Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (22 page)

Of course I'd heard it all before.

The last time I saw Billy holding court, he was perched on a desk in a classroom at Hutt Valley High School talking to a group of ‘troubled' pupils — not a few of them wannabe boxers — about Life's Great Lessons. This was the special-needs class. It was a year or so after I left Epuni. I was 14 and living in a family home in Naenae, and Hutt High represented my seventh stab at a secondary education. Billy's class was where the school tended to put the problem kids, so I got shoved in there too. I was certainly no fighter — I did a bit of judo but couldn't throw a decent punch
for toffee — but I quickly grew to appreciate his style of classroom coaching: say please and thank you, remember people's names, make eye contact, remember it takes strength not to use strength. Perhaps such injunctions even then sounded like platitudes, but they came with the authority of stunning success.

Although Billy was well out of the competitive side of the sport by this stage, this was
still
the four-time winner of New Zealand titles, along with the Australasian title and the Jamieson Belt, doing the talking. People in the know still ranked him among the country's hottest light welterweights. And here he was, the fleet-footed fighter who never took a serious punch to his head during his championship years, standing in our academic corner.

In a sense Billy was simply performing the same social service back then that others had for him, and people like him, for a very long time — a kind of mentoring that has probably turned around the lives or more young men than all the public dollars invested in residential children's homes and other forms of juvenile-crime prevention. In Britain in the 1880s social and religious reformers promoted the idea of setting up boxing clubs in poorer areas, believing as they did that the gym might absorb at least some of the violence on the street.

Early last century, in 1905, legislators in New York picked up on the same idea, attempting to push through a bill that would have seen boxing become a compulsory subject for delinquents, in particular children of foreigners ‘who are now brought up to use knives in settling their differences', who could yet quickly ‘grasp the American method of having it out in a much less harmful way with their fists', as one lawmaker put it. The bill was drafted under the shadow of President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a boxer and a boxing teacher, ‘a shifty man of his weight who has a punch worth going miles to get out of the way of', as one newspaper correspondent marvelled.

In New Zealand a similar plan was briefly put into action in 1940, after a court took the unusual decision to waive reformatory for nine boys charged with offences in favour of enrolling them in a boxing programme. Six months on, a child welfare officer marvelled, the kids were demonstrably better and fitter for the exercise, and the state had saved a great deal of money into the bargain. ‘You have built up your bodies,' the judge later told the boys, ‘and in the process your outlook toward the law and other people has also undergone a change — a change which is undeniably apparent in your appearance. For six months you have kept free from trouble and I know you will continue to do so. You will find that there is much more pleasure from the type of activities in which you have been engaged during recent months than in that which you called pleasure before and which was gained at the expense of other people.'

Billy underwent a similar experience thanks to an older fighter, Dick Dunn, who took the young dropout under his mentoring wing and taught him how to be strong enough to be hard on himself. Dunn, a boxer of the old, classic school (a believer in the importance of building one's fight on the jab, for example, rather than seeing the jab as an end in itself) picked Billy up, taught him how to throw a straight left, to keep his guard, to move and to hit and to move and to hit again without being hit. Great fighters shouldn't take a punch to deliver a punch, he always said. And great fighters ought to leave the game in the same condition they entered it: unhurt. The old man believed in the virtue, now widely ignored if not unknown, of boxers working in pairs rather than simply belting a bag.

Dunn could talk. He drilled Billy in the virtues of work and
self-denial
, fierce imagination and, yes, ‘character', because character is ultimately more important in life than performance, it's what separates the actors from the fighters — not simply in the interests
of rehashing some Victorian code, although it surely isn't a bad one, but because nobody ever made a great champion without apprehending those truths. That's how Dunn saw it, and Billy Graham has seen it that way ever since, too, especially since his career trend took an unexpected swerve in the 1970s.

