Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (7 page)

Because I wanted so badly to be like Muhammad Ali, I identified with him and decided that I would do my very best to grow up to be like him in every way that I could. He became a real father figure to me, although of course our relationship was completely one-sided. We were both from the underclass – it didn’t make any difference that he was black and American and I was neither, because we were both from groups that ‘polite society’ would have preferred not to exist. He was brave, and I wanted to be as brave as him. He fought on when his jaw was broken and I decided that I would be prepared to do the same thing. He spoke out about what he believed in even when his opinions were unpopular. He was never knocked out or stopped. He never let pain stop him from doing anything. There were times when Muhammad Ali lost fights, but he was always as brave in defeat as he was gracious in victory. Whenever I was in a fight that did not seem to be going well, I would think of Muhammad Ali and I would tell him, and myself, that I would never give up. When I was hurt in the ring, I got back on my feet. When someone was rude to me or belittled me, I tried to think, What would Muhammad do? – although I rarely reacted as graciously as he would have.

Back then, Muhammad Ali was everything I wanted to be. He still is.

After years of hating school, I was finally expelled, to much relief on both sides. The teachers had been violent to me and the other kids for years, and I finally started hitting back, having decided that enough was enough and that I just didn’t want to take any more of their shit. It could have been any of the teachers, but on this particular occasion it was someone who had hit me one time too often. He came at me with the cane, and I laid into him and knocked him out. I had got to the point where I knew that I could throw punches accurately and effectively and this guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time; he also deserved what he had coming to him, which meant that I had no qualms whatsoever about giving him a serious thump. So there he was, stretched out on the floor in front of me, blood trickling from his nose and on to his clean, white cotton shirt, and his mouth and eye swelling where I had hit him. I permitted myself a little smile. It was good to see one of the teachers finally getting what he deserved.

‘You’ll pay for this, Connolly,’ he said weakly, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbing gingerly at his wounds as he struggled to his feet.

‘Fuck you,’ I said.

Unsurprisingly, I was called up before the Principal.

‘You’re out,’ he told me. ‘You can’t hit a teacher! You’re lucky that he’s not pressing charges. You’re lucky that you are not going to serve time for this.’

‘Fine by me,’ I said. And it was. At the back of my mind, the whole thing had been an exercise in the hope that I would get thrown out because I just couldn’t take it any more.

That is how I left school at fourteen, illiterate, skinny, undersized, bruised and angry. I could not even recite the months of the year. I did not know anything. Nothing at all. Of course, it didn’t matter, I felt, because I was going to be a professional boxer, and I would be able to hire other people to do whatever reading and writing needed to be done. For the time being, however, I needed something to do and I needed a way to make some money.

As they had done so many times before, my friends at the boxing club came through for me. They knew a guy called Frank who had a fruit and vegetable stand at Romford Market, and they sorted me out with a job working for him. The job was a relief after the torture of school; I liked it and, although I hadn’t been able to do maths at school, I could work out change in my head and performed my duties reasonably well.

Although I was earning money now, I was still officially a minor, and would continue living in St Leonard’s for another four years. Every evening, when it was time to go back to the home, my heart would sink.

I knew how to take care of myself, I reasoned, but I couldn’t take care of everyone. While all the children at St Leonard’s were inclined to be self-destructive, some of the kids were seriously harming themselves. Glue sniffing was rife to the extent that little effort was ever made to hide it, and equally little effort expended on stamping it out. Possibly the care workers figured out that it was probably easier for them to manage the kids when they were confused and off their heads. I remember one of the boys being rushed off in an ambulance because he had gone too far with his glue sniffing and was having trouble breathing. It must have been a terrifying experience for that particular kid, but there was no visible decline in sniffing among the solvent abusers after that. By the time the youngsters at St Leonard’s reached fifteen or sixteen, loads of them were smoking marijuana every day, but I don’t think there were any hard drugs. There were not all the drugs around then that there are now, for one thing. A little later on, a lot of the glue sniffers would graduate to heroin, which ultimately killed a large number of them. They sniffed glue to try to forget about how unhappy they were, and I am sure that this was also the reason why they took heroin when they were older. For me, violence served the same purpose. I found that I got a real adrenaline high from my bouts in the boxing ring and an even better one from my less regulated encounters on the street.

