Hard Road to Glory - How I Became Champion of the World. Johnny Nelson
an important lesson about fame and wasn’t going to be sucked back into that unforgiving world where people can make you feel like a king but just as quickly try to brush you out of their lives like shit off a shoe. I was no longer interested in fame. I just wanted the cheque to clear in my bank and to get back to real life with the handful of people who mattered to me.
It took a couple of days for it to sink in that I had won and I spent some time going back over the years. I still couldn’t really believe that the tall skinny kid from Sidney Road, Crookes, in the wrong part of Sheffield, the kid who went to a girls’ school and never really wanted to fight, had at last become the best cruiserweight in the world. I must have been the most unlikely champion of all time. I wasn’t even the best fighter in my family – my brother Allan was better than me, and so was my sister Theresa. But then, mine was no ordinary family.
Unravelling my family tree is a genealogist’s nightmare. I was the sixth of my mother’s seven children. Several different men were involved. She wasn’t promiscuous, just unlucky. She probably had fewer partners than most people today but as a devout Catholic she wouldn’t dream of using contraception. My dad, James Nelson, split from Mum before I was born and I didn’t get to know him until after I was 30. I’m only now beginning to learn how many brothers and sisters I have on his side of the family. I think it was nine at the last count.
My only childhood recollection of James happened when I was about three or four. This guy pulled up in the street outside my house in a beige Ford Granada and tried to pull me into the car. My mum was there like a shot and I have a vivid memory of them having a tug of war with me as the rope, one yanking on each of my arms. I didn’t know who this man was or what he was trying to do but I was terrified. I was crying, my mum was screaming, and he was yelling back, ‘Cynthia, let me have him!’
By now, the neighbours were in the street adding to the commotion. Eventually, he gave up and drove away.
When we met up again years later, he was shocked I could remember that incident. He explained that he’d heard Mum was planning to give me away to my godmother, Mrs Shepherd, and he’d come to get me. ‘I wanted you to live with me,’ he said.
I still don’t know if Mum ever really planned to give me away or if she was just saying things to hurt James, but she certainly did everything she could to keep him and me apart. There was a friend of the family, a lady I called Aunt Edris, who thought it was wrong Dad wasn’t allowed access to me. She always gave me presents and cards at Christmas and on birthdays. She was so generous I thought I must be her favourite and it was only later that I learned they were from my father.
The man I grew up thinking of as my dad was Benjie, who moved in with Mum after she and James split up before I was born. We lived in a three-storey council house in Sidney Road in Crookes before moving down the road to Upperthorpe, both poor neighbourhoods to the north of Sheffield city centre. We weren’t far from Kelvin Flats, a 1960s block about a quarter of a mile long, which over the last decade or so had become notorious for violence, poverty and people jumping off the roof. Eventually, they dynamited it into oblivion. Mum always told us we mustn’t play with the kids from Kelvin.
The eldest of my siblings living at home was Brenton. He was academically the brightest of us all but he was often mean to me as a kid and I didn’t like him. I think it’s fair to say we’re still not close. His full brother was Allan. In contrast to Brenton, Allan was my hero. I wanted to be just like him. Their surname was Douglas. Next in line was Theresa, whose surname was Smith, my mum’s maiden name, and younger than me was Benjie’s son, Oliver.
Mum had left her two eldest children, Trevor and Jeff, in Jamaica when she came over to England. Jeff eventually moved to the USA. I don’t really know him very well. Trevor is an albino with blue eyes and you would think he was a white guy apart from the blond afro hair. He came over to find Mum when he was about 16. I guess he looked a bit freaky and, when he told immigration he’d come to find his mother but didn’t know where she lived, they locked him up in Brixton Prison for the night. Eventually, they let him out and he came to stay with us but he moved to London when he was about 20 and has made his home there.
Our many shades must have struck outsiders as a bit odd, from albino Trevor, through Allan and Brenton who were quite light-skinned, to Oliver who was a bit darker, to me and then Theresa who was the darkest of us all. But to me they were just my brothers and sister. We had our share of beatings when we behaved badly but that was quite usual in many homes and schools back then. If you had to catch one, you preferred Dad to Mum because she hit harder. But my main memory is of a happy home. For that, I give Benjie the utmost respect. He took on a woman with six children by five different men and treated us all as if we were his own. There have been plenty of kids in our circumstances who have ended up in trouble, even in jail, but none of us went down that road and we now include a policeman, social worker, teacher, market trader, cook and electrician, as well as a recently retired boxer.
Like my real dad, Benjie was from Dominica. He was a swing grinder in a steel factory – a hard, dusty job that involved smoothing large lumps of rough steel with a massive grinder that was suspended from the ceiling on chains. When he was working, he earned good money but in Thatcher’s Britain the steel industry was on its last legs and too often Benjie would be laid off for a while. Those times were hard and I remember being very anxious when I heard him and Mum arguing about not having enough money to pay the gas bill or how we would have to buy cheaper food. I would think to myself that I should help by eating less even though, with my appetite, that was never going to happen. Now I have a family of my own, I believe they were wrong to discuss their problems when we kids were around. I try to keep any problems away from my daughters. Debbie and I never discuss money in front of them, good or bad. We want them to enjoy their childhood without worrying about things like that.
As a kid, I tended to take concerns on myself. I would hear Mum get up at five in the morning to go to her job as a cleaner at the Hallamshire Hospital and wish I could do something so she didn’t have to go out in the cold and the rain at such an unearthly hour. I was determined that, when I was older and making money, she would be able to stop work. My anxieties grew when the Yorkshire Ripper was murdering women just up the road in Leeds and Bradford. It was far too close for comfort, and the reports on TV terrified me. I worried every time Mum went out on her own and I wasn’t the only one because I noticed Benjie started to walk her to work and meet her after her shift to bring her home.
The shortage of cash meant I quite often had to make do with hand-me-down clothes from Allan, Brenton or even Theresa. Not that I minded too much. I remember Theresa had one pair of flared, studded jeans that I couldn’t wait for her to grow out of. When the time came for her to pass them on, I was jumping around and acting stupid because I was finally going to get my hands on these cool jeans. One of Mum’s favourite sayings was ‘Chicken merry: hawk never de far’, or the hawk is about to swoop on the chicken. In other words, when you are happiest, something bad is likely to come round the corner and hit you where it hurts. So it was this time. My racket pissed her off, so she decided to teach me a lesson by not letting me have the jeans.
The merry chicken got another smack one Christmas when things were obviously tight on the cash front. Mum had to work on Christmas Day and we were all at home, waiting for her to come back and give us our presents. All day long, we wondered what goodies ‘Santa’ had brought and the more we thought about it, the bigger and more expensive they became in our imaginations. Eventually, Mum came in and produced a black plastic bag. This was it: at last the wait was over. But it wasn’t how we’d thought it would be. All the packages were wrapped in those rough, green paper towels you get in hospitals. Inside mine was a packet of biscuits and some dominoes. Each of us got a record – mine was Boney M – even though we were never allowed to use the radiogram where Benjie would play his beloved old-style Studio One reggae. I guess Mum couldn’t afford to buy us anything and had just scavenged what she could from the hospital.