No Win Race. Derek A. Bardowell
tail end of the fight. Eustace’s killer Martin Newhouse was eventually arrested. Yet while Newhouse had been let out on bail because ‘it would be wrong to keep him in jail over Christmas’, Gerald had been denied bail. He spent Christmas in prison and on release Gerald was prevented from going back into Newham, despite his girlfriend being pregnant at the time.
Fight.
The black and Asian communities rallied behind both cases under the guises of the Newham 7 Defence Campaign and the Justice for the Pryce Family Support Committee. This led to the National Demonstration Against Racism on 27 April 1985 with 3,000 demonstrators. A further 2,000 demonstrators marched on 11 May. The pressure from both campaigns led to national coverage about poor policing in Newham. This exerted pressure, symbolised by the demonstrations uniting blacks and Asians while also highlighting institutionally racist policing, contributed to justice being done. Newhouse was sentenced to four and a half years’ youth custody for manslaughter and two years for affray, running concurrently. Gerald had not been criminalised. While some of the Newham 7 did time, the case highlighted that reasonable physical resistance against attacks would not automatically result in prison. The coverage of the Newham 7 and Eustace Pryce campaigns also demonstrated that cases like these could no longer be swept under the carpet and that blacks and Asians had the right to defend themselves.8
Black was not just a term that unified the African diaspora, it also became a term that united all black and brown people in the fight against racism. This had been my London. The London I grew up in. A London that had been hostile towards me from the beginning, a London where black and brown resistance had been unified and emphatic.
Minter–Hagler symbolised more than the racial divides of the time. It symbolised the choice you had to make growing up back then. Blackness or Britishness? Colour or country? Do you side with those with shared experiences or those with a shared birthplace? I had to choose. Rebel or comply. Be bold or be shy. Risk exclusion or be subservient.
I knew it would be impossible for me to remain anonymous being black. No middle ground. There were no hiding places for black athletes. No hiding place for blacks. And no hiding place for me.
* The Virk brothers were racially abused and attacked by five white youths in East Ham. The brothers fought back and one of the white youths was stabbed. The Virks called the police and they were arrested. When they went to trial, the police’s chief prosecution witnesses were the white youths. The Virks were found guilty and served time. The Ramsey family had been subjected to frequent harassment from the police including a raid on their home when 11 family members were arrested. Akhtar Ali Baig was killed in East Ham by two young men and two young women aged 15 to 17 years who spat in his face, racially abused him before stabbing him in the heart. One of the assailants allegedly said, ‘I’ve just gutted a P*ki.’ Ten-year-old Kennith Singh never returned home after going to the shops in Plaistow. His dead body was found under some old carpets several days after he went missing. The Touissant brothers were racially abused and attacked by the police and eventually taken to a police station for no apparent reason.
IN MY HOUSE, THE ATHLETES my father and mother admired did not try to hide. The foremost sporting names had been the boxer Muhammad Ali and the West Indies cricket team. I kind of missed the Ali era, only catching the tragic tail end of the most magnificent career in sport’s history. I grew up at a time when Larry Holmes ruled boxing’s heavyweight division, from 1978 to 1985. In truth, there was little to choose between Ali and Holmes. Both were wonderful boxers, great thinkers, with piercing jabs and an ability to control the narrative in the ring, to improvise, to ensure they had the final say in the storyline. Both were technically gifted and incredibly tough with a frightening ability to absorb huge punishment without being knocked out. Both looked good too, like lighter-weight fighters. Most heavyweights are lumbering, crude, one-dimensional, mechanical. Imposing. But difficult to watch. Ali and Holmes had speed, mobility, fluidity.
Holmes couldn’t scale to Ali’s heights though. Couldn’t come close. He didn’t have the charisma. He didn’t fight with the same balletic grace. Didn’t have Ali’s back story, the way he stood up for black people, his eloquence, his beauty, his ability to be vocal in situations when he had been expected to be compliant. Holmes, it seemed to many, stood more for money than politics. And rarely would his fights have as much drama as Ali’s. Holmes’ fights were well scripted, technically sound, not expansive, unrepeatable, intimidating in their excellence. Ali won against the odds. Performed miracles. Against Sonny Liston in 1964. Against George Foreman in 1974. On both occasions people feared for Ali’s health because, like Mike Tyson in the eighties, Liston and Foreman were frightening, more than human. Ali mocked fear and his opponents before the fight. He cracked jokes, made up poems, all while talking black politics, black liberation. All while spending as much time with ordinary people – signing autographs, delivering magic tricks, listening to their stories – as he was in training. Then he’d control the narrative in the ring. Perform a miracle. Then he’d crack more jokes afterwards. Talk more black politics, spend more time with people. Ali was the most grassroots megastar ever. Likely the first and only sports star crowned the most famous person on the planet.
Budd Schulberg, the Academy Award winning screenwriter of On the Waterfront, once wrote: ‘Nothing reflects character more nakedly than boxing.’ Schulberg once regarded the heavyweight champion of the world ‘with a reverence just this side of religious fervour’. According to Schulberg: ‘The heavyweight champion was no mortal man but stood with Lancelot and Galahad.’ Ali stood with Lancelot and Galahad, perhaps more so than any of the great heavyweights, from Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey to Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano.
Ali and Holmes faced each other on 2 October 1980, a few days after the Minter–Hagler fight. Ali was 38, Holmes 30. Ali had been retired for about two years. Holmes had graduated from being Ali’s former sparring partner to world champion. Ali by this point had already started slurring his words, walking slower, talking slower.
Ali’s biographer, Thomas Hauser, recalled on ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary episode Muhammad and Larry: ‘Before the Nevada State Athletic Commission licensed Ali to fight, they asked him to go to the Mayo Clinic for a full report. That report said that when Ali tried to touch his finger to his nose, there was a slight degree of missing the target. He couldn’t hop with the agility that doctors expected he would. He had trouble coordinating the muscles he used in speech. This is before he fought Larry Holmes.’
By fight night, Ali looked sedated. He was Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. For ten rounds, Holmes hit him. Over and over. In round nine, Ali screamed. Ali didn’t fight back, couldn’t fight back. But he wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t go down. Holmes kept looking at the referee, he wanted him to stop the fight. He wouldn’t. Eventually Angelo Dundee, Ali’s long-time trainer, threw in the towel. Holmes cried.
I remember when highlights of the fight were shown on television. Not so much the details of what happened, more my father’s response to the fight. I had little to no conception of Ali’s full history, the 1960 Olympics, the poetry, Henry Cooper, Liston, the Nation of Islam, the Vietnam War, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’, ‘The Thrilla in Manilla’. My father cherished Ali’s defiance and willingness to confront mainstream America, to defeat white America. If the Black-British footballers in the seventies, often victims of abuse from crowds, had symbolised what black people were going through in their everyday lives, Ali had been emblematic of what we could be. He did not bow when criticised for changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and converting to Islam. He did not bow when he had been threatened with jail and lost his world titles because he refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He had been the highest profile athlete across the globe, yet he did not minimise his politics to attain or retain fame. He used his platform to highlight the plight of black people across the globe. With black history having been bleached, silenced and obscured,