When I stopped and looked down at him lying there I knew that the fight was over and he wouldn’t be coming back for more. His mate steps forward and shouts that the fight is over. At this point I’m so psyched up that I just want to fight them all. I go into them all, calling them on all the time. One steps forward and I bang him straight out. I side kick the second into the wall and the third I knock straight out. My friends pull me out and I start to calm down, I switch back to Mr Nice Guy mode and things are okay once more. The one thing that has changed was that people treated me with respect and they saw the other side of me, which sometimes has to happen. Once relaxed I find I’m covered from head to toe in blood, in fact even my socks are soaked in blood. Sometimes on the door you have to be an animal, you can’t always be the nice guy because some people see kindness as a sign of weakness.
I tell my mate Wayne that I know there will be comebacks, maybe not off Shaun but I just had this sneaky feeling. It’s two nights later and I’m in the pub having an active night again, I’ve been involved in about five fights and thrown a few out as well. What I didn’t know was that three of the lads who I threw out were friends of Shaun’s. I got called to The G, so I run down the underpass and get to the pub. Once I get there I spot Shaun’s mates sitting there, feet up on the table, with grins on their faces, thinking I’m not going to throw them out. I walked up and told them that their sort was not wanted in the pub, so they can leave. They didn’t even look up, one of them told me to fuck off and they just sat there. I grab the biggest one in a leg lock and drag him off his chair, his big head hits the floor and he’s out cold, job done. I drag him to the door and throw him out, next thing his mates have jumped me. They hold me tight between them; don’t ask me how I got out of their grip but I somehow managed it. I step back into the doorway and the two guys both try to grab me at the same time; this time there’s no room and they both collide with each other. I throw two hooks at them, one each, and they don’t know what’s hit them. Funny thing was that when they both fell to the floor knocked out, they fell at the same time, just like some comedy act.
As I’m lifting them out I get a call to go to The R, so off I run back down the underpass. I turn up and there’s two guys going for it. I start to get things cooled down when I feel something just miss the back of my head. One of the guys fighting had tried to smash a bottle down on my skull. I turn around and both of the guys who had been fighting were coming for me. Wayne, my mate, runs in and smashes one of them to the ground and proceeds to choke him out. I’m left with the arsehole with the bottle. A crowd have gathered around me, tables have gone up and people are screaming like mad; all the time this guy is approaching with the bottle. I’m moving back, ducking the bottle and waiting for a chance to take him out. This guy is hellbent on doing me some serious damage. All of a sudden he pulls his arm back to strike and I’m on him. I hit him straight in the throat with the back of my hand, he drops the bottle and clutches his throat. He coughs out blood where I ruptured him. I finger-jab him in the eyes and deliver a full-force kick to his nuts. Remember this guy wanted to hurt me bad so that’s what I do to him, I think it’s only fair. I axe-kick him to the head and chest. A few good kicks and he’s out for the night, leaving me once again covered in blood. You wouldn’t believe my cleaning bill, cost me a small fortune.
Working the doors as much as we were, it was inevitable that we would get comebacks. People you had thrown out or knocked out sometimes just wouldn’t leave things lie, so you would be constantly looking over your shoulder when you were out on the street. Wayne and myself stopped off one night and got some chips to take home. All of a sudden this car screeches up and this big fucker jumps out. He starts to shout and tells us what he and his lads are going to do to us. We had no idea who he was but gathered he may have been a friend of someone we had trouble with. He puts his hand into his coat and we jump back a bit, not knowing what he has under there – a knife or maybe a gun? Somebody shouts that the police are coming and he gets into his car shouting that he would be back for us and shoots off down the road. Wayne and myself are left there dumbfounded, we have no idea who he was but knew he was big trouble. After a good talk Wayne and myself decide to track him down and visit him before he visits us.
A few days go by and we finally find out where he lives and drive down to his place. His car was outside, so we gathered he was in. It’s about eleven o’clock at night when we knock his door. He opens the door and stands there in shock to see we are there; they never like it when you track them down, it makes them feel so vulnerable. As he starts to speak, we both throw a punch at him and both connect, sending him to the floor. I step in and start booting the hell out of him, splattering the doorframe with his blood. After a while I stop and look down to see that he’s out and in a terrible state – it’s only what he would have liked to have done to us. That was the last time we ever saw him. Thing is, these people like to come looking for you but it sometimes comes back to haunt them.
At this point of my life I’m training really hard. Each day Wayne and myself work out. We did all sorts of training, from boxing through the different martial arts. People always wanted to know how I progressed so fast with each different style, well what I did was to find the best in each style and train one-on-one with each of them. Some of the styles were similar so I picked them up quite quick. The best days for me were the “animal days” where a few of us would really go for it. We would go for each other just like a street attack, only just pulling back the punches and kicks. We would attack each other with such venom but we were in the business of fighting and had to experience it from all angles. It may seem mad for people to watch us spar barefist but it’s what we needed. All this training and the fact that I was using the skills on the door got me more and more work. The phone would ring each day with offers of new doors to run.
