Nigel Benn (8 page)

I really used to give it to them. I had power. If people hated me for it, I didn’t care. I knew I was getting out of the Army soon. When they were under my control, the detainees had to march to dinner with me and I would make them perform mundane tasks like picking up litter. When the RSM wasn’t in camp, I was in charge and that felt really great.

The job itself was a doddle. As the RP you only had to keep order in camp, so there was lots of free time and you were excused from normal duties and exercises which other soldiers had to do. I was also able to sneak women into my bedroom because now I was in the privileged position of having a room to myself and not having to share with other squaddies. Furthermore, there was nobody to arrest me unless I did something seriously wrong.

For about six months of my posting, I had an Irish girlfriend called Karen. She was a fiery lass, the way I liked them. I met her at a camp disco but hadn’t realised until I became an RP that all women allowed in camp had to be vetted. Some of them had been around for nearly ten years and we had all sorts of nicknames for some of these old pot-boilers. One group from Coleraine were known as the Coleraine Commandos. They used to think I looked like Leroy from
Fame
. Karen was nice looking but some of them, well, you had to be really under the weather or pull a sack over their head before you did anything. Fortunately, I could
break the rules and my social life flourished.

However, there was another side to socialising with women, a much more dangerous and sinister aspect. Vetting was not just a formality but an essential safeguard. There had been a number of instances where women had lured soldiers off base and then left them to the mercy of IRA killers. I could have been a victim myself. On one date, I met a girl off base and suddenly broke into a sweat, thinking, ‘What am I doing? I don’t know this girl at all. I know nothing of her background. Am I being set up?’ I walked away from our tryst. You just never knew.

It’s always the silly things that catch you out in life. While I avoided detection when sneaking women into my room, I was unceremoniously ‘sacked’ from my cushy number over a daft prank. I ‘borrowed’ a pair of military handcuffs and took them out of camp on a visit to England. On arrival at Heathrow Airport, I chained my mate to some railings. I don’t know why I did it, for a laugh I guess. He was locked up in the pouring rain and left there for an hour, while I toured the periphery roads.

The story of this dastardly deed got back to camp fairly quickly — in fact, all was revealed before my return. The RSM, who is God when it comes to anything like this, ordered an inventory to be taken. If anything is missing you answer to him and if it can’t be accounted for, ass gets kicked. My brother John telephoned me in London and I was ordered to return the handcuffs immediately. On my return, I was relieved of my duties as an RP
and sent back to Z Company.

I left the Army in January 1985 with some misgivings and an excellent reference. I’d served four years and 265 days. The CO personally gave me a glowing report. He said I had been a fine soldier and that I had excelled in the field of sport. He described me as a natural athlete, good at rugby and boxing and said my conduct had been exemplary. I had good motivation and was an asset to the regiment. My departure, he emphasised at the bottom of the reference, would be a sad loss to the battalion. His words of praise, which most of my friends thought applied to somebody else, worked a treat in getting me a job in a security firm.

I came out of the Army a man. In spite of that, there were problems adjusting to civilian life. At first I went back to Mum and Dad’s to sort things out and decide what I wanted do. But civvy life was not what I expected and I became depressed. While it had been good leaving the Army, I wasn’t aware of the tremendous impact it had made on me. After all, I had spent nearly a quarter of my life as a soldier.

I had never wanted to make the Army a career but it was difficult leaving my mates and the security of the regiment. All of a sudden, I was deprived of the comradeship of guys who’d been around me for almost five years. I was on my own. It was going to be difficult taking that big step back to suburbia.

Habits die hard. With my training in Northern
Ireland etched into my memory, I was always up and alert early in the morning. It took me about three months to come back down to some form of normality. Every morning I would be checking my car, feeling under the wheel arches, looking everywhere. In fact, I am still in the habit of doing this. Even now I keep alert in case someone is following me and I still observe precautions like not stopping too close to another car, to allow enough room to drive off in the event of an emergency.

Although the Army offered a good life and very good experience, I needed something else. However successful my boxing career had been, I had no plans to continue fighting after I left. It had served a very useful purpose and that was now at an end.

The best consolation prize for me after leaving the Army was returning to Mary. We could now be together on a permanent basis. We moved into a flat in Stanley Road, Ilford. I got engaged to her at 21 but both parents were against us committing ourselves at such a young age. She was intelligent and fun to be with, although we would argue over stupid things. While living with Mary, I suffered from my enduring problem — my inability to keep my dick in my pants. I was still partying and trying to find girls without realising I already had the best girl on the planet.