The combination of fear, deprivation, drugs and general mayhem among the inmates at St Leonard’s created a situation in which outbursts of violence among the children and teenagers were a daily occurrence, and the girls were almost as bad as the boys. I had already been carrying a knife with me for several years, and in this respect I was far from unusual. Most of the kids had weapons about their persons at any given time. They had weapons stuffed down the waistband of their trousers or in their socks. They had weapons hidden in the dormitory and all over the garden. They had weapons in their school bags. Often, when I was playing outside, I would find a knife or a bat or a sharpened screwdriver under a bush or secreted behind a drainpipe. We all wanted to be prepared for any occasion, and knowing that there was always a weapon to hand made us feel a bit more in control of our situation.

I will always be grateful for the fact that boxing gave me a way to escape from grim reality and hope for the future. Most of all, it gave me a glimpse of normal family life and, as I passed through my early teenage years, I increasingly realised that the status quo at St Leonard’s was not normal and that it was not right. The ordinary teenagers I knew from the boxing club didn’t go home to beatings and abuse, but to parents who only punished them when they had actually misbehaved, and who worried about them and cared about them and gave them food that was not just abundant but tasted good too. They even tried to encourage them, and said things like, ‘Well done, son.’

Before, my anger had been general and without focus, but now I was angry because of the childhood I had never had and because of the childhoods that were being stolen from my foster siblings at St Leonard’s still.

Most of all, I became angry with the adults at St Leonard’s, but I also became angry with the Catholic Church. Until I was fourteen, I had attended Catholic school where I had received nothing but hardship. You would go into one class and get caned for giving a smart answer or for looking out of the window, and then you would go into another and the religion teacher would tell you that violence was wrong and to love your neighbour as yourself. And then we were expected to go to confession every week and own up to our sins, in return for which we were given the usual ritual penance to pay. I didn’t know the word ‘hypocrisy’ but I definitely knew what hypocrisy looked like, and I saw it every day in the faces of the good Catholics who were supposed to be teaching us.

Fucking dirty, sanctimonious, hypocritical pricks.

Well, they would all be history when I had made it as a boxing pro. Oh yes, they would be sorry then!

My idea of becoming a professional boxer was a whole lot more than a pipe dream, because I was actually very good at it, and had been boxing competitively since I was thirteen. I was the rising star of the small club I had joined a few years before. I was not the only one. There were some seriously good boxers at the club, some of whom had won major amateur championships. One of the guys at the club, Tommy Butler, was an England boxing coach.

Because we lived in East London, we were boxing with West Ham and the East End of London. I did well. Tommy encouraged me: ‘You’ll be boxing for England, you know. You really will.’

If the teachers and the caregivers at St Leonard’s had always been my tormentors, Tommy was a hero to me. Because he was kind and looked after me and was also tough and manly and did not take shit from anyone, he gave me some idea of how a man was supposed to behave, and I think that his example and my efforts to emulate him helped me to feel protective towards the younger children in care and a bit better about myself. At any rate, I was never attracted to the idea of keeping them in line, the way Bill Starling wanted us bigger ones to do.

As I got better and better, I started to fight at regional level and won many amateur titles. That meant that I was one of the best boxers in the whole region at my weight and age, and well on my way to dominating at national level. This was a real achievement and I acknowledged it, but I still felt that I was no good because that is what I was told every day. This made me work harder. It was a constant quest to feel better about myself – a goal that was still a work in progress.

Without the hope that boxing and my dream of being like Muhammad Ali gave me, it would have been very easy for me to go the way of most of the kids in care, into alcohol and drug abuse, petty criminality and prison. Without my dream that I might be successful one day, I am pretty sure that I would be dead now. Dead, or in prison. Without my dream, most of the things that Uncle Bill and his colleague Auntie Coral said about me would probably have come true. I had learned how to hurt people – badly – but I had also learned how to be disciplined, how to train, how important it was not to abuse my body and how to respect others when they respected me. Boxing taught me how to be a gentleman. But it also trained me in the art of being the best street thug I could be.

