Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (15 page)

My style wasn’t that of a traditional boxing coach. Boxing coaches come from the old school and do ballistics stretches and other exercises that can be unsafe for regular clients who don’t have the strength or fitness to deal with them. I was teaching boxing to the general public, so I had to know how to look after them properly. Not being athletes, most people can’t be trained like boxers. Continuing with my work, I developed a system of exercise called Boxerobics
^TM
and started my classes at Dance Works on Oxford Street, another gym with a top-notch clientele. I was proud of what I was doing, because I felt that my work was not just providing me with a living, but also making a positive difference in the lives of the people who signed up to use me as their trainer. I could see for myself how they felt better physically and better about themselves psychologically as they became more fit, stronger and healthier.

Things were going very well, but I still had to do a little door work in the evenings to pay the bills. Then something fantastic happened. The media started to notice me.

Because of the high profile of the gyms where I was working, not to mention of the celebrity clients and media types who frequented those gyms, and the growing popularity of boxing training as a keep-fit method,
Time Out
did a magazine piece on me, and
Health and Fitness
magazine started to do a weekly segment on me too. Other health and leisure publications quickly followed suit. At the time, I was the only personal trainer in London doing boxing, Boxerobics
^TM
and boxing training. In fact, I was one of the very few personal trainers in London at all, as this was a profession that was then in its infancy. While some trainers were offering boxing exercises without knowing anything about boxing, and some boxing coaches were opening classes to the general public with no awareness of what ordinary health-club members can achieve and what is too dangerous for them to attempt, I was able to straddle both worlds. I discovered that I was a very good communicator, and much more articulate than I had previously thought. It didn’t seem to matter that I had dropped out of school young; I was still more than able to get my ideas across in a way that my clients could understand and appreciate.

As I was becoming well known and acquiring a healthy reputation in London and around the country, I attracted the attention of a company called Pickwick Pictures that was planning to make a fitness video with a beautiful Australian supermodel named Elle MacPherson, who went by the moniker ‘The Body’ because, it was said, she had the most perfect physique of any woman in the world. I was approached by Pickwick Pictures while I was working in the Barbican.

‘We want to make a video called
The Body Workout
, with Elle MacPherson,’ they explained, ‘and we need to have some boxing in it. We’ve heard that you are the man for boxing. Would you be interested in working on the pilot for the video?’

Even I had heard of Elle MacPherson but I tried to look unimpressed as though I worked with celebrities of her calibre all the time.

‘Perhaps. I’m quite busy. I’ll have to check my schedule.’

‘OK. Look, we’ll do some work in London and then we’ll fly you over to America and we’ll see how we get on. Does that sound good to you?’

‘Well, like I said, I’ll have to check my schedule,’ I answered, although inside I was rejoicing.

Wow. Was this really me? Paul Connolly from St Leonard’s children’s home? Was the loser, the reject, the kid whom nobody had ever loved or wanted, really being asked if he would like to work with a world-famous supermodel?

As I said, I had been approached by Pickwick Pictures because boxing had suddenly become hugely popular, but very few trainers knew how to apply boxing techniques to the prospective buyers of the video that Elle MacPherson was planning to make. I was one of the very few in the world and at that time probably the only suitable fitness expert in the United Kingdom. They needed someone who would be able to tailor-make a fitness programme for the general public that could be done at home with no supervision and no risk to anyone’s health and well-being. This was quite a demanding challenge, as the exercises that boxers have to do can cause a great deal of strain to ordinary bodies.

The pilots that I made were shown to Elle. She liked them and they were duly used in shooting
The Body Workout
video. After we had worked in London for quite a while, once they were completely happy with the product, they flew me out to Miami to make the pilot video proper. Until then I had not travelled very widely, and Miami was a tremendously exciting place for me to visit. Of all the cities in the United States, it is the most ‘Latin’, with vibrant colours and smells and sounds unlike anything I had seen or heard before.

As the pilot had gone so well, it was decided that the video would be made and marketed.
The Body Workout
was shot in New Zealand with Karen Voight, who is a very well-known trainer in America. I was supposed to be credited as the boxing expert on the video, but, when it eventually came out, my name wasn’t on the box or the credits; I watched them a few times just to make sure. This makes me wish that I had had the business knowhow in those days to realise that I needed an agent who would have taken care of my rights and career.

Still, I have all the paperwork and my involvement with
The Body Workout
video launched my career on this side of the Atlantic. I had a connection with a serious video production company and with one of the most famous supermodels on the scene. Astonishingly quickly, people seemed to know who I was and to want to know what I did. A series of newspaper and magazine articles about me and my services followed. I was invited on daytime television regularly, and my career really seemed to be taking off in a big way. The networking opportunities, as they say, were phenomenal. Today,
The Body Workout
is still one of the top-selling exercise videos of all time and I am very proud of my role in the making of it. It was a thrill to see myself featured in the
Sun
’s fitness section,
Bodyworks
, on 26 July 1994. The article went into my involvement with Elle and Pickwick Pictures in some detail:

Elle MacPherson may have the world’s most amazing body… but keeping it in shape doesn’t come easy.

So the 30-year-old supermodel, dubbed The Body, turned to British fitness expert Paul Connolly and his new boxing workout.

