Hard Road to Glory - How I Became Champion of the World. Johnny Nelson
me in a dance competition at Tiffany’s in Sheffield and was going to be my choreographer, I readily agreed. The £50 first prize also played a part in my decision. He dressed me as a baseball player complete with cap, fashionably on back to front, and football boots with the studs taken out, and we worked out a funky routine to one of my favourite tracks, ‘I Love Music’ by the O’Jays. On the night, it went like a dream. I was super-fit and full of energy, could do the splits and wowed the crowd with my moves. Towards the end I took some Monopoly money out of my pocket and pretended to bribe the judges, which raised a laugh from the audience. I thought the £50 was as good as mine – less Allan’s commission, of course. To my amazement, the judges gave the prize to some girl with a silver scarf dancing to Saturday Night Fever. Apart from a great body, I thought she had little to offer and I was gutted.
It was on one of my trips to an all-nighter at Clifton Hall in Rotherham that I first realised many people had a different sense of values from me. Ever since listening to Mum and Benjie rowing about money, I’d developed a real sense of how much everything was worth, and to this day I know the value of a fiver. This night, one of Allan’s friends turned up at the club clutching an old 78rpm Motown record he’d been after for some time. This was a precious item, a record for collecting, not for playing. I was amazed when he told me he had paid £80 for it. I thought of the things I could do with that kind of money and all of them seemed to be more worthwhile than buying some old record. That feeling was reinforced when we left the club because he slipped on some ice, the record flew out of his hands and smashed on the pavement. I just looked at the hundreds of black shards scattered at my feet and thought, That’s 80 quid.
Nightclubbing was fun but less for me than for Allan because I was still struggling to make a real breakthrough with girls, although I didn’t admit as much to the other lads at the café when I related tales of my colourful nightlife. When we got bored with hanging around, trying to top one another’s stories of events that only seemed to happen when we weren’t together, we roamed the streets, looking for something to amuse us. We discovered a public lavatory where gay men would meet up and we would hide in the bushes until they came out and bombard them with mud bombs. It was the kind of mindless prejudice that seems strange to me now but which I never questioned at the time.
On one occasion, we saw a guy go in alone and one of the lads suggested we should rob him. The rest of us agreed, especially when he said he would go in first. We waited in the bushes in case he needed back-up but what happened next wasn’t in the script. The two of them came out of the toilet, got into the guy’s car and drove off. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. We couldn’t work out why our mate wasn’t trying to get away; the bloke didn’t seem to be holding on to him or forcing him in any way. We hung around for about half an hour, then made our way back to the café. I was worried he might have been kidnapped but someone else suggested it was more likely he’d forced the guy to go and get some more money. About two hours later, our friend arrived back with a pocketful of cash and a story of how he’d beaten the man up. We accepted this at face value but the more I thought about his story, the more questions it raised in my mind and I wasn’t at all surprised to hear a few years later that our friend had ‘come out’ and was living with another man.
Benjie also had an experience at that toilet block. He stormed into the house one day, muttering and cursing, and ran upstairs into the bathroom. He grabbed his cutthroat razor and started to sharpen it on his leather strap, all the time saying, ‘I don’t believe it. I’ll kill him.’
Mum asked him what was going on and he replied, ‘I went into the toilet for a pee on my way home and some man came towards me and said, “What about it?” He said that to me! What the hell does he think I am? I’m going to chop his dick off!’
Mum managed to persuade him to leave the razor behind and, by the time he got back to the gents, the guy had gone but it took Benjie some time to recover his composure.
He also got upset when Mum caught a local tradesman shagging our dog, but not nearly as upset as I was. Leo was a beautiful Newfoundland, weighing as much as a lightweight boxer but tremendously friendly and cuddly, a real gentle giant. I loved that dog so you can imagine how I felt when Mum phoned me at work and asked me to come home because she had caught the guy molesting him. I was steaming and immediately phoned the police only to have my story met with a snigger and the phone being hung up. I rang back and got the same reaction. I couldn’t believe it. This man had shagged my dog and no one cared.
The third time I rang, I said, ‘Before you hang up, this is not a joke. It’s true and just think, it could have been a child not a dog.’
That seemed to get through to them and they finally sent someone round to take statements. We thought they would take action against the man but two mornings later I saw him coming down our road again. That was it. I went outside, determined to get justice for Leo. From the upstairs window, Benjie was yelling, ‘Go on, Johnny, kill him!’ while downstairs Mum was crying, ‘Johnny, come back! You’ll only get in trouble!’
I grabbed the guy, pulled his face right up close to mine and screamed at him, ‘How dare you show your face round here after what you’ve done to my dog?’ He protested his innocence, pleading to be allowed to get on with his business but I yelled, ‘Get out of here, you pervert. If I ever see you anywhere near here again, I’ll beat the shit out of you.’ The language was a bit more colourful than that, if you get my drift, but it certainly did the job.
With that, he scurried off, helped by a boot up the backside from me. I could never look at Leo again without thinking what had happened to him.
Several of the lads at the café messed about with weed and drink when they could afford it, and probably nicked stuff to sell when they couldn’t, but I didn’t ever consider it. I was no saint but at the back of my mind there was still a fear of what would happen if I got caught and I already realised Brendan found out almost everything that happened in Sheffield if any of his fighters were involved. I remember going out to a club one Saturday night and not getting home until around four in the morning. I was shattered the next day and decided to do just a light workout at the gym but Brendan put me in to spar and kept me there for two hours. I felt sick. When he finally let me out, he said, ‘I hope this will remind you what’s important the next time you’re tempted to stay in Isabella’s until dawn.’ I still don’t know how he knew.
My main reason for keeping away from drugs and alcohol was because I knew they would hamper my training. I got such a buzz out of working out at the gym that I didn’t need any artificial stimulants to get high. I was also lucky to have Willie as my friend because he felt the same way. He had a physique to kill for and could run forever, and he and I spent hours running and working out. Keeping fit became a way of life, as natural to me as walking and talking, and if I went a couple of days without going to the gym I would get withdrawal symptoms and become edgy.
With all that training, I inevitably became stronger and Brendan finally decided I was ready to have some amateur bouts. It was time for me to get into the ring competitively. But with no real wish to hit anyone and, more importantly, a massive desire not to be hit, it was far from clear how I would do.
TWO MINUTES IS A LONG, LONG TIME
I didn’t start my amateur career until I was 17, by which time most young boxers have had dozens of fights and the good ones are already thinking of turning professional. It meant I seldom fought kids my own age. There were no junior fights for me against under-strength boys who couldn’t hurt anyone. As far as the boxing world was concerned I was a man and that meant several of my 13 amateur fights were against guys who weren’t good enough to be pros but were hard and enjoyed getting in the ring and hitting people. I was also tall, so my opponents tended to be close to heavyweight. They mostly had the advantage of experience and, unlike me, they wanted to be there. Many of them seemed to take special pleasure in beating up a black kid who was clearly anxious not to hit them back.
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