Journeymen , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - Mark Turley

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

140 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Journeymen tells a story that is often purposely ignored - that of the modern-day boxers who lose for a living. Far from huge purses and pay-per-view hype, the book lays bare the reality of the boxing business and the way it works in small-hall venues countrywide. October 2013 saw the 100th and final fight in the career of East London's Johnny Greaves, remarkable in that he won only four contests. He took fights at short notice, facing young prospects with the implicit understanding that he was not there to win. Journeymen features in-depth interviews with Greaves and other men who have similarly served the fight game, including Kristian Laight (180 defeats), Jason Nesbitt (178) and Daniel Thorpe (113). Though sometimes dark, their tales reveal humour, wisdom and sporting pride: the journeymen eschew glamour, make the best of what they have and face the world with a smile and a wink.

Sujets

Boxing

Xian de Boxing

Informations

Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	09 octobre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909626942
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2014
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Mark Turley, 2014
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-90962-653-9 eBook ISBN: 978-1-909626-94-2
--- Ebook Conversion by www.eBookPartnership.com
Contents
Introduction
Two Sides of the Same Sport
Writers write, fighters fight
Hearts of gold, bodies of steel
Boxing saved my life.
The sins of the father, visited on the son
The Enigma
I love getting hit
On the Road with Mr Reliable
The One Man Riot
Undefeated in the home corner
I could have been a contender
These boys can t beat me!
Putting up with all the bullshit
The Final Bell
The Smiths, remembered
Photographs
Bulls do not win bull fights. People do. Norman Ralph Augustine
Dedication
M Y wife Elisa showed martyr-like patience in helping me with the boxer interviews and accompanying me on long drives all over the country for many months. My daughters Lola and Libby often suffered the same fate and handled it with grace. None of them have seen me as much as they should have this year. Like most large undertakings completed within a family scenario, this book has happened both because and in spite of them all.
I couldn t publish a boxing book without mentioning my dad, Dennis, from the fighting village of Penmaen in South Wales. He taught me to throw a jab before I could ride a bike. A hefty chunk of my childhood was spent watching and talking about boxing with him. I don t imagine there were too many other primary school kids in 1980s south London who could reel off stories about Jimmy Wilde, Tommy Farr and Dick Richardson.
The fighters all gave me their time for nothing and many other people in and around the game answered my questions over the phone, provided views via the web or generally offered support in one way or another. It may be an unforgiving sport, but a lot of the people connected to it are the most down to earth and genuine you can find. As much as I d like to thank all of them there are just too many to name.
Chin down, hands up.
Mark Turley
July 2014
Introduction
A different sort of boxing book
I N the same way that history is usually about kings, generals and events of great importance, boxing stories tend to focus on world title nights, champions and the characters around them, those perceived to be winners and those who live in the shadows of their glory.
But what if there were a history of foot-soldiers or anonymous infantrymen? Their struggles, spirit and humour? Of the guys who worked like donkeys, defended the rear and took bullets without receiving a second look? Is it possible that seeing battles through their eyes would make us view the whole war differently?
The stories here come from the wrong end of the fight game, where mad blokes with day jobs get clobbered by young whipper-snappers for a few weeks worth of wages. Where rings are assembled on top of basketball courts or nightclub dancefloors and TV cameras are a rarity. If this was a Rocky film, it would be about Spider Rico.
For that reason these pages will not serve up the fantasy that many fans are used to - multi-million purses, rafts of quotes from Don King and whore-and-coke splattered after-parties on the Las Vegas strip. For large numbers of young men drawn towards the alpha-male glamour of the fight game, this pastiche of over-indulgences qualifies as living the dream , but if we re being honest, there are more than enough books like that already. I have a couple of shelves full of them at home, penned by some of boxing s great scribes and as much as I have enjoyed them all, they tend to fuse in my memory. If you ve read any before, you ll know what I mean; deprived background - fighting as an escape route - sudden wealth/pressure of the spotlight - demons that can t be slayed - ultimate redemption in some form.
Tried and trusted. Not here, though.