We got a call to run the door at a place in Chalk Hill, London. We had to look after this community centre where they were holding this Pakistani festival. Now I know that doesn’t seem a violent situation but when you realise the centre was just across the road from an Afro-Caribbean housing estate with a history of violence with the Asian community, you can understand the pressure we were under.
The whole day is going well, we are having a good time eating food and enjoying the job but never leaving our guards down. All of a sudden the glass in the front door is blasted through with a shotgun. Glass is flying everywhere, cutting everyone near the door. We get some of the kids down on the floor to safety as a large gang of coloured guys break in to fight the Asians. They have baseball bats, hockey sticks and weapons of all sorts. I can’t say this didn’t scare me because it bloody well did. I had been taught gun disarmament before and was trying to work out how to get to the guy with the gun. About this time a large gang of Asian lads come running down the stairs all tooled up – don’t forget there were about 650 Asians in the building and we were trapped between both gangs. Somebody makes for the guy with the gun and he almost takes his head off, he’s down and beaten to a pulp. We are also being attacked by the Asians who we were supposed to be looking after; it’s just one mass brawl. There were fights everywhere. We were ducking bottles, chair legs and any other weapon that they could use. I’m knocking out people left, right and centre. I’ve got lumps and cuts all over me. Then the police turn up. The fights stop and the crowd starts to disperse. The police take a look around at all the mess. We of course tell them nothing, and they leave. Now that was the first instance with a gun and I must admit it scared the life out of me. Any man who says a gun don’t scare them is a liar.
What you must remember here is that I’m not a violent man. In most cases I try to talk people out of the fight yet I was having four to five fights each night of the week. Sometimes I would be out walking the street and someone would start and most were big-name fighters who wanted to take me out. It’s like the old scenario with the gunslingers in the Wild West, someone was always waiting to see how good I was. I couldn’t go
anywhere with my family without having to fight. They didn’t care who I was with or where I was, walking the street was just the same as running the door. I had to weigh everybody up and take on all comers. Funny thing is I can’t remember one of them being smaller than me, always the big bullies who thought I would make the perfect victim.
There were also some people who thought they could take the door off me; they could see how quiet the place was and would think that they could handle the job. What they didn’t realise was that I may have been fighting all the hardest in that area for months to get the place that quiet. I was working this one place on my own as usual and that’s the way I preferred it, I had got the place in order and earned the respect of the customers. People came to the door and spoke to me politely before entering, sometimes stopping to pass the time of day with me. Two big lads turned up one night, both wearing these big, long, crombie-type coats. I think they thought of themselves as gangsters. They both stood by the door, blocking it. One asked if I was Andre and I told him I was. All the time, I’m watching them, taking into account their body language and the fact that they were very big, rough-looking fuckers.
“Come in lads, if you want to,” I politely tell them.
“Nah, it’s okay mate, we’ve come to take the door off you,” the bigger of the two growled at me.
I’m a little shocked, to say the least, when the other one tells me, “We are going to take over a few doors around here and yours is the first to go.”
There’s no amount of training that could prepare me for a scene like this, so I reply to them, “Come on guys, I’ve worked hard for this door and there’s no way I’m giving it up. Anyway, how the hell are you two going to take it?”
They looked down at me and the biggest says, “We aren’t going to take it, he is.” With that, they separate and standing behind them is what I can only describe as Frankenstein’s monster. He made the other two look like little boys, he was one of the biggest men I have ever seen in my life. His face was scarred all over the shop, he was a giant of a man standing there looking down at me full of hatred, clenching and unclenching his massive battered fists. I won’t kid you, I’ll tell you the truth, I just didn’t want to be there, I really didn’t, but I wasn’t walking away. The whole pub was watching all this, nobody moved, they couldn’t believe what was going down, and this was straight out of the Hammer House of Horrors. As you know, I’m not a big guy but I felt microscopic next to this monster.
The monster tells me, “Little guy, I’m going to piss on you.”
“Okay, I know I have to fight but let’s keep it like gentlemen, let’s shake first,” I say to the monster.
He puts out his bear paw hand to shake mine. I pull him forward and release a cracking head-butt and an elbow shot to the temple. He’s sort of staggering, half down but still on his feet, I keep the pressure on and keep hitting him with my elbow and hands. One eye socket is bust wide open with blood shooting into the air, but he still hasn’t gone down yet. I step back and hook-kick his leg, which sends him crashing down onto the pavement. I stamp on his hands until they break, his head is bust open and he is screaming for me to stop. The whole pub now comes out to back me up, and the other two drag him away as I’m being held back by the customers. Now I’m going completely berserk and I’m trying to break free to batter the other two. As they disappear around the corner I start to cool down, and I’m sane again.
I look down at the floor and I notice the whole alleyway is soaked in blood, even a trail where they dragged him around the corner. I’m thinking, if the police turn up I’m in deep shit, so I grab a mop and bucket and start to clean all the blood away. This was taking ages and all the time I’m thinking that if I carry on like this my life is never going to change for the better. There’s only so much a man can take. I had a wife and kids to look after. If I weren’t fighting I was paying the scumbags home visits, constantly in fight mode. The troublemakers even came onto my wife when I wasn’t there. I was planning to get out of the game as soon as I could.
