Wild Thing (17 page)

Trouble at Ripples didn’t come exclusively from football hooligans; the West End provided combatants from all four corners of the globe. Two Greek guys with a serious attitude problem turned up one night. They were loud, abusive and improperly dressed, so we refused them entry. Instead of walking away, they stood right next to Freddie and began mimicking him. He jabbed one of the men in the head, sending him flying across the pavement into a parked car. I punched the other in the mouth, and he slumped to the floor. I grabbed the man I had struck and dragged him over the road to a pub, where I left him propping up a wall. His friend had recovered from Freddie’s jab and started shouting about being a karate expert and how we were now both going to die. The man began prancing about in front of us, waving his arms and making whooping noises. He then threw a kick at me. I feigned a block, and when he responded by lunging forward, I knocked him to the ground with a right hook. ‘Get up, you useless cunt,’ I said. ‘You aren’t going to kill anybody but yourself.’ The man jumped up and ran down the street screaming threats and insults. I chased him, and when he noticed that I was in hot pursuit, he lay on the ground and crawled under a parked car. There was quite a lengthy queue of people waiting to get into a nearby cinema, and they were all laughing at the man. When I went to one side of the car, he would drag himself to the other to avoid me. I could have crawled underneath the vehicle and caught him, but I didn’t fancy getting covered in muck for a fool. Tired of the game, I eventually walked back to the club. My hand was extremely swollen, so I attended the local accident-and-emergency department after work to have it X-rayed. Every time I bent my hand towards or away from me, a sharp needle of pain shot up my arm. The X-ray results confirmed my worst fears; I had a hairline fracture of the hand. My fight with McLean, which was only a few weeks away, had been placed in jeopardy.

In my heart I knew it couldn’t go ahead, but others told me that the fracture would heal in time for the fight. In the end it didn’t matter who was right and who was wrong, because shortly afterwards my volatile temper destroyed any hope of the fight taking place. While I was working at the Room at the Top one evening, a swarthy-looking man kept staring intently at me. He was tall, stocky, in his late 20s and had a badly broken nose. His battered features gave away the fact that he was certainly no stranger to violence. I pointed the man out to Peter and said that if he kept staring at me, I was going to clump him. The man smirked at me, wandered over to the bar and deliberately pushed into a group of customers who were waiting to be served. The people who’d been shoved out of the way quite rightly took exception to the man’s behaviour and began calling to staff to intervene. I saw no point in debating the moron’s actions with him. It was clear that he had come into the club looking for trouble, and I was all for giving the customers what they wanted. One of the other doormen got to the man first and tried to calm the situation down. His pleas fell on deaf ears, so he asked the man to leave. For a moment the man stood motionless, but then he lashed out. A large ring that he was wearing caught the unsuspecting doorman and cut him deeply under his eye. I spun the man around to face me and smashed my head into his nose as hard as I could. Blood splashed across his face before he fell to the floor. Seeing the damage he had inflicted on a colleague, I decided to educate him about the use of unnecessary violence. I picked his limp body up and smashed it against a wall before dragging him away from the bar and into the manager’s office. Once inside I sat astride the man and battered his face with my fists. Gordon, the assistant manager, came in and tried to drag me off him, but I was insane with rage.

When I had finished, I stood up and saw that the walls of the office were spattered with blood and my bandaged hand was also soaked in it. ‘You’ve fucking killed him, Lew,’ one of the door staff said. ‘He’s fucking dead.’ Having calmed down, panic set in. The man lay awkwardly on the floor. His face, a mask of blood, was unrecognisable. I too thought that I might have killed him. I unwrapped the blood-soaked bandage from my hand, disposed of it in a bin and then hid in a storeroom at the rear of the main bar. The music in the club had been turned off, and I could hear people saying that an ambulance had arrived. I knew it would only be a matter of time before the police were informed of the incident and they too would appear on the scene, no doubt looking for somebody to arrest. After a few minutes I heard police officers instructing one another to search everywhere. I assumed that they had established that a doorman was involved and that he might still be on the premises, so I got out of the storeroom, opened a fire-exit door, walked to Ilford High Street and hailed the first taxi that I saw.