‘I tell you what Dick Dunn said to me back then,' he recalled. ‘He says, “Billy, you don't read properly, you can't write properly, you've got no qualifications. You've never passed an exam.” He told me if you get hurt in this game, you'll pay the price. And then he says something else. Dick says, “You love people, Billy, you're always encouraging them. So why don't you get involved with these kids' lives?”' So after 18 years in the sport Billy set out on a path of motivational speaking and pastoral care for the young which, with only one exception, has proved to be a roaring success.

Thirty years on, the memory of his brief involvement with Epuni Boys' Home still causes Billy to squirm. ‘I just hated the place, you know, every inch of it — and you know what, it seems like yesterday I was there, because I can still smell it.' Epuni, where he worked on and off for about six months, ‘just broke my heart', he added. ‘It was … it was just terrible.'

At first it seemed so hopeful. The kids took to him easily enough. He taught them about staying fit and fighting well. He drilled them in a martial arts technique known as sticky hands, a method of stopping punches coming on to you while moving and fending away. He got them to do sit-ups and press-ups. And most of all, again, he told them stories about the men who started life on the wrong side of the tracks, and how boxing's deeper lessons saved their souls.

‘They needed stories,' Billy said. ‘Tell me a story, they'd say, tell me a story. Tell me a story, please. They'd be about to go to bed, but they weren't letting me go without a story. “You promised me, Billy,” they'd say. “Stay and tell us a story.”'

So he stayed and told them stories. Jack Johnson and his improbably named girlfriends bulleting in fast cars and getting caught speeding across state lines, for sure, but also the fact that while Johnson was inside he found need for a tool that would help tighten loosened fastening devices and so modified a wrench for the task that would later be patented. Joe Louis hiding his pugilistic ambitions from his mother by carrying his boxing gloves off to music classes hidden inside his violin case — but also the way Louis stood as a symbol of honesty and sportsmanship at a time when boxing promotions were dominated by hoodlums.

‘I grew up with that sort of story-telling stuff'cos I had an Irish nana. She used to tell me stories. But the other guys working there at Epuni would always say come on, “Come on, lights out, lights out, gotta go now.” “No,” I'd say, “I'm having some fun with these kids.” But they didn't like that, even though the kids obviously loved it.'

Then he started to notice that everything wasn't quite right with a number of the boys; he suspected they were being sexually interfered with. ‘I'm a street kid myself, you know, and I had a feeling that things weren't kosher there,' he said, ‘and so I complained about it.' Billy shrugged. ‘They couldn't get rid of me quick enough.' So he left, and with him went a collection of ideas that if implemented widely enough might have saved a generation of boys and young men, along with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on maintaining the old system — and the millions of dollars the government might yet be required to fork out if the current raft of lawsuits ultimately prove successful.

Recently, Billy revisited the newfangled Epuni for the first time in many years, and once again, the institution's now greatly diminished cohort took to him. ‘When I finished speaking I made an offer to the person now running the place, told him it might be good to bring the boys down here.' The offer was declined. ‘He said
they didn't want the kids to learn how to box because they might use it to beat them up. I told them that these kids didn't need to know how to box, didn't need to know how to beat you guys up. It's actually the other way round, I told him, because if they learn how to fight, properly, they learn how not to beat people up.' Billy laughed sardonically at the memory of his most recent rejection. ‘So some things haven't changed, have they?'

But of course some things do change too. Billy's first rejection only spurred the sense of mission that would eventually lead to the largely self-funded establishment of his Naenae Boxing Academy, the site for which he purchased in 2006 from the Salvation Army and where we met. ‘We have gang members walking through the door,' he said of his typical clientele. ‘First thing I tell them is to lose that look. Get that damn headgear off, shake hands with 10 people — or go home. And get that patch off, too, I tell them, or I'll make you eat it.' He would too.

