighter. One day I went up to one of them on the school stairway and offered to see him outside. He declined the invitation, even though he was bigger than me. And I noticed he was shaking. We were both about fourteen or fifteen, but he was nudging six foot. I was a lot shorter, about five foot seven. He always had three or four boys going around with him. I’d noticed him kicking people and taking their money. He reckoned he could pick on others, but I decided, that day, I’d had enough of watching it.

I approached him on the stairs. Even then, I made sure he was above me, standing a couple of steps higher with his group of hangers-on. ‘You think you’re hard,’ I said. ‘You think you’re a bully. Let’s go outside and sort it out.’

‘I don’t want to fight you, Paddy, he said.’

But I put pressure on him. ‘Let’s go for it now, out in the playground,’ I said. ‘Me and you, right now.’ But he wouldn’t. His face was going red and I could see him gulping saliva. He walked away in front of his own team, and he lost his status. After that most of the bullying stopped. Others had seen that moment of confrontation and one or two of his followers dropped away.

It just seemed to be a natural progression, on my way to other things. It was me sorting things into the right order, stopping the weaker ones being picked on. I wasn’t having it. This gang leader went around in a group. He always needed the gang to support him. I was an individualist. I was happy to bide my time.

This is what makes people wary of me, even now. The tamped-up aggression was always there, latent. I could wait my moment. I’ve seen that guy a lot since school. He still fancies himself. Not with me, but within his own little bubble. He still lives in the same area, but get him out of that place and he’s a nobody. I know how to deal with individuals like that.

One of the members of his gang, an Asian lad, was also a bully. He kept having a go at me, saying, ‘If you have a go at him, have a go at me too.’ I’ve nothing against Asians; plenty of them come to my gym. But one day this guy was having a go at a girl in the classroom, then having a go at another lad who tried to intervene. I got up on the desk and punched him in the head. Next thing, he was on the floor, bleeding. He started crying and I said, ‘You’re not going to bully again, are you?’ I can’t stand bullying. I really hate it. We were fifteen then, in our last year at school. You’d think the guy would have had more sense. But he hadn’t. I didn’t go around in a gang. I used to walk out of school on my own. I didn’t need hangers-on.

By this time I was starting to get into trouble with the police. I didn’t start playing truant until I was about fifteen but, if it hadn’t been for my interest in sport, I would have been heading for prison by then. My energy would have been translated into violence. I was heading in that direction.

I remember one of our school discos, where a gang from another school turned up. They started throwing bricks and stones at us as we came out of the disco. There were more of them than us, but I said to the lads, ‘Let’s go for it,’ and we ran after the gang, down the street. I was up front, leading the chase, and I picked up a scaffolding bar that was lying on the ground nearby. It was a handy tool for deflecting bricks and stones and I ran across the road with it, straight towards the other gang. But, as I tore round a corner, I ran straight into a police officer. I dropped the bar immediately. I’d only wielded it to show the other gang I’d got something to fight with too. But, if the teachers weren’t clouting me, the police were. I got a good clip round the ear from the copper, which probably did me good. He gave me a real telling-off. He cautioned me and told me to move on.

But one or two of the lads who were supposed to be with us while we were chasing the gang had, in fact, chickened out. I went back and got hold of one of them who’d lost his bottle and threw him over a garden fence. My reasoning was he should have stood by us. We needed him. It wasn’t the moment for him to think of us being outnumbered, twenty to four. He’d wanted to go home, so I had to do some brainstorming on him. I struck him. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was that angry. I’ve seen him once or twice since then. He still lives in the area. I presume he’s forgotten about what I did but he still looks at me warily.

I must have been about sixteen then. I didn’t know, for sure, what I was going to do with my life or how it was going to pan out, but I was getting some idea of what I wanted to do. I’d already got visions of doing my own thing in some way, and I was now looking for a more aggressive contact sport than judo.

