The Met Police has an annual boxing competition for novices, called The Lafone Cup. It was named, like many old Met institutions were, for some long-dead commissioner. In 1975, I competed in it. I was not a natural pugilist. My best mate was a gifted one. He’d won the Lafone at heavy weight and was forging a promising amateur career in the Met team. As well as playing in its first rugby team. He was built like a small tank and had a face like a battered matinee idol. Think Jean-Paul Belmondo. You get the picture.
He tried to get me into it. I’d done national service in South Africa and had a squaddie’s caution about volunteering for pain and hard work. He said our chief superintendent loved the noble art and that if you were in the divisional team, you got extra time off for training. I caved.
We lived in a section house near to Hampstead Heath, with which I soon became better acquainted than I ever wanted to be, from running all over it. The team trainer was a very big, fit old PC. I say old; he was around fifty and near to retirement. He was bald as a coot, with an old cop’s simple world view. I would not have wanted to upset him. I’ll call him John.
While I was in the team, for reasons hard to believe and explain but based on a wildly mistaken identification, I became a suspect in an armed robbery. I was arrested and later interviewed by the new A10 corruption unit from Scotland Yard. It wasn’t funny at all. A10 came to see John, since my alibi was that, at the time of the robbery, I had been running around the Heath with the team.
After they’d seen him, John put my mind at rest. Of all his team, he’d told them, I was the least likely to have taken part in an armed robbery. I didn’t know quite how to take this but thanked him. Eventually my name was cleared, but not before the A10 superintendent had asked me to appear in an ID parade (I declined) and he’d had to send a report to the DPP. It was a scary time. I met that superintendent in 1983 in a pub near Scotland Yard. He remembered me and laughed. He said I was the only innocent cop he’d interviewed in 1974.
I was a natural light heavyweight, but John said there were loads of light heavies in the competition who might be taller and have a better reach than me. I went down to middleweight and entered a world of pain. To get down to a weight, boxers sweat it out of them. I sweated and cut down on the beer.
By this time, I was getting into it. We trained in a gym at the back of a pub on Haverstock Hill, like the one at the Thomas a’ Becket on the Old Kent Road. The gym was used by the famous trainer, George Francis, who then trained the world light heavyweight champion, John Conteh. He also trained future British heavyweight champion Bunny Johnson and the middleweight Bunny Sterling.
I never met Conteh, but I met the other two; modest, quietly spoken men devoted to their brutal craft. One afternoon, Sterling said he would spar a few rounds with my mate, who was much bigger than him. When my pal wouldn’t keep his hands up, Sterling showed him why he should. My mate said he’d never been hit so hard or often in his life.
In the gym, we used the bags and balls and sparred in the ring in the middle of the big room. I’d never been in a ring until I went there. We wore smelly leather headguards and the big sixteen-ounce gloves. One day, there was nobody my weight to get in with me. John looked around and saw Arthur. Arthur was another big, tough old PC, who lifted weights and came to help out and stay fit. He’d done some boxing and could, as they say, bang a bit. John told me to get in with him.
I protested, since Arthur outweighed me by more than a stone. John told me not to be a ninny. Arthur smiled menacingly and said he wouldn’t hurt me. I danced warily around Arthur and we exchanged some flurries. I was hopeless, but I had some basics by then and I was fast. I hit Arthur with a lucky little jab, on his nose. He responded instinctively with a much better one on mine, with all his thirteen odd stone behind it. The big glove blotted out everything in my vision and I fell on my arse. And bled. Dear Lord, how I bled, from both nostrils.
George Francis was there and told me to get off the canvas before I made a mess. I hung over the ropes and bled some more into a bucket someone held up. George told me to come out and sit down. He rummaged in his bag of tricks and produced a little bottle. He opened it and inserted two cotton buds, which he pulled out and stuck up my hooter. It stung briefly and, like magic, the bleeding stopped.
John looked at me glumly. He said I’d have to get it fixed, or I’d never get past the first round. He got me an appointment at the Ear Nose and Throat hospital in the Grays Inn road, where they cauterised it. In the prelims I had to fight against a bloke from my own team, to get a bout and make up the card. My opponent was a judo black belt and a hard man. It was a weird contest; we’d trained together for nearly a year. We went three rounds and beat the shit out of each other. He got the points decision.
Afterwards, another friend and Met boxer took me for the first beer I’d had in weeks. He said he would have given the fight to me. He said the other man had been a bit more aggressive, which probably swung it for him, but that I was faster and much the better counter puncher. I was chuffed.
The next day, I had two blackened eyes and an egg sized bruise on the knuckles of each hand. I never boxed again. A few years ago, while experiencing sinus problems, I saw an ultrasound image of my septum. It looked like a tiny map of an Alpine pass. It delighted my ENT consultant.
My best mate carried on in the Met team and had a good run. I saw him box at a few smoky venues, watched by dodgy looking men in evening dress. I didn’t get it, but he loved it. I never saw him lose. Later, he won the European Police heavyweight title. Twice. Now, I have the hands of a feckless building labourer. He has hands like a concert pianist and he still looks like a damn’ film star.
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