They usually stay. A good number of Billy's hundred or so students might on some superficial level be described as failures. Or rather former failures. Many have certainly been on the wrong side of the law. ‘Almost without exception these are tough kids, kids who dare to be different,' he explained, ‘kids who don't want to play soccer or badminton or bowls, but guys who want to fight. They want to test themselves. And this is the game — the only game — that sorts them out.'

So most weeknights you see them assemble in this venue, one of the very few in Naenae never to have been despoiled with graffiti, skipping and hitting bags and thwacking speed balls. Fighting. As three large ceiling fans churn the air, the boys sort themselves out under the pastoral gaze of the main coach, a couple of colleagues and a galaxy of framed photographs of the great fighters, not least Billy Graham during his salad days. But at this point in his career, sadly, Billy is probably fighting as difficult a battle as he ever has
in the wider scheme of things: the tastes of the New Zealand chattering-class — the one that constantly frets about youth crime and whelps on about the need for ‘solutions' — have become dandified over the years, and boxing simply isn't a dandy's sport.

If only they took a little time to see what is being created here. The physical environment that Billy has made for his wards — the spiritual one too — is an inspiring one, immaculately polished on the inside and surrounded outside by dozens of painted rocks displaying the faces of the heavyweight champions of the past century. Hard men on hard stone. As Billy is always pointing out, for all the tall tales of sports writers and fight managers, virtually all the famous heavyweights of the past century or so share one overriding thing: tough backgrounds. Their origins are either dirt-poor like Joe Frazier, or desperate-poor like Sonny Liston, or crazy-poor like Tyson. Some say that Ali never quite fitted that mould, coming as he did from a relatively better-off home in the American Midwest, but Billy dismisses the suggestion with a wave of his still-impressive fist. Ali was one of the world's most hated people — because of Vietnam, because of the Muslim thing, because he couldn't really read or write, because of his mouth and the cruelty that too often got the better of it — and if that sounds like Easy Street, said Billy, perhaps you haven't really
thought the matter through.

Thinking the matter through — which is to say, thinking about life — is the biggest lesson on offer here at the Naenae Boxing Academy. All new entrants receive a copy of Billy's neatly printed
Passport for Success
, a collection of the coach's seven principles for a useful life: responsibility, compassion, consideration, kindness, duty, obedience, honesty and truthfulness. Memorise the lot of them, along with the attached aphorisms, and you get a free annual membership to this unique training initiative and the opportunity it promises.

For all this talk about the great heavyweights, Billy isn't in fact
a supporter of professional boxing, believing as he does that the amateur side of the sport that he has excelled in best imparts those same important principles that he has since dedicated his life to sharing: the importance of learning new things, looking after one's body, eating properly, speaking well. ‘Simple stuff really,' he explained, using oddly familiar words. ‘Like saying please and thank you: little words that open doors in life. Like looking at people. Really noticing them, I mean. Remembering names. Making good on what you say you'll do.'

Not to mention the mastery of fear, the real meaning of courage, the need to concentrate energy and find purpose in what one does, about getting up after you're knocked down and, especially, about being a man. If Joyce Carol Oates was correct when she wrote that boxing has always been a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity, all the more trenchant for it being lost, then this must be all the more powerfully the case for boys and young men whose positive exposure to masculine role models has been limited at best.

And, finally, those photographs and paintings of the great heavyweights, as we've already seen, serve yet another purpose, perhaps the most important purpose of all: they meet a young man's appetite for stories, the adolescent male's desire to leap into the imaginary. It's an appetite as keen and fundamental as his appetite for food, but which circumstance or neglect has denied for many of the boys involved with this gym, and without which no meaningful future life is really possible. Tell me a story, Billy, they still plead. Only this time he really can, and not just to the assembled youngsters.

Billy and I had been walking around the venue chatting when we came to a stop next to an old magazine article relating to an instantly recognisable event — the Frazier-Ali fight in Manila — now framed and enjoying pride of place on the wall. What
would he say, I wondered, was the lesson a young man might have learned from watching the closing moments of that fight on October 1, 1975?