Fighter

FIGHTER

ANDY LEE

with Niall Kelly

Gill Books

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Fighter

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

Copyright

About the Authors

About Gill Books

‘La mort n’est rien; mais vivre vaincu et sans gloire,

c’est mourir tous les jours.’

(‘Death is nothing; but to live defeated and

without glory is to die every day.’)

– Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

For Maud and Julia

FIGHTER

Fighting is a natural thing. But professional fights, prize fights, twelve rounds of championship boxing bound by the Queensberry Rules, any sort of rules, those types of fights are unnatural. They’re packages of planning and promotion and pomp and ceremony; they’re stage shows, some small and some big and some worthy of any of the great residencies that have gone before in the hotels and casinos of Las Vegas. Like the fight down the lane ten minutes after the school bell sounds for the final time of the day, it has to be engineered into place not only to make sure that the chosen two, willing or otherwise, uphold the first part of their end of the bargain by showing up at the right time and the right place, but also to guarantee that they have a crowd, a bullring, an amphitheatre, a coalition of eyes that lend the whole scene its legitimacy and ensure that the second part of the bargain, the violence itself – sometimes tame, rarely skilled, and often brutally frenzied – follows as agreed, because what is the point of this type of fight if there is nobody there to watch it and whoop and cheer and bay? But a real fight doesn’t demand an audience. It isn’t trailed neatly by a prelude of trash talk and exaggerated storylines. It happens in an instant, a reflex action as old as human nature itself. Fight over flight as the only response because someone has injured you or hurt you or upset you in some way, and the only retribution that can bring you any compensation or consolation is a physical one. That kind of fight in its most pure, raw, unconstrained, maniacal form – not brought to you by Bob Arum’s Top Rank Incorporated in association with DiBella Entertainment, not sponsored by Tecate con carácter or sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commission along with the World Boxing Organisation with its referee and its three scoring judges at ringside from Nevada, Nevada and Connecticut. A fight without the interminable build-up, the lights, the TV cameras, the posters and packed arenas and purses worth a million dollars or none – that fight is inherently natural. Sometimes it’s instinctive, from the slightest spark to fully ablaze in an instant, and sometimes it’s premeditated, bubbling, festering, waiting for its moment of maximum impact, but it’s always driven by emotion. Well, nearly always. It can happen at any time or in any place, because total strangers fight and best friends fight and sworn enemies fight and families fight, and the fallout can rarely be predicted and the consequences are rarely the same, because some fights are easy to mend and move on from, but some fights endure and worry at the loose threads of what remains of a relationship for evermore. But for two men to meet and sign contracts to fight and arrange a time and date maybe eight, ten or twelve weeks in the future, and then hold a press conference to try and help sell tickets, it’s unnatural. It’s absurd. Where is the emotion? Where is the instinctive response that you didn’t even know you possessed until it has already overcome you and drawn you into the first dice roll of a physical confrontation that until that split second only existed in your thoughts and your imagination? That’s not how it works, because when two fighters agree to fight it’s not personal, or at least most of the time it’s not, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing at stake. No, quite the opposite. For some fighters everything is at stake: sums of money that can change a life and sums that would barely sustain a life until next Saturday night and the next small hall. Your health prized away as collateral every time you step through those ropes. Your reputation too – it’s all on the line. So just because there’s nothing personal doesn’t mean that there’s no anticipation, and once that date is set it takes up residency at the forefront of your mind. It becomes the reference point through which all time and events are now understood. Everything in your life moves towards that date. Every decision you make every day is to benefit you on that date. Every pad you hit. Every meal you eat. It all trickles down to one moment in time when the talking is over and the seconds are out and the crowd has transformed into a wall of white noise. That’s the moment when you need to be at your mental and physical peak. It’s understandable that the date occupies a permanent space in your thoughts, and it might expand or it might contract, but it will never totally disappear. It’s always there. Even when the fight is over and your hand is raised or left limp by the referee’s side, it will still be there. Because once a fight happens it exists forever. Duran and Leonard on 25 November 1980. Hagler and Hearns on 15 April 1985. Every time you look at your professional boxing record from now until the day you die the fight will be there, and it will be a part of history, and it will be a part of you. No matter how much you wish you could have that moment again to throw a punch or take one back, you never will. You have to live with the consequences, tied to your name and tied to your identity in neat and tidy numbers, the messy reality obscured by each one: pain, sweat, sacrifice, incomparable happiness and utter devastation that no single digit can ever encompass. The accumulation of those digits over the course of a career can’t paint your picture in anything more than the broadest brushstrokes, and yet it’s the first thing that people ask you. What do you do? I’m a boxer. What’s your record? And when they learn the answer, no matter how big the first number might be, everyone’s thoughts are instinctively drawn to the second, because one of the small cruelties of human nature dictates that you might have been a world champion once upon a time, but people will inevitably ask you about the night you lost your belt, not the night you won it. Even with a fighter like the great Rocky Marciano, who never knew what it was like to be confronted with his defeats as he walked down the street or grabbed a quick coffee or ate his dinner, even with a legend like that, it’s the impenetrable zero that people fixate on, not the many heroic deeds that it took to construct the forty-nine. So when all of the hard work is done and the date is near, your body knows that its time has come again. If you’re lucky, the rhythm of your days matches the rhythm of fight night: when you wake, when you sleep, when you eat, when you go to the toilet. Then you go to this place where you agreed to be at the time you agreed to be there, to stand opposite the man you said you would fight. And the bell rings.