I was getting into a lot of trouble around this time and a friend suggested I take up boxing. I missed going to the judo club but I wanted a new challenge. I thought I had another skill in a different area. It’s hard for a lot of people to make the change from the martial arts to boxing; not everyone can do it. But I had the ability to adapt to a different discipline and I’d already had a taste of boxing at Aston Villa when I was twelve. This time I joined the Austin Amateur Boxing Club at Longbridge, where they made the cars.

For a while boxing absorbed all my troublemaker’s aggression. I concentrated on getting into the ring, sparring and doing punchbag work and I focused on preparing for competitions and tournaments. A lot of people will tell you they’ve boxed, but punching a bag and getting into the ring are two different things. There’s nothing like the real thing.

I enjoyed the fighting. I was still pumped full of aggression, everyone could see that. I was wild, even in the ring. I was like a windmill, arms and legs going all the time. I was always going forwards, coming at people. I realised I was a pressure fighter, constantly in the face of my opponent, regardless of how often or how hard I got hit. I was on top of them all the time. That’s pure aggression.

I spent about a year and a half in the gym, learning boxing skills. Then, in 1983, when I was nineteen, I had my first fight. I was never a boxer; I was always a fighter. A boxer takes his time and picks his punches. A pressure fighter just goes forward, all hell let loose. I’d been told to stand back and pick my moment, but I never did. I stuck to my own style of fighting, which probably lost me my first fight as an amateur boxer. I kept coming forward.

I’d already had my nose broken at the Aston Villa club but it was to happen again in my first amateur boxing tournament as a welterweight in 1983. I was a novice fighting a tall, black guy from another boxing club. I’d looked at him in the changing room before the match, and I thought, He’s too big and tall for me. I wondered if they’d weighed us properly. But I’m very heavy-boned and stocky in build. Out we went, into the ring. All my friends were there to support me, thinking I was going to do well. The place – I think it was a social club – was packed out with about three or four hundred people. In the second round I felt my nose go. And I heard the crowd say, ‘Oooh!’ They’d heard the snap.

Then I got the guy with a left hook. I nearly had him. He was wobbly; I could see his feet going. But the referee stopped the fight because, by this time, blood was pouring out of my nose. I don’t know whose side the ref was on. I was still fighting, and I was even starting to beat the guy, but the match was stopped. It was a clean break to the nose but there was blood all over my face and I was swallowing it. They couldn’t stop the flow of it and if you have a gum shield in, it restricts the breathing. So they stopped the fight.

They’re very strict in amateur boxing about this kind of situation because of the possibility of head injuries and fatalities. At that time, as an amateur, you didn’t have to wear a head guard. There was no law about wearing them. And there I was, coming forward all the time, just as I did when I was sparring.

I heard that the other guy stopped fighting one or two fights after that. Boxing’s a hard game. After he beat me, I heard he lost the next fight and couldn’t take the defeat. To be a good sportsman, an athlete and a champion, you’ve got to accept the losing side of the coin. It’s hard, but, in every sense, you’ve got to roll with punches.

Once I’d got my first two fights out of the way, I was on a winning streak. I’d learnt the hard way to take my time and listen to what they told me in my corner. And I started to listen to other people in the gym. I hadn’t done that before. I’d always thought I was right. Now I was maturing and starting to think. I wanted to be more than pure brawn. I stopped relying on my aggression. I realised there were skilful people out there who worked harder at techniques and, as a result, were better at the sport than I was.

When it came to my third fight, I altered my game plan and started winning. This fight was with a boxer who’d had about twelve or fourteen fights. I was well outmatched. He was with the Bugle Horn Boxing Club at Northfield, in the south-west of Birmingham. It’s closed down now. But the guy had all his friends and family and supporters there. The hall was packed with three hundred people. My only supporters were my two corner men from my gym, who were also my club trainers, and my brother and sister. I could hear the shouts all around me: ‘You Irish bastard!’ and other insults. In fact, I was born and bred in England and I’ve got the British flag on one of the shelves for my trophies.

