Chris Eubank: The Autobiography

DESIGNER THIEF (#ulink_9ad18997-e6e0-5f02-894a-90b303149604)

One day my father came back from work and said to my brothers, ‘Where’s Christopher?’ No one knew. At 9 o’clock that evening, there was a knock at the door and it was the police, who informed my father that I had been taken into care. I don’t know if the authorities can do that without consent, but they certainly did it with me. I’d had a social worker assigned to me for some time at Peckham Manor. He was called Mr Lord Okine, an African fellow who drove this little white Datsun. I didn’t even know what a social worker was, I didn’t understand.

Peter was the first brother to be taken into care, then David, then me. Simon stayed at home. It was not my father’s fault: he didn’t give us up to care, the authorities took us away. It wasn’t a complete shame for me because it had become boring at home with Dad. I couldn’t stop misbehaving, it was in my nature. I remember thinking, why is this man beating me so much? I realised it was because I was getting caught . . . so I stopped getting caught.

The first care home I went to was The Hollies in Sidcup. It was a massive complex made up of 36 different homes, each named after trees, and one called Reception Centre where I was. My brother David was in Larch. I was met at Reception Centre by a member of staff who took me on a tour of the building. He showed me a room which had a table tennis table, a pool table and a communal eating area. The tour continued, revealing a tuck shop, a storage room and the staff room, before finally ending up at my dormitory. They sat me down in there and gave me my briefing.

Being taken into care was almost like winning the lottery. Can you imagine my sense of bliss? The fridge was full of food – beefburgers, sausages, everything. I could play pool. I had a dorm with new friends to meet and, most fantastically of all, my own warm bed – no more four to a mattress! The whole place was even heated! It was such a wonderful experience meeting these kids from Scotland, Manchester, all over the UK, seeing their different attitudes, hearing their different tales. That first term at The Hollies was one of the best experiences of my life – I had three meals a day, table tennis, pool, and there were girls. Heaven! We used to climb down the drainpipes to get into their dorms: it was such good fun.

But just as at school, however, I found myself getting into trouble and was shifted between care homes several times in four years. In 1979 I went to Yastrid Hall in North Wales, which I now know to have been in the midst of the sexual abuse scandal that did not come to light until the mid-90s, when it was revealed that a network of adults appeared to have been involved in abusing children across the country. I wasn’t abused sexually or otherwise, I didn’t even know there was a problem. It has transpired that certain children were being abused, but at the time I never knew. Admittedly, I was engrossed in my own little world but, fortunately for me, that whole terrible saga passed me by.

From Yastrid Hall, I went to Stanford House in Shepherds Bush for seven weeks in a lock-up for assessment. From there I was sent to St Vincent’s in Dartford for a month, before being expelled and taken to Orchard Lodge in Crystal Palace, for another seven-week assessment in a secure unit. From there, I went to Karib, a care home for ethnic minorities in Nunhead, SE 15, was expelled again after only one month, then sent to Davy’s Street in Peckham.

All this time I was a highly unruly boy. I still had a short fuse, I was a very fast runner (ten miles in 72 minutes when I was 13), quite clever, and my sleight of hand wasn’t too bad. I took full advantage of my skills, always breaking into staff rooms and tuck shops or the newsagents down the road to pilfer cartons of 200 cigarettes. Such petty crimes later progressed to shoplifting and repetitive absconding.

Yes, it could be described as a very itinerant childhood. However, my view is this: moving around so much is the perfect way to ensure that an individual continues to have new experiences. You never get stuck in a rut when you’re barely at the same place for more than three months at a time. Constantly having to make new friends was not a burden because I preferred my own company anyway; I was still something of a loner. Now, as an adult, I can travel anywhere and feel comfortable in any situation, an ability I put down partly to these teenage years spent on the move.

It was around this time that, despite my antics to the contrary, I started to read proverbs. Although it would be some years before I succeeded in applying (or at least tried to apply) myself to many of the words I was reading, the wisdom they offered always appealed to me. I was always enthralled and intrigued by the wise man and words.

In North Wales, there was a kid in care with me called Timmy Brian, who had this marvellous way of strutting about. I watched him swagger around and noted the effect this had on people, so I started to do my own version, with my own flavour. Timmy was a very courageous black kid from Nottingham who thought of himself as Superman. He used to point his hands skywards like he was flying through the air and I used to roar with laughter. Sometimes I still copy him. If you’ve watched me on television, perhaps on A Question of Sport, you may have seen me doing this. When a show starts, the warm-up man asks the audience to give a round of applause, even though no one has done anything of note yet. I always thought that was an odd situation, so when it happens and the applause starts out of nowhere, I often put my hand in the air like Superman, like Timmy Brian. It is just a fun thing but, of course, some critics say, Oh, look at Eubank, assuming they are clapping him.’ I’m not, I’m just being a big kid again, back in North Wales with Timmy.