Darryl Cunningham is only on his feet for seventy-seven seconds, off his feet for ten, and then his night is over as quickly as it started.

It’s late on a Wednesday and outside the front door of B.B. King’s Blues Club and Grill, Times Square hums to its usual oblivious tune of engines idling, tourists snapping their cameras into the bright lights, and street artists hustling to make a dollar.

The room has slowly filled over the course of the last few hours so that by the time Cunningham slumps, defeated, to bring a premature end to our main event, it’s standing room only with people wedged in around the bar at the back. If the light is right, you can almost read the labels of the whiskey bottles sitting on the top shelf, likely to be untouched on a night like tonight. It’s a small room, and even when it’s at capacity, your audience might be six or seven hundred people, tops, certainly no more than a thousand at its absolute limit.

This is where you go when you lose. Let me out of here and in ten minutes I could be at Madison Square Garden, although when I got there I’d be standing outside its locked doors with the rest of the world. Inside is reserved for the greats of history, for winners, and for those who are still on the cusp of their ultimate victory and clinging onto the hope that they might one day prove themselves worthy. Those living, breathing museums of boxing are no place for a fighter who has slipped out of the headlines and into the shadows, into that purgatory where there’s a question mark over whether or not you can truly be considered a title contender anymore and a thinly veiled wonder if you ever deserved to be a part of the conversation in the first place.

But there’ll always be a spot in B.B. King’s. I can let my ego tell me that a night like this is beneath me; that even if Cunningham’s record, with his twenty-eight wins and four losses, looks similar on paper to my own 29–2, we live in two different worlds. But in reality, it’s not so clear. I can remind myself that I am a world title contender, that this time a year ago I was getting ready for the biggest fight of my life, my shot, but a year is a long time in boxing and so much has changed.

New life, new home, new coach. No belt.

Why am I here? There are a lot of reasons, but mainly, I’m here because I lost to Julio César Chávez Junior, the WBC middleweight champion of the world. I’m here because I have a new coach and the only way that we’ll ever get to know each other is by working together and training. He’s not here with me tonight, but I might as well take whatever fights I am being offered and see if I can take all of our hours of talk and tactics out of the gym, put them into action in the ring, and make a few quid at the same time. And I’m here because when my star was on the rise, which was not that long ago, my promoter signed me to a new deal which guaranteed me a certain number of fights, and now he’s upholding his end of the bargain, although not in the circumstances that either of us had imagined.

This business is ruthless and it’s frightening how quickly you can be forgotten. Even if you haven’t been forgotten, it can certainly feel that way.

I’ve been convincing myself that I didn’t need a difficult fight tonight, that I’ve nothing to prove, that my credentials are still sound, and that patience will be my best friend if I can just sit tight and wait, keep doing what I’m doing until the next opportunity comes. And it will come.

As well as that, my wedding day is only a few weeks away, and there’s only so much damage this guy can do in a minute and a half if he even manages to lay a meaningful glove on me in such a narrow window. Soon I’ll be married, and it’s more than just a word, or a ring on the finger, or a big day out with our friends and family. In one way, nothing changes, and at the same time everything does. I owe it to Maud to make the best decisions for us, for our little family that’s just the two of us for now but maybe, hopefully, some day will be more. How much longer can I keep fighting the Darryl Cunninghams of the world for bad money on bad cards that nobody is watching? How much longer can I keep selfishly telling myself that I am still going to be a world champion when all of the evidence is laughing at me in the face?

