A RUTHLESS INTRODUCTION TO BOXING
Jamie Hughes boxed for England as an amateur and left the sport unwillingly as a 4-0 professional. His journey from "obese kid" to prospect is a fascinating one. He tells his own story in this multi-part piece.
CHAPTER ONE
I started boxing when I was eleven. I always fancied myself as a bit of a top kid, you know, but I got pinged in the playground. He was supposed to be the hard nut but I thought fuck it I’ll have a go and I’ve gone for him. He’s done some little moves and I got hit with an uppercut. He was so slick, I just thought I needed to know how to do that. It weren’t no glamorous thing, I just wanted to learn how to fight.
Really overweight, obese really, I went to the amateur gym. It was called Danson, in Crook Log Youth Centre. My weight was not anyone’s fault but mine, I just used to find a way to eat chocolate bars. People say “it’s the parents” but it weren’t the parents it was me because where there’s a will there’s a way. Crackheads wake up on a Monday and they go and find whatever cash they need to get a rock- I was a fat kid addicted to chocolate bars and I went and found money to get chocolate bars.
INTRODUCTION: TELLING BARRY MCGUIGAN TO FUCK OFF
I think they thought I weren’t going to last very long, my old man laughed like “off you go son”, so my mum went down with me. The first time I sparred I got weighed in. Maybe they were just letting the big kids from the manor have a go and let’s see what this little fat cunt’s got I don’t know, but I took my beatings.
It was just all boys trying to be hard, be geezers, be their old man. I lived in New Eltham at the time but I didn’t want to go to Eltham because I hated a couple of the boys there so I thought fuck that I ain’t going to that club. They’re not the most sought after places that way, and they attract those people. Woolwich and so on.
Danson Gym had no money at all. A few punchbags, for some reason a blackboard fuck knows why. The ring, it wasn’t a ring. We were only allowed in there Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday so every day we had to go in and slot these poles into holes that had been made in the concrete floor and tie ropes around them. Imagine going down on that and hitting your head on the floor. It was like bare knuckle boxing in a carpark.
Sparring was basically who’s gonna take a fucking hiding, but there was so many boys in there. I was about eleven and they stuck me in with some kid who was about fifteen and he just battered me; I think because I was fat they stuck me in with anyone, but he messed me up. He wasn’t even a fighter, he was just a psycho. Proper amateur boxing doesn’t hurt, big gloves and so on and it’s all about not getting hit, not fighting. The punishment I took in that gym hurt.
Remember when Millwall used to have a proper atmosphere? Tim Cahill elbowed some cunt and people cheered like we’d won the game, Millwall fans are easily pleased like that. Danny was just attacking everyone though, stewards mainly. Lunatic, but most of the boys were like that. A couple of them ended up in a gang, they don’t go anywhere without sixty of them which is outrageous. Imagine you bump into those cunts round a pool in Ibiza, they’re all criminals.
Kids from estates from all over, a mad mix, but we used to go to Wales and all over on trips and it was quality. A great, great thing to grow up in. If you got all the boys from that time together and put them in a pub today, it’d look like a proper naughty firm but if you picked ten of those fighters most of them were national level or at least top boxers.
That was the club though, ruthless gaff, sink or swim.
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