That night I received numerous calls from people telling me that the man had suffered brain damage, was in a coma or dead. I know from experience that people are prone to exaggeration, but it was fair to assume the guy was at least seriously injured. There was no point going on the run – I had the children’s welfare to consider. I would have to front it out and hope that the man pulled through. I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep much that night. The following morning Peter telephoned and asked me to meet him. ‘It’s nothing to do with me, Lew,’ he said, ‘but that guy is in a bad way and the club owner Mr Bednash has said he cannot allow you back in as either a customer or an employee.’ I knew the police would give the management grief if they tried to defend my actions, so out of respect for my fellow doormen and Mr Bednash, who had helped me in my time of need, I said I would comply with anything that was asked of me.

Peter said that he had warned Mr Bednash that if my exclusion was permanent, all of the villains and riff-raff that I had ejected and barred from the club would return. Before I had started work at the venue, there had been a lot of undesirables going in causing trouble, and little had been done about it. I had weeded most of them out and restored order. To highlight his point, Peter reminded Mr Bednash of an incident involving Roy Shaw. One night Shaw had gone into the club, and the manager, who was aware of his reputation, had said he wanted him to leave. The door staff were reluctant to ask Shaw to go, so the police were called. In fairness to Shaw he hadn’t done anything wrong; he had merely popped into the club to socialise. The police, also aware of Shaw’s reputation, turned up in force. When they marched into the club, Shaw was at the bar sipping a coke. The officers lined up in front of Shaw and asked him to leave. ‘Fuck off, I’ll leave when I’ve finished,’ Shaw replied.

A senior officer stepped forward and told his men that he would deal with the situation. ‘I’m asking you to leave,’ he said to Shaw in his sternest voice.

‘And I’m telling you to fuck off and get back in line,’ Shaw replied.

The officer looked nervously at Shaw and said to his men, ‘We will give him a few minutes to finish his drink.’ Shaw started laughing and began walking around the club. The officers followed him in single file, but not one dared to touch him. Everybody in the club was laughing, except for the police. Eventually Shaw got bored of the game, finished his drink and walked out.

Upon reflection Mr Bednash decided that my exile would not be permanent. I could, he said, return to the club when the dust had settled concerning the badly injured man. The following day I was told by a reliable source that the man had suffered swelling of the brain and remained in a comatose state. I was pleased that some of the earlier, more dramatic, reports were wrong. I was also informed that the police were looking for me so it would be in my best interests to keep a low profile.

I drove to a hospital in east London and had my hand, which was by now extremely swollen and painful, X-rayed again. The hairline fracture I had sustained fighting the Greeks at Ripples had now become almost a clean break. There was no way I could fight McLean in this condition, so, after consulting his manager, it was agreed that the fight would be postponed until a later date. Two weeks after I had knocked the man out at the Room at the Top he regained consciousness. Fortunately he suffered from temporary memory loss and told police that he did not wish to complain or make a statement as he had no recollection of the incident. It turned out that he was a Portuguese merchant seaman whose ship had been docked at Custom House near Canning Town. The ship had since left without him. Thankfully he too left the country as soon as he was well enough to travel and I never saw him again.

The venue had been booked, the publicity posters had been printed and nearly all of the tickets had been sold for the McLean fight, so they had to find a replacement opponent to fight him. Solly Francis, a Geordie who worked with me at the Room at the Top, claimed he had beaten McLean in a bar-room brawl a few years earlier. Francis was about 15 st., well built, loud, brash and cocky. He wasn’t a bad doorman, but he certainly couldn’t box. I didn’t know if Francis was being honest about the outcome of any altercation with McLean, but there had definitely been some sort of problem between the two, and the black blood of animosity had continued to flow.

McLean’s people approached Francis and offered him the opportunity to fight their man in my place. Francis had already been booked to fight at the Rainbow on the same bill as me and so was already in training. ‘I’ll fight the mug,’ Francis said as he accepted the challenge. He then started boasting to people about how he was going to punish McLean.