I know Cunningham. I know him from Detroit. He’s a decent fighter, and he has that Detroit state of mind where he wants to be the King of the City, the guardian at the gates, putting the up-and-comers and the wannabes in their place, taking the adulation and applause, the tips of the cap as he walks down the street, cultivating this reputation as a man to be feared and respected. You don’t want to fight Darryl Cunningham; he’s a hard bastard.

But when you take guys like him out of Detroit, when you step them up and out of their comfort zone and force them to face a fighter with some pedigree, the fish is moved from his little pond to the big, bad ocean and now he’s floundering. Nobody knows who Darryl Cunningham is in New York City, they’ve never heard his name or wanted to shake his hand, and he knows it. He knows that his reputation counts for nothing here and that I’m certainly not bothered by it. I saw that the moment he shook my hand at the weigh-in yesterday – meek, deferential, humbling himself a little so that he could try to make some sort of friendly overture, a first plea for mercy as we stepped off the scales.

I try him early with a couple of jabs to the body, nothing with too much meat, just little testers, but he’s withering already and I know that this won’t take long. Roger, my brother, yells at me from the corner, although he hardly needs to raise his voice in a place like this.

‘You see it, you see it, right? You see it.’

I had seen it, the space to step into for the kill. I feint for the body, and as he covers up again, I whip my fist up and away until it slams into the place where the hard part of his jaw and the soft skin meet, an uppercut and a hook all in one.

And I know, as I let my hands go and I land that final flurry of punches and Cunningham falls at my feet, I know that back home in Ireland the news of my thirtieth professional victory will barely register, nothing more than a convenient space-filler along the side of whatever happens to be the main story of the day.

Outside on Times Square, life goes on.

LIMERICK

As a kid, I never wanted to be a world champion.

My runner slips on the concrete as I try to force my hand through the final few inches so that the glove fits snugly. A small circle has already formed outside our family’s trailer in London.

‘Can I be Rocky?’

‘You were Rocky the last time. You have to be Creed this time. Or you can be the Russian.’

‘I don’t like Creed or the Russian. I want to be Rocky.’

I always found this a bit of a dilemma before I was old enough to even appreciate what the word meant: it’s hard to pretend to be somebody when your heart is not in it, but at the same time, you still don’t really want to get punched in the face.

If you had to fight one of the Lee brothers, I was the one that you wanted to be in against when the spaces between the twenty or so trailers and caravans that made up the Bow Triangle transformed into our Caesar’s Palace for an hour, or for however long it took for one of us to accidentally end up with a black eye or the first signs of a bloodied nose to start trickling down towards the upper lip. If you took one look at me between the ages of seven and twelve, you’d have fancied your chances. I was short and I was heavy; I wasn’t a boxer, but I was a fighter.

My eyes are filling as my brother Ned catches me cleanly again, not in the slightest bit concerned about the six-year age advantage that he holds over me; man against boy, in every sense. I blink the tears away as quickly as I can. I don’t want anybody to notice, even though they’ve all seen me cry before, and I want to be able to see his next shot so that I can get out of its way. Too late.

I keep walking forward, trying to keep Ned honest with punches of my own but taking each of his in return. I paw at my own face, like a boxer, wiping away whatever evidence there is of this latest hiding before any fresh marks can accumulate.

‘Stop that. Ned! What are you doing? Leave the child alone and put the gloves away.’

My mam, Ann, hears the commotion – the ooohs and the aaahs of our friends that have gathered around to watch – and leans her head out of the caravan to ring the final bell for today; Ned wins on points by a distance as per usual, but I was so stubborn, I would never quit.

When I fought Ned it was always the main event – not because it was the fight that everyone wanted to see, but because when we were done, that would be the fighting over for the day. There might be a group of ten or twenty hanging around the trailers on any given afternoon and we’d close over the gate and everyone would have their go, sparring against each other, sparring against us, but most days it would wind up with me taking a bit of a schooling at Ned’s hands, and that would be the end of it all.

I was thirteen, maybe fourteen, the last time that we fought. Ned had just got married, and a lot of our family and friends were still around. It was his idea.

‘Come on, Andy, let’s put on the gloves and we’ll give it a go for a few minutes.’