My love affair with uniforms had not ended. I simply exchanged my army fatigues for the regulation grey of a security company. One of the first sites I guarded was a green field at Roding in
Redbridge. It was being developed into Roding Hospital. I never believed that, years later, I would be going there for private treatment after defending my WBC super-middleweight title against Henry Wharton. The hours I worked there were long and tedious, up to 15 hours a day.

At Redbridge, various checkpoints were positioned around the site and I had to walk to each of them at given times during my shift and clock-on with a key. As a short-cut, I ripped off all the checkpoints from their posts, labelled them and then clocked on, one after the other without having to walk around. Having done that, I suddenly came to the worrying conclusion that I needed to be Speedy Gonzales and faster than Superman to have done the rounds so quickly. Fortunately, my clocking-on had not registered the time and I got away with it, unlike my friend who was caught half asleep with his feet up on the table and wearing no uniform. He was instantly sacked.

There was no shortage of security work for someone who had served in Northern Ireland and I kept changing jobs in the hope of finding one that I would really like. The only job I got turned down for was at Liberty’s in the West End of London.

For several weeks I worked as a store detective at Woolworth’s in their Dalston branch and made the terrible mistake of accusing an innocent man of shoplifting. I saw a guy put what I thought was an object in his shoe. I’d been watching him for a long time because his actions had aroused my suspicion. But when I had apprehended him, the terrible truth dawned on me that I’d made a mistake. He was
rightly furious.

‘You’re a blood brother, man,’ he protested. ‘No, I never took nothing. I could take you to court, man. What the fuck are you doing?’ I felt really bad and wondered what the hell was I doing. But then everyone can make mistakes.

Working long and staggered shifts took its toll on me. I was always knackered, always falling asleep and matters were coming to a head with Mary. We were quarrelling too much and too often. Sometimes I came home dog tired at 8.00am. Mary had been studying for an economics degree and our lifestyle was being messed up by the hours I worked. I was getting cheesed off with my job and my life. After the Army, I wanted some red-carpet treatment, not to be part of a slave labour brigade. I also decided that I would not be making a career in security. I had enjoyed being back in uniform, it felt like being back in the Army, but the last thing I wanted was to be a security guard for the rest of my life and have nothing to show for it.

With all this going on and my insecurities regarding Mary becoming worse, I reached a turning point in my life. It came about as a result of a security van being short of a guard. I was asked to stand in. That meant riding in the back of an armoured transit van with responsibility for over £½ million in cash. Can you imagine the temptation of sitting on that amount of loot while being paid peanuts and realising that you would never amass such a fortune guarding it? I thought ‘Oh, mate, I really need this, don’t I?’ I could feel it. ‘Look at this lovely money. God, wouldn’t I like it
to be my money. Should I try to take it?’

A little bit of rationalisation crept in as I toyed with the thought of acquiring this fortune. The money was bound to be insured so who would I be hurting? Certainly not the security firm, nor the people for whom it was destined. So why not?

I had a mate who knew all about these things. If I needed anybody to help me it would be him. With that, I began working on my blueprint for robbing the security van of £½ million.

At that time, I owned a beige Triumph car and used it for doing a recce of the van’s journey. I knew that the van driver would not be informed of his route until he was about to set off with the money. That procedure was introduced to make it difficult for an insider to tip off accomplices planning to rob the vehicle. Obviously, I wasn’t the first to be tempted.

My role in this robbery would be to pass over the money after a gun was held to my head. I had friends who could provide us with shooters so that was no problem either. By the time I had everything lined up to execute the plan, however, I began to have second thoughts. All the brainwashing from Dad about being honest and leading a decent life started to nag at me. On the other hand, everything had been prepared for me to go ahead with the plan and, with luck, live the life of Riley after its successful completion. But what if it all went wrong? Eight to ten years behind bars would take away my youth for ever. And what about Mary?

I bottled out. When it came to doing it and
everything was in place — I had only to name the date — I couldn’t go through with it. This was not how I wanted to live my life. I decided then that I wanted to make an honest living. I didn’t want a criminal record. My parents wanted to be proud of me and I did not want to disappoint them. That’s what they had strived for all their lives and one moment of madness like this could have ruined everything.