Some of the drug dealers would try anything to get me on their side. A guy comes onto me one night and tells me my dad nearly got jumped. He tells me that two scumbags tried to sell my dad drugs and were planning to do him over, seems he was lucky this guy knew he was my dad and stopped the whole thing. Well, I thank him but I do some research and find he sent the guys onto my old man just to make it look like he was a hero and I’d owe him big time. Don’t get me wrong here, my dad could still fight even though he was now a lot older, but in that area if he had laid into them loads of scumbags from the flats nearby would have come out and attacked my dad.
I’m in the Vine Street Community Centre one night and I’m looking for this dread-locked druggie who said he helped my dad. I know he’s in the toilets so I enter and kick the cubicle door in, to find him and two mates cutting up their drugs. Now he still thinks I’m his big mate, and he’s smiling at me and greeting me as if I’m his long lost brother. I call him outside the cubicle and inform him that I know the truth and he is a liar and a scumbag. I throw a straight right and it takes his head right back, two more for good measure and he’s out. I knock one of his mates out and the other is crying like a child not to be hit. On top of the toilet I find a huge pile of powder that they were cutting up. I get it all and flush it down the toilet. A few well-aimed punches and I leave the toilets. In the corridor I shout to all the other dealers there, “There’s one of your men smashed up in there and if you want to know who did it, it’s me, and I’ll do the same to any one of you who touches my dad or who I catch dealing in here.” They all stop what they are doing and listen to what I tell them: “Some of you I get on with, others I don’t. Just remember, if you get me in a gang I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
The reason I stopped the door work was because of my wife and kids. I had been running this really rough door and one night before I left for work my wife says to me, “Andre, before you go to work tonight would you please write a letter for the kids explaining why you do the work you do, because one night you’re not going to come home and I don’t want to be the one to tell them why you are what you are.” Now I didn’t listen at first but later on I’d got a little trouble in the club. There was this big, really nice guy by the bar and he was having a good time. Before we could react, this bunch of lads jumped him. There were so many of them jumping on this guy, we were in trying our best but there was so many of them. A new doorman had started that night and he got slashed from ear to ear. The police came and stood outside in riot gear doing nothing but watching us three doormen fight with this, by now, huge gang. We somehow, God knows how, stopped the fight and got them out. The new doorman was sent to hospital along with the first guy who got battered, and I’m looking at my wage packet, looking at the blood-stained floor and rubbing the gash on my head where I had been bottled. Then I remember what my wife said, and packed in the door work for good. I came home to the wife and told her that I was finished on the door. Of course, she had heard it all before but this time I was serious. After ten years on the door I just had to get away and spend more time with my kids.
Now, I’ve worked the doors for years and along the way I’ve collected 16 black belts in various styles, which came in handy many nights. I’m a trained bodyguard and qualified to train others as well. I’ve looked after loads of top celebrities, the downside being that I’ve had contracts put on me, death threats from major drug dealers, been shot at more than once, I’ve been in more life-threatening situations than I can count. A few book companies have expressed an interest in my life story, which I plan to get down on paper very soon. I sometimes travel the world teaching combat styles to various military personnel from Special Forces units. You could say I’ve had a full life, not always a happy one but a full one. At the end of the day I’m still here with my beautiful wife and able to watch my beautiful children grow up which, if we all get our priorities right, is the reason we are all here.
DON LEWIS
/> Tredegar, Wales
Truly one of the old school, Don was born in 1934 and, from the earliest age, all he wanted to do was fight in the ring. A travelling man known as the “Corring Mush”(“Fighting Man”), his lifetime of fisticuffs, both in and out of the fairground booth, could not be further removed from the devotion he has for his family.
I AM FROM Tredegar originally and from a fighting family. My mother died when I was young and I never knew my father. My grandmother adopted us and brought us up. I went to one school and some kids tried to knock my sister about, so that’s when I started to fight. Then when we moved to a different school, I always fought the top boys. When I left school I couldn’t read or write, I just wanted to fight all the time, never wanted to do anything else but be a boxer. I went to Jack Phillips to teach me to box. He was an old-time boxer, and fought some good guys. They put me in with this kid called Rocky who I beat after three hard rounds. They said I was just lucky at the time but I told them it wasn’t luck.
I was working down the pits at the time when the boxing booth came to Ebbw Vale. I went straight down to it, never knew anything about it or even who to speak to. I spoke to Ron Taylor, the owner of the booth, and asked if there was a chance I could have a go. They wanted to know if I could box, so I told them, “I can’t box but I can fight and can take anything you give and still come back.” Ron said, “There’s a boy here you can fight and if you’re any good I will give you a job.” The boy’s name was Johnny Arrow, a boxer from Croydon. I didn’t know who the hell he was but I still beat him. Mind you, I had to put some time into him to do it.
After the fight, I said to Mr Taylor, “Well how about the job now then?”
Streetfighters: Real Fighting Men Tell Their Stories Page 8