Working on the fruit and vegetable stall was good for several reasons. First and foremost, I was not in school any more. That was already great – and, as I planned to become a professional boxer, it didn’t matter that I could not read and write. Then, because I was earning my own money now, I could largely decide what to spend it on. I mostly spent it on food. I had been hungry all my life and now I started to make up for it, and more. I was ravenous all the time. I had never been fed properly, so I had no control around food, and I was very physically active because of my boxing, so I just wanted to eat, eat, eat and then eat again. Because of the way I had been brought up, I had no idea what a balanced meal was supposed to entail so I craved the quick fix of sugar, fat, salt and grease. I used to do things like go to Marks and Spencer to buy a pint of double cream, and then open it and drink the lot outside on the street. How wonderful! It slid down my throat the way that dried-up fish fingers and bread and margarine never could. I could not get enough. I had been living on bread and margarine, fish fingers and spam all my life. I had fourteen years of that to cancel out.

I worked quite well for Frank on the stall, but my eyes were always on the goal of becoming a boxer. The job was just to earn me some money in the meantime and Frank was just a decent bloke who treated me fairly. I didn’t pay him a great deal of attention one way or another but I think that I did my best to work hard for him when I was at the market. Apart from having to go back to St Leonard’s every night, I was quite happy and things were a lot better than they had ever been for me before. I even started to dress well, by the dubious standards of the 1970s, and to take some pride in my appearance. Although I continued to be quite small for my age, I was turning into quite a handsome boy and having some better clothes made me feel good about how I looked. This was very welcome indeed. The kids from St Leonard’s were always very badly dressed, because the caregivers used to buy us the cheapest rubbish that they could find. Our clothes were provided from the stores in the home. At school we wore our uniforms and the rest of the time we wore the few clothes we had. I remember having a wardrobe with two tops and two pairs of trousers in it. We were all in the same situation. Now that I had started earning money I really enjoyed going to shops and picking out my clothes and not having to look like just one of the kids from the home. I spent some of my money on high-waist brown trousers with flares and colourful shirts and big, heavy shoes with platform soles. I wore my hair in a fashionable style and started to take more of a focused interest in girls.

I didn’t lose my virginity until I was in my later teens, which was really very late indeed by the standards of most of the kids that I knew. The local girl who had the honour of deflowering me was known as the village bike, so she was really the best person for me to lose my virginity to because she was very experienced and knew exactly what to do with a nervous kid who had never been with a woman before. If I had been with another first-timer, it probably would not have worked out as well as it did. I had been to an all-boys’ school so I didn’t have particularly refined habits around girls and I was anxious to learn more about how to talk to them and how to get them into bed. I hooked up with her at a local pub or club and one thing led to another. I said goodbye to my virginity with no regrets and determined to set about getting some more of the same. We never had a relationship but I didn’t look back after that and I went on to be quite successful with women in general. I was good-looking and very fit, both qualities that are appreciated by teenage girls.

My first real girlfriend was a gorgeous girl called Lindsey who was the daughter of a local police sergeant. I met her the way teenagers usually met – just hanging around the local shopping centres and outside McDonald’s, which was still relatively new in Great Britain and had not yet lost the shiny newness of America that it seemed to represent. We stayed together for two years. Being with Lindsey was a wonderful experience for me, not just because I had a beautiful, sexy girlfriend and my first real love, but also because her family was kind and normal and both generous and welcoming to me, even though I was a tough, Irish kid from St Leonard’s and a bit of a ruffian, to put it mildly. They used to invite me around for dinner, and I got to know Dave and Val, Lindsey’s parents, and her sister Carol. This, together with my experiences of the boxing club, taught me a bit about what life is really all about and helped to prevent me from becoming ‘institutionalised’, which is the name given to the awful, crippling mental condition that destroys the lives of so many of the kids who grow up in care without having any experience of the real world.