The Trib (49 page)

Without making light of it Jimmy, others have lost people to cancer and don't do their own version of
Weekend at Bernie's
.

‘You have to understand what nowhere really means I guess. Me and my sister and my other two brothers ended up finding ourselves nowhere if that makes any sense. Just nowhere in our minds. It was very weird. It was angry as well as weird. It was all screaming and crying and laughing. It was all over the place. I was all over the place. The taxi driver said your friend doesn't look too well and it was quite hilarious actually; we all got a good laugh out of that. But we put him back the same night and then all the police came the next day and they were going to arrest us. But they saw there was no damage done and let us off and I didn't get arrested for breaking and entering. But I was still nowhere.'

How do you get to nowhere? Too much, too soon? Loneliness? Depression? Tragedy? Bad advice? No advice? White's case might tick all of those boxes but it's still impossible to overlook an addictive personality. There are the cigarettes (‘I may have a packet of cigarettes for a week now but I do hate cigarettes, I absolutely detest them'). There's the drink he reckons he's blown at least half a million on since people started to see him as a success. There's been the gambling too, which saw him blow well over a million in that time (‘It can be very addictive but I'm not addicted'). And while the rumours he blew his 1994 world runner-up cheque of £128,000 the next day in the bookies are untrue, it's little wonder that despite ten tournament wins and over £4.5 million in career earnings, he was declared bankrupt and his wife Maureen left him after twenty-two years.

‘For me all that stuff became quite a normal life. Obviously coming from a working-class background it's not easy, because all of a sudden you are surrounded by rock stars and women find you attractive. You know it's all plastic but try and resist it. You pretend it's real even if you know deep down, and you go with it, and suddenly where are you? I've been in too many positions looking back and I find it hard to believe some of the places I've been in. With drink I remember too many times waking up and thinking, ‘F**king hell, how have I ended up here?'

‘So all that money disappearing, some of it was down to me, but there was bad management too. You put faith in people to look after your finances and find two or three years later you've been robbed. It's really the children's money that they are robbing because you want to leave your kids secure. As they say, I drank a lot of it, gambled a lot of it and blew the rest. But I'm not complaining.'

Since going bankrupt, he's been putting his life back together, brick by brick, although some have continued to fall off. He was cautioned after cocaine was found at a hotel bar but says he was in a group and it was pinned on him. He tried to change his name to James Brown by deed poll following a sponsorship approach from HP Sauce only to have the application rejected. He had a hair transplant but when he took a look in the mirror his eyes were black and his chin had dropped more than a few centimetres. He even had his dog kidnapped.

‘I put a poster on all the trees saying I lost my dog and there was a £300 reward. Then I found him but these posters were still up and suddenly he goes missing again. I had gone in the police station and this kid beside me had said his coat was gone and that he left it at a fair. I knew then it was gypsies that took it. I phoned a few people, found out where the fair had gone, got in touch with the top guy and arranged to meet Johnny Francome at the clock tower at Epsom. I knew Johnny when he was a boxer and he actually did
Snatch
; he was the one who taught Brad Pitt how to talk. He said he didn't know it was my dog. You know my dog is the only Staffordshire Bull Terrier to have a coloured picture on the front page of
The Times
. I've learned to laugh at these things. Can't do nothing about the past.'

And that's what makes White so likeable. Despite being beaten on the river nearly every time, he's never complained about his hand in life. He lost his snooker club but now has a stake in another one. He went to see Paul McKenna about his game and ended up being hypnotised for each of his flaws from drink and drugs to gambling and women, although reckons he wasn't fully committed and hypnosis alone won't fix him. As for his career? He's made moves this season, making round one of the Welsh Open last week and jumping eighteen places in the rankings to forty-seven but the whirlwind of former decades has become just a strong breeze even if he won't admit it.

‘I'm pretty tuned in at the minute. I've had lots of practice, put in lots of hard work. But it's been a hard road just to get myself to tournaments but now my “A” game can win any tournament. I've put all that other stuff behind me and I'm just enjoying playing. Not that all that other stuff wasn't fun, don't get me wrong. I loved every minute of it. Please don't go making this sound like him moaning.'

So, being Jimmy White – what's it really like? ‘I've survived cancer, I'm still playing the game I love, I've got five healthy children.' There's only one word for it he says. Lucky.

Olympic glory, suicidal thoughts, Buddhism and now working behind bars: it's been a strange life for Nicholas Cruz Hernandez since defecting from Cuba, but he's still managed to keep on smiling.

7 January 2010

S
ome days the gym was filled with the swish of leather on leather. Others, when Nicholas Cruz Hernandez would invite some Cuban acquaintances over to waste away the hours with recollections of their homeland, the clunk of dominos would reverberate around the place. But most of the time there was just the silence that tortured him. It was then he could hear his thoughts and they had no reason to be kind.