At my last care home, Davy’s Street in Peckham, I was always getting into trouble with one particular care worker. He was a huge man, very tall. It was not his considerable size that was most threatening however – what was most scary was the fact he never treated me for what I was, namely still a teenager. He saw me from day one as an adult and for that reason his obvious dislike for me felt much more tangible and intimidating.

One day we’d had yet another disagreement over something I had done, so he cornered me. He was really angry and breathing heavily with fury. He leaned down over me and said in a truly menacing tone, ‘I don’t give a f**k about any of this, I will kill you.’ Now I had stood up to my fair share of bullies and bigger men in my younger years, but I knew this man was simply too big and too aggressive to mess around with. After this unseemly confrontation, I went to the bathroom and, because the home was a lock-up at the front, I crawled out the window and was gone. I was never in care again.

I had been so unruly when I visited my father on leave from the care homes, he could not tolerate my behaviour and eventually refused to have me back home at all. For the next 18 months, I was homeless. My territory was around Peckham and the Walworth Road, I did not have a permanent roof over my head. Much has been made in the media, and indeed by the public I meet, about how awful this must have been. No, I won’t have this said. I lived like a king. I wouldn’t say it was bliss, because bliss is not having to work and being at ease with yourself. You can’t really be at ease when you don’t know where you are going to sleep that night. So it wasn’t bliss, but it wasn’t far off.

I was a teenage kid, shoplifting daily and earning easily over £100 by 6 o’clock each night. I was young, quick, had good sleight of hand and bundles of courage, so I was never really too compromised. I had girlfriends all over the place and as much marijuana, Special Brew and Treats as I wanted, I went to Blues dances, called Shobins, two or three nights a week and was driven around everywhere by taxi, wearing the finest clothes. I was my own boss, I had no parents to report back to, no school to trouble me. I was lord of my own manor.

During this time, I was part of one of the most proficient shoplifting gangs in the country. On a bad day we would take home £110 per man, but when we were on song we would make £180 each. At the time, the average wage was perhaps £60 a week. There were four of us in the gang: myself (Eu-ey), Sticks, Nasty and Beaver. Sticks took his nickname from the Jamaican term for a thief, while Nasty earned his monicker because he was girl mad. They were both Nigerians. Beaver was the last man to join up. I now realise that this behaviour is foolish, but having gone through it myself I can relate to youngsters and talk to them effectively about getting caught up in this kind of lifestyle.

We worked Monday to Friday, consummately professional, and were very exacting in our standards. We wore suits, shirts and ties and always looked immaculate. Before a job, I would put on my Italian mohair suit, a crisp shirt and tie, and my prized Burberry coat. At the time, Burberry had just introduced these extremely sturdy security tags, so stealing one of their range was not an option, you had to buy your Burberry coat. I vividly recall going to Haymarket to purchase mine: it cost £180 and was a sight to behold. Magnificent. Oh, man, I felt I had arrived. On the streets, how you dress is inextricably linked to how much respect you command, so I was always intimately fascinated by the latest fashions. That may well have something to do with my latter-day passion for dress code.

The purpose of the Burberry coat was twofold. Firstly, you looked impeccable, not at all like a shoplifter. Secondly, if you bought the coat legitimately, you were given a Burberry’s bag, which was effectively a licence to steal anything. You would walk into some of the finest clothing shops in the West End and look as if you could afford to buy any item. The sales representatives never suspected a thing, they probably assumed I was some rich African youngster with money to burn. That uniform was crucial to our success.

We had numerous locations to work, including Oxford Street. Of course, things would not always go our way and sometimes we would end up being chased.

That year on the streets was so exciting. We were at the peak of our shoplifting prowess. I had all this money and freedom and never wanted to compromise that by staying at a hostel. Instead, I would crash on friends’ floors most of the time, flitting from one run-down flat to the next. I blagged it, as they say. I would go to someone’s house and get so drunk I couldn’t leave. It was during this time that I started to smoke weed very heavily. I had begun when I was only 12, but by this time on the streets I was a very heavy user. A lot of my shoplifting money was spent on weed, booze and clothes. I must have smoked thousands of pounds of ganja over the years. I still knew quite a few rastafarians and that influenced my attitude towards smoking too.