That still left me with a problem. I did not want to continue with the long hours and little pay as a security guard. My life was going nowhere. The urge to do something different was bringing me closer to my destiny — fighting. West Ham boxing club beckoned but before I became seriously involved as an amateur, I took part in a prize fight at Lacy Ladies in Seven Kings, east London, which I used to think was the best soul club in England.

I had never been to a prize fight before, nor had it ever occurred to me to attempt prize fighting. My opponent was a guy called Lloyd who thought he was the English version of Marvin Hagler. Wrong — I was! The purse was £150, the biggest I had ever got. People used to go there to settle their differences. I had gone there only to watch but then thought it might be a good way to earn some cash. Lloyd was their local boy and had already dispatched several challengers. ‘Any more challengers?’ he asked cockily.

Lloyd was in his late 30s and when I stepped into the makeshift ring, wearing just my jeans, he told me he was going to beat me up. I had nothing
to lose and he didn’t frighten me but he tried to laugh at me. He had seen big guys come and go and gave me lots of mouth. The audience were busily exchanging bets — some were actually backing me — or watching Lloyd attempt a psychological victory before punching me to the ground, or so he thought. I murdered him. I did two rounds with him and knocked him out. He said I was lucky. I said, ‘Ta-ta,’ took the money and left.

W
est Ham Amateur Boxing Club in east London was a famous breeding ground for boxers. Loads of the big names came from that stable, including my trainer Jimmy Tibbs. I first went there for social reasons when I was still living with Mary. Roy Andre was my sparring partner and Mark Kaylor, the British and Commonwealth Middleweight champion whom Jimmy had trained, had just left. It was probably one of the best amateur boxing clubs around at the time. It had produced people like Terry Spinks (British Featherweight Champion and Olympic Gold Medallist), Ron Barton (British Light Heavyweight Champion), and Billy Walker.

When I joined, I had to see Dave Woodward and was put into the ring to show the club members what I could do. I said nothing about my army experience, letting them decide if I was good enough. I enjoyed watching them try to figure me out. There was no doubt they were impressed with my performance but you could see them thinking they had a rough diamond here.

Dave Woodward became my trainer but although I only wanted to fight on an amateur basis, everything was leading up to me becoming professional. Not least because I was beating everybody I fought.

Against club predictions, I beat my sparring partner Roy Andre. He had knocked me down once during the fight, blacking me out — the only time it had ever happened to me. But I got up again and everyone thought I had slipped. Sure I slipped, on to his right hand! From there I put everything I had into the fight and stopped him in the second or third round.

My most traumatic fight in amateur boxing was against Rod Douglas. That was the first time I had ever lost a fight. He was a really powerful guy and we punched each other from pillar to post. When he beat me, I cried my eyes out for a year. I couldn’t handle defeat, not after my record.

Although I had lost on points against Douglas, I considered myself the better fighter. Both of us had been on the amateur circuit and had won all our other fights. I had to make 10st 6lb which was a pretty hard thing to do. Sometimes all you could eat at night was a lemon to drain you out. Rod Douglas was the more experienced boxer and I felt there was some favouritism shown towards him. However, that didn’t lessen the depression I felt at losing. Like me, he came from the East End of London but he had been fighting as an amateur since he was 13.

After the fight, I was quite sore and felt like giving in. If I couldn’t beat him there was not much
point in carrying on. I was in such bad shape I couldn’t even eat properly. Soon after the fight, Mary bought us some fish and chips but the inside of my mouth was all cut up and my tongue was slit at both sides. Each time I tried to eat chips, salt entered my wounds and trying to eat became unbearable. All I could do was gingerly roll some of the food around in my mouth.

For a whole year, my brother Dermot mercilessly needled me about losing the fight. He even called me Rod. ‘Go on, Rod,’ he would say, trying to wind me up further. Losing to Rod Douglas was so devastating that it nearly spelt the end of my boxing career. I wanted to retire. That was it. I never wanted to box again. Then, because of all the riling from Mark, combined with the grit and determination which had been instilled into me in the Army, I renewed my efforts and began training like a champion. I decided I would beat Douglas and settle the score.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Mary and I were having difficulties with our relationship. My immaturity was much to blame and although I may have deserved it, I was annihilated when Mary called it a day. She did it in such a normal and controlled manner that I couldn’t believe what was happening. Looking back on it now I can see why our parents were against us getting engaged. We were too young and had our own insecurities and problems to sort out before entering into a mature and adult relationship. Love alone, and there was plenty of that, would not make things work for us.