It was my twenty-first birthday that night. I went in there and I beat the guy on points. It was a unanimous decision. I remember my hand being raised and the crowd still booing me because their golden boy hadn’t won. He’d been winning fights up till then and his friends probably had money on him that night. I headed for the changing rooms and the crowd who’d been booing a few minutes before cleared a path for me, because I’d proved I was the best. I looked at one or two of them as I went by, as if to say, ‘Call me a name now, then?’ They were a typical lager-lout crowd. But when I walked back through the middle of them, everything went silent. And my brother and sister were proud of me.

* * *

I’d left the army cadets when I changed school at around fourteen and a half. By the time I was sixteen I’d started thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And I thought, again, of the army. The careers officers came to the school in our last year to advise all the school leavers about future careers. From school I joined the Junior Parachute Regiment, which is a regular boys’ service of the armed forces. And I didn’t have to work at getting fit for the exercises and courses; I’d already done that.

Browning Barracks in Aldershot, Hampshire, was the depot of the Parachute Regiment. It was a new part of the world for me. We were treated like juniors, like boys. I disliked that intensely. It was like school to me and I wanted to be treated like a man. I wanted to be at the senior level of the services. But my brother, who’d been in the Royal Artillery for about six years, warned me this was how it would be. He’d told me I wouldn’t like it, and he was right. He’d got a ranking and advised me to wait until I was older before I joined up. He knew what the Junior Paras would be like. But I couldn’t wait. And I made a mistake.

We did the usual weapons training, navigational skills, camping and assault course work. The point of the junior service is to build you up for the men’s army. They try to increase your stamina and your confidence. We learnt to use the SLR, the self-loading rifle, and the GPMG, the general-purpose machine gun, which fires four hundred rounds a minute.

I noticed I was fitter than the blokes around me. I’d be first going over the assault courses and finishing the cross-country runs – unless I had flu or was suffering from an injury that day, and then I’d come third or fourth or fifth. I was thin and wiry then. I was muscular but agile. I could move like a whippet. In the BFTs, the Battle Fitness Tests, I came first. In the armed forces you have to pass fitness tests every year. They have to make sure you’re up to the job.

I can’t say I made any friends there. At the junior level, people come and go. The real problem was, I thought I was missing out on something. At sixteen I felt I should have been down the pub and having girlfriends, instead of square-bashing. But I was a good lad in the junior army, unlike my later army experiences. At that age I was as keen as mustard. It was a new environment and I was doing well, but I decided to leave. They tried to persuade me to stay. They could see potential in me. My section commander, a ginger-haired lance corporal called Betts, was a nice bloke and did his best to change my mind.

We were allowed out at night, under supervision. But we weren’t allowed into pubs because we were under age. The military police in Aldershot were very strict. If you didn’t have your ID card on you, it was an immediate fine. They’d put you in prison for offences and I don’t think they’d hesitate to use a baton. The military are like a law unto themselves. They’ll deal with you in the way they see fit, and you’ve got to go along with it. If the civilian police found you messing about in Aldershot, they’d get shot of you to the military police. They knew you’d get dealt with properly. If a civilian policeman hit you with a baton or manhandled you, you could have him. The military police must have some arrangement that encourages the law to hand you over to them – fast.

Other evenings were spent getting ready for inspection, cleaning our kit. We had to polish our boots and do our washing and ironing. Everyone had a room job, a specific job within your block, cleaning the toilets or whatever, and the job had to be done. It was an experience in itself but, at sixteen, you don’t want to know about it. I stuck that life for six months, then applied to come out. Army life could be enjoyable but I kept asking myself, ‘What else am I missing?’ I wanted to have my cake and eat it. I wanted to go out with my mates and be in the army. But you can’t do both. For that very reason there was a large turnover of juniors: about forty per cent. I wasn’t the only one who missed his freedom. Four or five lads left the same day as I did. My mum was pleased to see me.