About once a week I would not be able to get a floor for the night, so I would break into a car and sleep on the back seat. I spent many a happy night napping on car seats in Peckham, Camberwell or the Elephant and Castle. On a few occasions, I did end up sleeping under a mattress but I didn’t like that: the cold still got through to my bones. The longest stint I had under a proper roof was at Nasty’s. Even then, he got tired of this after a couple of weeks and said, ‘Look, Chris, I can’t handle it anymore, you need to find somewhere else.’

I was still only a kid but I had been living on my own instincts for so long, my sense of self-survival was deeply ingrained. When your mother isn’t there and you live with your father who is doing long shift work, you don’t have time to be a child. If you want food, you have to find it yourself. With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that my personality was becoming heavily predisposed towards the life of solitude, hardship and suffering that is boxing. I maintain to this day that my childhood never felt like this. I have no complaints, but looking back I do accept that in a sense I was in training for the noble art from almost my first breath.

Of course, however buoyant I kept my disposition, life on the street wasn’t all a bed of roses. Inevitably, I found myself in compromising situations from time to time. One night, I had nowhere to sleep, so Sticks introduced me to a chef he knew vaguely. I later found out he was also gay but no one told me this at first. I needed a roof for the night, so I had to keep calm when I went inside his dishevelled flat and saw dozens of machetes and knives all over the house. I said, ‘I’ll be okay to sleep on the settee,’ but he was adamant, saying, ‘It’s a matter of principle that you sleep on the bed.’ I politely refused, but he was insistent. He seemed cool to me, so eventually I said, ‘Fine, okay,’ and settled down in this bed. At about 3 o’clock in the morning, I suddenly felt this big hand wrap around my waist and start to pull me backwards as he cuddled up to me. I was out of the bed like a flash! Then it struck me that I was with a complete stranger whose house was filled with cutlasses and various other blades, and now I may have offended his feelings. The night before I had burgled a house in Seven Sisters Road and took a camera, which I’d left on this man’s coffee table. I tried to say to him calmly, ‘I’m not like that,’ before grabbing my camera and clothes and hot-footing it out the door! I headed out into the street, but as I was halfway down the road, I got this bad feeling and decided to hide behind a wall, for no specific reason. Seconds later, a police patrol car slowly drove past. I was always blessed with an intuitive street sense that kept me out of trouble so often. Imagine if they had found me, a young black teenager wandering the streets in the middle of the night, out of breath and with a camera around my neck!

People often ask me how it feels to possess the material things my boxing success has brought me, having come from being a homeless delinquent. I do not see it like that. Whatever our individual circumstances, we are all fighting and each person’s own individual predicament is relative, it feels like a hefty burden. I always say to people, ‘If I have £1 billion and you have nothing, then my burdens are as heavy as yours. I still have things to do, I still have problems, I still have aches and pains. Nature doesn’t give anyone more than they can handle.’ Everyone’s burden is heaviest. I prefer to look at things this way. If I look at it any other way, it gives people who are less fortunate an excuse to say the world owes them something – it doesn’t. The world owes you nothing. If I had looked at my younger years in that way, I would have suffocated in resentment. I could not allow that, I had things to do. I had to fly, so to speak.

One night, I took a taxi to a gentleman’s outfitters in Brighton. We usually hired a taxi to take us around our daily targets, the driver would be paid £70 for the day and was aware of what we were doing. When I got there, the driver pulled up into a side street and I got out with my tool, namely a pickaxe. It was 3am and the streets were deserted. The store had a double set of floor-to-ceiling glass doors. They were alarmed but that was never a deterrent. I took the pickaxe and, smash!, embedded it in the top right-hand corner. Then, smash!, again in each corner, four very deliberate and targeted blows so that the large pane was weakened. It was then simple enough to kick the glass through and walk into the store.

Of course, the alarm was going off, which in the still of the night always sounded amplified 1000 times. However, I was serenely calm. All the butterflies I’d had before the event had dissipated. This was how I was with any job, whether it was stealing clothes or fighting a contender – as soon as it started I would be at peace.

I grabbed about six suits and then just stood there, stock still in the centre of the store, soaking up the peace. When I was ready, I simply walked to the taxi and headed back to London. Easy. On the M23, however, these two sleek police Jaguar cars pulled up alongside us. I looked behind and another one had taken position to our rear. It transpired that someone had heard the alarm, saw me break in and called the police. I was nicked.