There’s a tiny bit of hesitation, from me rather than from him. It’s been a while since he’s boxed properly or even trained; not that he’s gotten out of shape, or anything like that, nor has the hard-wired talent that made him one of the best amateurs in London, in the UK, for years suddenly short-circuited. I’m still a stubby little fighter, but Repton Boxing Club is like a second home to me at this stage, and I’m down there more nights of the week than I’m not. I’m fitter and stronger than the nine-year-old that he was able to boss around at will but maybe he doesn’t realise that.

Maybe he does because, after all, it’s still a man in his early twenties fighting against a teenager. Even on my best day, I still wouldn’t beat him but the first time we trade, maybe the second, he knows the gap is closing. I’m putting it up to him. He knows I’m coming.

‘Ah, that’ll do you now, take the gloves off there.’

Mushy, my eldest brother – his name is Tommy but we all call him Mushy – was a very good fighter when he was growing up, but Ned was a boxer in the truest sense of the word. The letters kept coming to the site, even after he’d given up, trying to coax him into camps for the English national team in the hope that he would try to qualify for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. He was gone from boxing at that stage though and he never went back.

There was another letter:

A winner never quits and a quitter never wins.

Best of luck, Ned,

Reggie Kray

I want to be like Ned and like Mushy. We go to watch them box in York Hall, or sometimes at the weekend, we’ll squeeze into the back of the car, elbows and knees stacked like a game of Tetris, and we’ll drive out of London, to Kent or somewhere, to watch them box in a little hall where everything inside is coloured different shades of brown and it smells a bit like old cigarettes. Ned and Mushy always win.

I don’t know anything about Repton, except that it’s the place where they go to train and that’s a cool thing that they’re very proud to tell people.

‘I’m a boxer. I box for Repton.’

Repton is where the good boxers go, they tell me as they put pads on their hands and get me to hit them as hard as I can. Don’t move your feet. Keep your arm straight. Hit me. Good. Again. Hit me harder. Repton is for champions, they tell me. Repton is for winners. When you’re a little bit bigger and you start training, you’ll go to Repton.

Sometimes my dad, Tom, goes down to the club to watch Ned and Mushy train, and I’m allowed to go with him. There must be a lot of champions and winners because all of their posters and photographs are stuck to the wall, so many that you can’t even see if the yellow paint has peeled away or count the white tiles. The black masking tape that’s holding them in place is starting to come unstuck so that if somebody opens the door they start to dance in the breeze. National champion. Olympic Games. Professional debut. World champion. I watch them but they never fall off.

We stand around the sides because if we stand anywhere else, we’ll be in someone’s way. It’s probably the biggest room I’ve ever been in, like a giant cave, but there isn’t an inch to move. My dad talks to all the other dads while I watch Ned and Mushy, follow them with my eyes around the hall as they move from the skipping rope to the mirror to the punchbag to the pads. It’s a funny place. The other dads stand there smoking their cigarettes, using the end of one to light another, and they all make jokes that I don’t understand. There’s always someone laughing. Someone cursing. Sometimes it sounds like they’re angry when they’re shouting at each other but they’re not, they’re only messing. A few of the dads stand out – they come in with big bags on their shoulders and everyone knows them because they always have nice coats or music tapes or videos in the bag and people want to buy them.

Ned and Mushy go to Repton two or three times a week but I’m only allowed to go once, on a Sunday, because I’m only seven. A man called Mick teaches me and the other children to keep our hands up so nobody can hit us, to keep our feet moving so nobody can catch us.

The older I get, the more I understand about Repton, and about how so many of the people who come through its doors have a past that they’d rather forget about, and maybe a future that they don’t even realise yet. When people talk about Reggie Kray, I know who he is now; how Tony Burns, the head coach in Repton, is friends with one half of the East End’s most notorious gangster twins; how Reggie and his twin brother Ronnie used to come to the gym sometimes and train. Ned is one of Tony’s stars so one day, when Tony is going to prison to visit Reggie, Ned goes too.

Once you meet Tony, you never forget him. He’s been in Repton forever, because he knows that for most young kids, like Ned, like Mushy, like me, the East End is one door after another being slammed in their faces until there’s only two options left: go make trouble, or learn to box. Tony expects you to be on time, to train hard, to respect the green vest when you put it on. To win.

That’s the Repton way. That’s in my head all day as I get ready for my first-ever fight, carrying the weight of a hardened world title contender on my eleven-year-old shoulders. I’m in maths class. Maybe it’s geography. Or history. I don’t know, I don’t care, although I’d welcome the distraction if only I could focus for long enough. The only sums I’m worried about are the ones that will be on the referee’s card later tonight, whether the number of punches I’ve landed is greater than,