The other major difference is me. By the time this book is published I will have been a boxing journalist for about two and a half years, mostly on the internet, on various sites, with a few bits in print. Unlike the guys who received awards for the books on my bedside cabinet, I can t claim to have particularly impressive credentials - neither decades of ringside experience nor a phonebook full of contacts - or at least I didn t before I started work on this. I do come from a boxing family and have been watching boxing for as long as I can remember, but before the last couple of years I wouldn t have considered myself any sort of insider. I was just a fan, like millions of others.
This perhaps puts me in a strong position, though. Unlike some of the best-known pundits, I have nothing to lose. I don t have a lifetime s worth of carefully maintained fight-game relationships or even a salary that will have to be sacrificed if I write things that certain people don t like. I have no vested interest in telling the story one way or the other and if this means doors closing in my face and the end of my stint as a boxing writer then so be it. I ll just go back to what I was before and watch on the TV or buy tickets.
If nothing else, this book will be honest.
As much as it tells the stories of ten men who fight to supplement their income in the small-hall scene in the UK, painting a picture of the workings of the sport at that level, to some extent it will chart my journey from naive fan to where I am now, having attended these kind of shows for the last couple of years. In that time I ve gained a new perspective on a sport I ve followed all my life. Imagine being besotted with an actress you ve seen in movies, then meeting her in a nightclub and finding she has bruises and needle tracks on her arms. That s my relationship with boxing. It still fascinates and attracts me, I still want to be around it, but parts of it make me uneasy.
Boxing holds an ambivalent place in the world today. The spectacle of two men (or women, lately) attempting to concuss each other with their fists is at odds with modern morality. Polite society has turned its back on it.
Foolish calls for a ban have been with us since the 1960s. They are less vociferous now but have had a creeping effect. It is no longer a sport taught in schools. It is rarely on free-to-air TV any more, Mick Hennessy s recent deal with Channel Five being the only exception, and is only superficially covered by the newspapers. As a result, world champions are not the household names they once were and the casual sports fan, replete with football trivia and everything else from rugby to golf, mostly has no idea who British or European titlists might be.
This means that within the boom industry of live sport, through which Premier League players have become a new class of aristocracy, boxing has been reduced to a sideshow. Small-hall boxing is barely even that. Paying 45 to watch a bunch of guys you ve never heard of beat each other up at the York Hall is simply not on the radar of mainstream entertainment for most people. Attending such shows therefore has an illicit, retrogressive, almost guilty feeling, like going to a titty bar.
In spite of this, at the peak of the pyramid, where welterweight champ Floyd Mayweather Junior - the world s highest-paid sportsman - can be found, pay-per-view records continue to be broken and a handful of fighters receive sums unimaginable for the big stars of previous decades. Boxing clearly isn t dying, as some say, it is just carving an ever deeper, more isolated niche for itself. The wealth it generates is increasingly held in fewer and fewer pairs of hands.
At its core, for competitors, the modern, less-celebrated version of the noble art retains truths from its golden past. It remains a physical pursuit which demands unique inner strength. You can call it bravery, recklessness or even desperation - fighters all have their own motivations for doing what they do and not all of them are noble, but I am aware of no other sport where you can watch an athlete bleed himself dry in a career-long chase for glory that so rarely has a happy ending. Not many ex-tennis pros end up punchy and broke. In the words of Bud Schulberg, Fighters don t grow old, they just die slowly in front of your eyes.
Like a ghost hovering behind every bout is the knowledge that competitors have been killed in that squared circle, while the spectre of Dementia Pugilistica with its Parkinson s-like symptoms lurks with equal menace. Muhammad Ali, the sport s most famous practitioner, embodies, in retirement, the affliction that will affect 20 per cent of those who fight professionally.
Yet the moral balance lies in the way it nurtures so much too. It channels and focuses those who need it desperately, gives an awkward boy self-belief, shows a weak man where his strengths lie and generally introduces an individual to himself. Many a wayward youth has been saved from a life behind bars or an early grave by morning runs, dieting and gym-time. They find solace in it, a form of spirituality. It demands devotion.
Boxing gives, then boxing takes away.
This is the yin-yang that all fight fans must balance. Do its pros outweigh its cons? Most of us are simply too far gone to care. The adrenaline and sweat are powerfully addictive and the nuances enough to keep you learning forever. We are hooked