There was no escape. They hauled me up in court and I explained that it was just a matter of money, that this was not my usual behaviour. Things were looking quite bleak, but thankfully the judge granted me bail, which I jumped and headed for a new life which was waiting for me . . . in New York.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_8173403d-69de-50c2-912d-97eb28fff332)

POSERS, BULLIES AND TRIERS (#ulink_8173403d-69de-50c2-912d-97eb28fff332)

‘They know exactly who you are and what you are doing. They’re watching you, don’t kid yourself they’re not. Wait until you’re 17–you’ll get caught, you’ll be in and out of jail for the rest of your life. You keep on screwing up.’

This warning shot was fired my way many times by my father over the years, but I didn’t change my ways. Unless I was taken elsewhere, he was convinced I was being groomed as Borstal and prison fodder.

It was actually my mother who plucked me out of my life of delinquency. She was hearing all these reports from Dad about my misbehaviour, so she asked him to send me to New York. She even forwarded the money for the plane fare. My flight was on 29 November 1982. I flew in a silk suit, with burgundy Italian shoes, but halfway across the Atlantic I realised this was not a clever choice of garment. I arrived at JFK after seven hours in a cramped seat with my silk suit looking like one big crease. I did a lot of thinking on that plane, though, and promised myself I would stop smoking, go to church and try to start behaving myself. I also thought it would be a good idea to go to a boxing gym, mainly to get fit. I knew that my peer group in London would make it very hard for me to forge a new life, so I was fully aware this was a chance of a fresh start. I collected my bags from the airport carousel and caught a taxi with my father to where my mother lived, at 161st Street on Melrose Avenue, South Bronx.

Being from the street, I was not intimidated with settling into a new environment. One of my first impressions of New York was the culture – I didn’t understand how inconsiderate people were with their language and the disrespect they threw around. It took some time to soak in the new terrain – this was, after all, nothing like even the toughest parts of London. My acute sense of observation was to quickly prove invaluable.

Pretty soon, I realised three basic facts that would remain constant during my time in New York. Firstly, it was very, very cold in the winter. Secondly, it was bakingly hot in the summer and, thirdly, I was just as poor here as in south London. In New York, it doesn’t matter what colour you are, if you’re poor, you’re made to feel like an outcast. You can be white, black, Hispanic, Chinese, whatever, if you don’t have any money, you don’t get any respect. It was very, very hard. I often had a dollar for my dinner and that would get me eight rotten bananas and a quart of milk. I’d put that in a blender with a little nutmeg and that was my dinner. Some days my mother would cook for me so I’d eat decently, but she wasn’t always with me as she worked as a live-in nurse for the aforementioned old Jewish lady, Dorothy.

I started straight away on my new less deviant path. I’m not saying that I stopped all my vices overnight, of course not, but that was my intention; indeed, I would drift back into the shoplifting later when I travelled intermittently between New York and the UK, but for now I was determined to start a clean slate. There was no one to tempt me like my London friends and I knew what I had to do. I had one more chance. I wanted to be a success and that meant not stealing, not drinking and not fighting. As I’ve said, before I flew to New York, I drank very heavily. It was either Bacardi or Special Brew, often swilling several cans before I went out in the morning.

Within three months, I had stopped smoking, no mean feat when you consider the quantity of nicotine and ganja I was getting through in London. Two devastating incidents happened which made me stop smoking cigarettes and joints completely. The first episode was after I had come from Manhattan and stopped off near Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, to go into a bar that was near to where we lived. There were some guys whom I vaguely knew from playing pool with, and one of them offered me some weed. This was not just ordinary weed, like the weed I was used to in England. This knocked me for six! I walked the eight blocks home but, before I went upstairs, I trudged into the store on the ground floor. This was an amazing shop, a cornucopia of fascinating objects. They used to say they stocked everything from a pin to an elephant. It certainly looked like that, all old boxes crammed to bursting, piled high, teetering with the weight of the weird objects inside.

The store was run by two middle-aged, real African American New Yorkers from down south, Mr Seymour and his sister Norval. This particular day, Norval was serving and as I asked her for whatever it was I wanted, she looked up at me. Now, when you smoke weed, your eyelids kind of shine and droop. I don’t know if she knew what I had been up to or not, but my perception told me she did. I could almost read her disappointed eyes saying, ‘. . . and I thought you were a good boy.’ That look, which I am sure she was not aware of, withered me on the spot. My spirit was crushed. I have always had a deep-felt respect for my elders and so this lady’s inner dismay really hurt me. I stopped smoking weed there and then.

Some Jamaicans say weed is a herb of wisdom. I agree but perhaps from a different viewpoint, namely that the wisdom only comes if you stop smoking and apply yourself to something. Marijuana helped me because it made me appreciate my focus more when I had stopped.