Aussie Elle had piled on the pounds for her role in the sizzling new movie, Sirens, but when filming finished, she needed to tone up fast for her next project, a new health and fitness video.

Paul flew out to Miami where her video was being shot to show her the ropes with his new Boxerobics workout.

Paul Connolly pulls no punches when it comes to exercise. The former boxer and fitness
instructor is creator of Boxerobics, the variation of the punchy US craze Boxercize that is fast catching on across the UK. A challenging combination of boxing moves and aerobic exercises, Boxercize originally caught the fitness world’s attention after actresses including Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher used it to tone up for film roles.

When
Health and Fitness
first reported the arrival of Boxercize in the UK it was an unsafe workout, often taught by boxers or fitness instructors with little knowledge of each other’s profession. This was where Connolly’s credentials gave him a head start. He switched from boxing to a career in fitness when an accident meant he had to give up hopes of turning professional.

The
Sun
was perhaps the most widely read of all the articles about me and my work, but it was just one among many. Success breeds success, and the more I was featured in newspapers and magazines, the more the journalists seemed to want to know. In
Time Out
in January 1994, I received a typical, enthusiastic response to what I had to offer. The article said, in part:

Former boxing champion Paul Connolly, who teaches his own rigorous system of ‘Boxerobics’
at Danceworks in London says that [great results] are accessible to anyone – so long as they do not have specific health problems and are prepared to train sufficiently hard. Boxing, combined with vigorous circuit training, is rivalled only by squash in providing the most comprehensive total-body workout. And it is particularly good for women, since speed and agility of movement prevent muscles from getting bulky…

Over and above such body-shaping benefits, the women I talked to in Connolly’s class – which is made up equally of both sexes – valued the cathartic effects of discharging pent-up anger and aggression by punching, hissing and shouting. Fatigue dissolves in minutes, they say, and is replaced by a long-lasting adrenaline ‘high’. Confidence grows too, as one’s skill and coordination improve.

I tried to stay nonchalant about the attention I was getting, because I knew that I had worked hard for it and that nothing lasts forever and that I would have to continue to work hard if I wanted things to keep going well.

But I did wonder, sometimes, if any of the people from the life that I had left behind me long before had come across the articles about me. Did Bill Starling read the
Sun
? Did Auntie Coral? They might well have done. Would they have recognised the man in the photographs as the miserable, underweight child whose life they had made so very unhappy? And, if they had, would they have cared? I didn’t know the answers to these questions, but they continued to come to me, unbidden. And what about my parents? I had no contact with either of them, but somewhere they were continuing to live their lives. Did they know that I was doing OK, despite them? Did they care?

F
LYING
H
IGH

I
must have inherited the Irish gift of the gab because the important people I was meeting now all seemed to like me, and to want to hear what I had to say, particularly my views on and input into the world of fitness. It felt good to be listened to with respect and to know that I warranted that respect, although there were often times when I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with my new surroundings.

Now that I was a known quantity with a product and a service that was fashionable, and that cutting-edge people wanted to buy, important, educated people started approaching me with requests that I write articles for boxing workouts that they were preparing for this or that magazine. It was wonderful, especially for someone like me who had spent years of his life feeling and sometimes even behaving like the sort of person most decent individuals will cross the road to avoid. At times it seemed surreal to think of myself writing for magazines and other publications that thousands of people would read, when just a few years earlier I had had to submit myself to the embarrassment of an adult literacy course, because I couldn’t even read well enough to make my way through a tabloid newspaper or figure out the signs in shop windows. I had to use spellcheckers a lot but the excitement of being able to express myself clearly in written English never wore off.

I was approached by
Cosmopolitan
magazine, probably the most influential of all the women’s magazines on the market at the time. The health and fitness editors at that time were two women, Mary Coomer and Eve Cameron, who wanted to know if I would write a regular column for their readers, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to reach a wider audience through the pages of their magazine.

Boxerobics
^TM
was suitable for clients of both sexes, but women in particular seemed to enjoy it, probably in part because it gives them the means to work some aggression out of their systems, which is something that a lot of females appreciate, having less opportunity than men to be aggressive in their daily lives. The
Cosmo
editors liked the work that I did for them and the response from the readers was very positive.

Then Mary rang me up. ‘Get yourself a passport,’ she said, ‘because we need you to start travelling with us.’

I had never travelled very much until then, and, although I was an adult, I was as wide-eyed and excited as a child to arrive in San Francisco and see the Golden Gate Bridge and all the sights. There I worked at an upmarket private health and athletics club in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was booming at the time, and there was money everywhere and lots of very well-heeled computer aficionados (or ‘geeks’, as I call them) who wanted to look buff despite their desk jobs.

I was amazed by the difference in attitude between London and San Francisco, in particular among the people working in the world of fitness, which is a competitive arena with a lot of egos involved. Back home, if I said, ‘I worked on the pilot for Elle MacPherson’s video,’ other trainers would shuffle away muttering, ‘Who the fuck does he think he is? Thinks he’s better than the rest of us, does he?’ and I would be left feeling as though I had been showing off unnecessarily. I don’t like that about the United Kingdom. One person’s success is seen to diminish the other people he knows. In America, it was different. Will Willis, one of the guys I worked with – a former Mr U.S.A. and therefore no slouch himself – saw my CV one day. ‘High five, buddy!’ Will said. ‘Elle MacPherson. Right on!’