Just four years earlier, the coach was a national celebrity. He had been the mysterious, gangly figure people called Black Paddy and was behind the national treasures brought back from the Barcelona Olympics. He was warm and friendly and successful and everyone wanted a piece of him. But everyone quickly forgot and by 1996 he was living in a makeshift quarters at the back of the gym on the South Circular Road with little more than a temporary bed and cooker. He could handle the mild poverty but couldn't cope without what he left behind for this lonely life.

One night he picked up a rope he found lying next to one of the rings. He wandered out to the door, took a look at the trees and picked out the biggest branch. ‘I thought in my mind what it was going to be like when they saw me hanging from it. Then I was thinking will I leave something in writing, telling them not to blame anyone, that it was my own decision. I wanted to look inside myself and see if this was more than talk in my head. And it was. It was in my heart to do it. I had absolutely nothing left. This was it. The end.'

Nicholas Cruz Hernandez first stepped off the plane on 4 May 1988 and expected the worst and the best from Ireland. Instead he got the best and the worst. After the Irish Amateur Boxing Association had asked for help, Cuba answered and sent the head of their Higher Institute for Physical Education. He awaited racism and tiptoed his way onto Dame Street but slowly gained confidence, wandered over O'Connell Bridge and ended up in a bar chattering away to the locals. He was overwhelmed by the friendliness but later stunned by the sporting rubble he found instead of the top-class facilities he had grown up with.

His task was to help prepare the team for the Seoul Games early that autumn. At one stage he took them to Kerry for a training camp but found nothing but a ring on the ground floor of the hotel. In the end he borrowed a sledgehammer and tyre from a nearby yard and used them for cardio and strength work; he smashed rocks and used the smaller pieces as dumbbells; he used trees for chin-ups; and, long before Ger Loughnane, he had his team doing squats up and down the dunes on a nearby beach. Then he went looking for a masseuse to the amusement of higher powers.

‘The boxers were great. So proud. The fighting Irish. But I sat with the president of the association, Felix Jones, Lord rest him, and I asked him about vitamins and he was looking at me as if to say, ‘What are you talking about?' In the end Cuba boycotted the Games and they didn't want me to go and that was hard because I'd built up such a bond with the guys. They believed in me.'

Four years later he finally got his chance, even if it very nearly slipped away. When the team were staying in the Olympic Village in Barcelona, the boxers found a window above the door to the Irish area and started throwing water at the athletes coming in and out. Sonia O'Sullivan was first. A while later Michelle Smith came out and ran for cover but slipped and cut her leg. Pat Hickey, head of the Olympic Council of Ireland, called the fighters and Hernandez in for a meeting and warned them if there was another incident, they'd be sent home before a punch was thrown.

‘They were just bored, but after that meeting I took the lads upstairs and said there's no way we are going to throw this away. There was a place where all the boxers trained but everyone was there so we set up an area on the ground floor of where we were staying. I was getting our boys up at six to train and I had a lot of complaints from the equestrian team saying they couldn't sleep. It was funny because by the end of it there was no one left competing but the boxers. All these people that were complaining were watching us training and wouldn't give us any space. We were the guys.'

When Hernandez returned to Cuba shortly after helping Wayne McCullough to silver and Michael Carruth to gold, even Castro was talking about him. His family presumed he was a millionaire after he made news across continents and asked how much he had received. He told them he got a few hugs and plenty of satisfaction. They laughed and asked him to be serious. He was. Felix Jones had promised him money but he never saw a single penny. Yet for some reason, when Ireland came calling again, he left everything behind.

It was 7 March 1996 and Hernandez was giving a seminar to coaches and boxers in Puerto Rico. He had done too good a job in Barcelona and his bosses were happier to send him to a fighting wasteland rather than these shores. Before he'd left for the nearby Caribbean islands he'd told his wife if he didn't come back he'd be in Ireland. She cried. He still doesn't know why he muttered those words because he had no plans to defect.

‘On the last day of classes there, I went too early. I was the only one there and I remembered I had a number in my pocket of one of the secretaries in the institute. I called and she said a fax came. She gave me the phone number on it. It was from Ireland so I called and it was the IABA who asked could I prepare the Irish for the Atlanta Olympics. The president of the Cuban federation was in Puerto Rico for a meeting and I told him, asked for my passport. He said no. I knew that meant if I went back to Cuba my travelling was over.

‘So I went looking for the bags and I said to the other coach, would you stand as a witness, that I haven't taken anything else. He knew what I was doing and said there's no chance I'd find the passport. When I stuck my hands in one of the side pockets I found a brown envelope with three passports. He couldn't believe it. There was a bit of a drama because the top guy wanted it back. He warned me I was defecting and that was five years' of a ban. I knew that but I didn't believe it. It didn't seem true.'