As with weed, I had always felt guilty about smoking cigarettes, but did it anyway, as you do when you are younger. The incident that stopped this habit was when my mother came down one day and caught me outside on the steps smoking a cigarette. All she said was, ‘Jesus Christ!’ but that was enough. Knowing how precious her religion is to her, she could not have hurt me more if she had whipped me with a cane. Those two words made me feel like crying. It levelled me and for days I was in despair, so ashamed. Whatever I did, I would always say to myself, Please don’t say those words.

I gradually cut back on the drink too and started to get my life in order. Although I had been a persistent offender in London, I was street-wise enough not to steal one thing during my time in the Bronx. Over there, if they catch you stealing even the tiniest thing, they give you a good hiding first before they call the police. New York was a rough place and I was there in the early 80s, when it had one of the highest crime rates of any city in the world. This was not the place to be taking liberties with people’s livelihoods.

I was surprised by the prevalence of the gun culture over there. In London there were knives at worst, and even then they were only brandished in extreme circumstances, and actually used even more rarely. Yet in New York it was common for everyone to have a gun. I would find out just how popular firearms were shortly after.

I started attending church and enrolled at Morris High School in the South Bronx, where I studied from 1983 until 1986. I took North American History, Spanish and Geography. I didn’t have the same temptations around me as in London, so I became a good student who worked hard towards graduation. My transition was well underway (this period of cleansing, if you like, went on until I fought for the world championship in 1990 – it was constant application).

By the time I was in New York, if I had learned one thing from my teenage years it was this: almost everybody lets you down. My initial impetus to enter a boxing gym was to get fit. However, I soon also realised that, with pugilism, I knew the parameters; no one could let me down, it was all to do with me. The only person who could let me down in the ring was myself. I couldn’t help but be drawn to that. There were no false promises any more.

My brothers had previously started boxing – indeed, Peter went on to beat Barry McGuigan in the Irishman’s fourth professional bout (McGuigan won the return match). So, I was already aware of the sport before I travelled to New York. I’d actually been in the ring before in the gym where my brothers used to train. However, these few fights were just tear-ups, kids scrapping. In one particular brawl with a kid called Matthew, I’d got badly smashed up: all my teeth were chipped and I was heavily bruised. That early exposure to the business was a very negative experience, which totally put me off boxing.

In New York, however, I was keen to get in shape. I started going to the Jerome Boxing Club, Westchester Avenue, South Bronx. It was a derelict building, so the gym fees were only $15 a month. However, this was money I just didn’t have. Fortunately, they let me be the ‘caretaker’ for the gym, which basically meant I swept the floors and put the buckets down to catch the rain that came through the roof – it was peppered with holes. I had the keys to the place, so I was always in there, seven days a week. Within three months of arriving in New York, I was in good physical condition. I was evolving into a very determined character.

After four months, I was asked if I wanted to spar. By now, I was very motivated so they put me in with a young man nicknamed Horse, a strong Puerto Rican. I got in there and throughout the first round he hit me relentlessly. The second round was the same, I could barely catch my breath. But in the third round, something important happened – I hit back. My competitive spirit in the ring had been awakened and from then on there was no stopping me.

Adonis Torres owned the gymnasium and was the first person who treated me with respect, like a man. He was effectively my first manager and really looked out for me in those early days. It was quite daunting in a Bronx gym at that age, being a foreign interloper with what was perceived as a peculiar way of speaking. They used to say, ‘This guy’s weird. He sounds like an English gentleman.’ Even though I came from south east London, I had been teaching myself better speech patterns, accents and articulation for some time. How I did that was by listening to the newsreaders on BBC1 and the World Service radio too. I copied them over and over until gradually it just became the way I spoke. I also learned by listening to how the Americans spoke English incorrectly.

So, at first, I was the new boy. However, I gradually became a more permanent fixture. I was there every day and over the next three and a half years, I watched fighters come and go, all the fly-by-nights, the triers, the posers, the good-looking guys with no heart, all of them. I was there throughout. I am often asked if I was ‘spotted’ as a prospective champion – the answer is no; I never even believed I was a good fighter myself.

I started to be drawn towards learning the art of boxing itself. I began to adore watching other fighters sparring. I loved to see them throw a left hook, take a body shot, go through their moves. The art is a beautiful thing once you can do it. I learned so much by watching other fighters. I don’t mean just in the ring either. How their personal lives impacted on their careers always compelled me. Really good fighters who were supposed to be going places would get caught up in complicated personal situations, and before you knew it, their aspirations were in tatters.