I really lost it when we broke up. After that, any time I saw Mary at a club or disco, my heart would skip a beat. It took more than a year to get over her. She was such a decent girl but she couldn’t cope with my paranoia and insecurities. Of course, the fact that she ended the relationship only served to increase my nightmare and I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

While this drama was unfolding, my younger brother Anthony was going out with a girl called Joanne Crowley, a very pretty girl, whom I was told had an older sister called Sharron. I was keen to see what she looked like and we met outside The Plough pub in Ilford. It was May 1985, three months before Sharron’s seventeenth birthday. I thought she was really attractive and nice and we met up again at Bentley’s nightclub in Canning Town. After that, we began dating almost immediately.

As with the other girls who had been special in my life, my relationship with Sharron blossomed. For the first six months we could hardly let go of one another. We were so close and loving. Times were hard. I had no job and very little money and I was training as a fighter and had quit the flat which Mary and I shared. Even so, there was laughter in our lives.

Just five weeks after we met, Sharron told me she was pregnant. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Let’s go for it.’

We were both so happy. I stayed with Sharron at her mum’s house for a while and later we lived in a hostel while waiting for a council flat. In those days my ambitions were more down to earth. I
thought if I could afford to buy us a terraced house, I would be fulfilled.

More people had begun to take notice of me as an amateur and my training was going well. I was putting in a lot of effort to face up to Rod Douglas and this time there would be no doubt about the outcome. Brian Lynch had taken over as my trainer and I thought he was the bee’s knees. He was a jeweller who had been a Thames boatman and PE teacher and his approach to training was unorthodox, which attracted me to him in the first place.

My chance to even the score with Douglas came nearly a year after our first fight. We met for the ABA London division, part of the ABA national championship in 1986. This time it was a barn burner. Everyone came to watch. York Hall in Bethnal Green, where the fight was staged, was packed. Nobody who was on the amateur boxing circuit wanted to miss this fight. Around this time, I had told my brother John that the direction I wanted to take was now quite clear. I had regained my confidence and set my eyes on a fresh target. I would become the ABA champion and, from there, turn professional and become world champion.

John was amazed at how much I had progressed through the amateur ranks. In spite of that, he still thought my ambitious predictions were a little too optimistic. Even so, he was impressed by the enormous increase in my strength and power. As I progressed up the scale, boxing commentators who were conversant with top professional fighters around the world, began
commenting on my power, speed and accuracy. They said it was as impressive as anything they had seen from Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler and George Foreman. When you’re coming up the ranks, that’s what you want to hear!

My mental attitude had also changed. I had set my sights on turning professional as soon as I had won the ABA nationals. I saw no future in getting hit for nothing. It would be madness to continue putting your body at risk for the sake of a hobby. Why get your head punched in for a trophy?

Brian Lynch trained me for the Douglas fight and put me through a hard routine, just like I had been used to in the Army.

I’ve said in the past that if you have a talent, exploit it to the full, and I was well aware that God had blessed me with the ability to fight. Steve Davis, the snooker player, was born to pot balls, Maradona to score goals and Nigel Benn to kick ass.

When I stepped into the ring with Douglas I instinctively knew I would beat him. I was as nervous as hell — after all, here I was fighting the same person in the same place where he had defeated me last time. But nervous adrenalin helped and it fed on the fact that the place was packed out. I’d put a lot in to win this fight and I was more hungry and more determined than before. Apart from that, I had done some growing up. We eye-balled each other and this time I had the eye of the tiger.

The last time we had been in the ring together,
his greater experience in amateur boxing was a decisive factor. Not this time. I exploded,
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
I had him down in the first round and again in the second or third. By the end of the fight I had clearly beaten him on points, in spite of the fact that he had been favourite. I then went on to beat Johnny Melfah in a further elimination round before going on to win the 1986 ABA national boxing championship cup.