When I next met Francis, he started messing about, sparring with me and saying he could beat McLean and me together. I threw a half-hearted jab back at him and, to my amazement, his legs buckled. Everyone was laughing, saying don’t put any money on Francis, he hasn’t got a chance. When Peter and I went to watch the fight, there were no surprises. Sitting on a raised stage just three rows back from the ring, I said to Peter, ‘When McLean hits him on the chin, it’s over.’ As soon as the bell rang, Francis head-butted McLean, which cut his eye. He then brought his knee up between McLean’s legs and the giant doubled over in pain. To my amazement Francis stepped back and started laughing, taunting his formidable opponent. When McLean raised his head, he had murder in his eyes. I knew Francis was doomed. McLean roared like a wounded beast and bulldozed Francis back into the ropes. Seconds later Francis lay motionless on the canvas. McLean raised his foot above his head as if he were going to stamp on him, but then shook his head and walked away. That was the last time I ever saw Francis; he never came back to work or showed his face around the clubs again.

To make up for the nights I had lost at the Room at the Top, I went to work full-time at Ripples. I was pleased to get away from Ilford. I had enjoyed my time there, but I was in need of a change of scenery. Familiarity and boredom make you less aware of who and what is going on around you. Working on the door in that frame of mind is bound to get you imprisoned, badly injured or killed. I knew that it was time for me to move on, sharpen myself up both physically and mentally and drop any bad habits I had adopted. I knew I could always return if things didn’t work out elsewhere.

 

AFTER HIS VICTORY OVER MCLEAN ROY SHAW KNEW THAT PEOPLE WERE
unlikely to place a bet on him losing the rematch, so he wagered approximately £12,000 of his own money on Lenny McLean beating him. The much-hyped second fight was staged at the same venue as the first, Cinatras in Croydon. McLean entered the ring looking sharper and much fitter than he had at his first fight with Shaw. When the bell went to signal the start of round one, McLean steamed into Shaw, hammering him to the canvas. Shaw got to his feet, only to be knocked down again. McLean, who appeared to lose control, began stamping on Shaw’s head. Dazed but unbeaten, Shaw got to his feet, only to be knocked clean through the ropes into row B of the audience, where he remained. Shaw later told Jon Hotten that McLean hadn’t knocked him out of the ring; he had in fact fallen out and remained in row B so that he could collect his winnings. ‘He hit me, I went down and he was jumping on me,’ Shaw said. ‘I got up and my corner rang the bell, made the round short. He hit me again and I fell out the ring, so I let him have that one. Got about twenty-four grand.’

After two very lucrative encounters, both fighters had swelled their bank accounts and scored a victory. Neither could claim they were better than the other. There was only one course of action open to them: a third, even more lucrative decider would have to be arranged to find out who really was the Guv’nor. A date was set, a venue was arranged – The Rainbow in Finsbury Park, north London – and fans of unlicensed fighting lapped up the hype that Joe Pyle and others created around it. Tickets for the fight were in great demand and sold out within hours of going on sale. Graphic descriptions given by both boxers of what they intended to do to each other appeared in the newspapers and on television. On the black market the tickets began to exchange hands for three times their face value. No wonder the promoters of the fight were laughing and joking as the boxers made their way to the ring.

Shaw, who had told reporters prior to the second fight with McLean that he was retiring, looked drunk when he entered the ring. He later claimed that he had overdosed on ginseng, but it looked to me like he had been celebrating the financial success of the bout with champagne. Whatever it was he had taken or drunk, Shaw certainly didn’t look like the man I had challenged five years previously. When the bell rang, McLean launched himself at Shaw, unleashing a flurry of devastating blows. Shaw tried to move around the ring to avoid punishment, but McLean continued to club him with his giant fists until Shaw fell to the canvas and remained there. I am not sure how hard McLean hit Shaw that night, but when Shaw came around to writing his autobiography
Pretty Boy
in 2003, he had either deliberately overlooked their third and final bout or suffered a total memory loss. Whatever his reason, he failed to mention the defeat.