My victory win put me in line to represent Britain in the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh the same year but I was kicked out of the England squad by the ABA for allegedly missing the first training session. It seems the ABA favoured Rod Douglas in spite of my win and he was chosen to box for Britain and won the gold medal. I will never forgive the ABA for what it did to me. I felt cheated and humiliated by their decision. That gold should have been mine

Since becoming world champion, the ABA asked me to participate in various events and activities but I always refused. I won’t help them now or in the future. The ABA acted like a judge and jury in a tragic case which had not come to court and in which they had no jurisdiction. They prejudged a personal issue when they had no right to do so and I shall hold that against them for as long as I live.

Sharron had given birth to our first child, Dominic, on 3 March 1986. The games were to be held in July. We were still living in one cramped room in a hostel with our young baby. We were young and inexperienced parents, having to
survive in difficult conditions. In spite of this, we made the best of things and we both loved Dominic. We now have three children and our love for them has been the greatest thing in our lives.

After beating Douglas and winning the ABA national championships, I turned professional. Douglas stayed amateur and became the ABA title holder for the fourth time, while I went on to a win a series of fights which attracted the attention of the press and public. When he saw how successful I was as a professional boxer, Rod thought he’d follow suit and turned professional under Mickey Duff. He was hoping to fight me again, this time as a professional, before his career tragically ended on 25 October 1989 after 14 undefeated fights. The referee had to stop his British middleweight title contest against Herol Graham at Wembley in the ninth round after he’d been twice battered to the canvas. Rod went home feeling OK after the fight but collapsed three hours later and was lucky his brother drove him to hospital in time for neurosurgeons to remove a blood clot from his brain. It was his twenty-fifth birthday and he spent it first on the operating table and then on a
life-support
machine in intensive care.

That is one of the risks in boxing. In fact, his experience was very similar to the tragic events surrounding Michael Watson. Rod had to learn how to talk and walk all over again.

As a boxer, I have never allowed the thought of injury to interfere with my career. If I felt that way I wouldn’t go on fighting. Tragically, I’ve seen it happen to people I like. I am very friendly with
Michael Watson and although they tried to write him off, he is still a man, still a person. He has his wits about him, he knows what is going on, it’s just that he hasn’t recovered enough yet to be able to express it as effectively as he would like.

If you are going to be a successful fighter, you’ve got to turn away from the danger of physical hurt and protect yourself as best as you can while you fight. And once you’re past it, you’ve got to know when to quit. I never wanted to be one of those fighters who keeps getting into the ring after his sell-by date. That’s when you really
can
get hurt.

I have always tried to be level-headed about boxing. It’s a question of sorting out your priorities, finding the right direction and attacking your target. As I keep saying, my army training really paid off. But long ago, when I had just started my professional career, I had already plotted my path. I said at the time that Britain had three world middleweight champions over the past 30 years. They were Randolph Turpin, Terry Downes and Alan Minter. Turpin was fighting before I was born and, having watched films of him in action, I rate him the best of the three. He could punch and he was a good boxer. Downes came second on my list because of his guts and courage and Alan Minter was third. My ambition was to top all three of them.

Brian Lynch had seen the potential in me as an amateur and I continued training with him for my professional fights, although we eventually parted company. Unfortunately, anybody who seems to
have been involved with me always wants to take full credit for my fight victories. Brian and I were very close at first but, like others, he thinks, perhaps understandably, he taught me everything, how to punch and how to fight. That is a mistake which nobody should make. I taught myself how to fight. Others helped in sharpening up my skills. No trainer ‘made’ Nigel Benn.

If anyone made me it was Mum and Dad. If trainers or managers were that good, then why haven’t they ‘made’ more Nigel Benns? That’s the question they should be addressing. Furthermore, I twice became world champion
after
I left Brian. I learned a lot about controlling my aggression and channelling my strength in the Army. It was the Army that taught me the principle that force without judgement crashes by its own weight.

Having said that, I would not take away from the fact that Brian was a solid and good trainer. When I first began training with him, the ABA would not give him a coaching badge and West Ham club also turned him down so I trained in secret. Because of that, Brian had to function as my corner man in the crowd and he devised special signals which he would relay to me like a tick-tack man on a racecourse.

After I turned professional, however, he took out a trainer’s licence and hired his own gym. We restricted sparring because there was little point in getting battered before a fight, and we also got rid of the old-style punch bag which used to injure quite a few fighters, even breaking their hands. For punching exercises, we used a floor-to-ceiling
speedball and a swinging, lightweight sandbag. I would also shadow-box holding a 15lb barbell in each hand and run five to six miles a day, as well as play squash and do vigorous body-stretching exercises.