Sunshine & Shadow

by Larry Writer

  J.R.R. Tolkien was right. There is a fellowship of the ring. Boxers have a respect for each other that grows with the years, and mellows long after they’ve hung up their gloves. Like the Diggers and the Turks who fought at Gallipoli, men who have done battle in the ring have an abiding respect for each other. When old boxers get together we talk about our fights and the excitement of the lead-up, and the days and weeks of recuperation before preparing for the next contest. So raw are those experiences, so triumphant and in a way so sad, that the pride of having been a fighter stays with you as long as you live. I’m sure the gladiators of ancient times would have known what I’m talking about. I can put my hand on my heart and say that I’ve never met a boxer I didn’t like. In my years as a lawyer, I’ve acted for many, like Jeff Harding, whose life went off the rails when their boxing days ended. A boxing career is a hard act to follow and there is something about us that makes others try to take advantage of us. How many of us end up down and out? Sadly, plenty.

  I’ve been known to while away many pleasant hours in my cafés of choice in Darlinghurst talking boxing. I enjoy reminiscing about old fights and the grand men who fought them. Sometimes, though, boxing being what it is, it attracts dodgy people. There are the rip-off merchants, and there are the bullshit artists.

  Not long ago a bunch of us were sitting around in a café and the talk was all about Jeff Harding. I said I’d fought him in 1986. Suddenly a bloke I hadn’t met before piped up, ‘I fought Harding, too.’

  ‘Did you? Really?’ I said, genuinely interested. ‘Where and when? As a pro or an amateur?’ I wasn’t trying to catch him out, I just wanted to hear his story.

  At this, and on further questioning from me, the bloke started to backtrack. It turned out he’d never fought Jeff at all. There was a remote chance that he may have hit the bag with him once, but I reckon there was plenty of doubt about that as well. I was gentle with him and didn’t expose him as the fraud he was. He knew, though, that I knew he was lying.

  Boxing opened up a new world for me. It introduced me to a lot of people: some salt-of-the-earth good people, and a few not so good, but that’s the nature of that game. It’s very attractive, very dramatic and there’s a romance about fighting, the brutality, the risk of danger and death, that attracts people from the respectable and from the shady side of the street. Next time you’re at a boxing match or watching on TV, take a look at the blokes at ringside. There’ll be celebrities, sports stars, crims, everyday people from all walks of life, all mixed in together, come to see two blokes getting stuck in. My theory is that boxing connects us with something in our psyche that comes from the kill-or-be-killed days of our caveman ancestors.

  I was lucky. Look at me today and you can tell my nose has been broken and I’ve got a couple of scars on my face. My joints are stiff in the morning. Other than that, touch wood, there’s been no lasting damage. To my way of thinking, my few ailments are a price I’m happy to pay for the experiences, the glory and the trophies and medals that came my way.

  What is it like to fight in the ring? This is something I’m often asked. Scratch the surface and most blokes would have liked to have stepped into the ring and duked it out. As one who did it many times, I can say that boxing is the hardest, most primeval, of sports. One man pitted against another, each trying to vanquish the other. Each fighter is representing himself, his family, friends and culture. There’s nowhere to hide. Boxing is about overwhelming your opponent physically and mentally and laying him low. It’s about fighting on, even though a blow to the head has your senses reeling and rocking and you are in terrible pain from a kidney punch that will have you pissing blood for days afterwards. Defeat can be ignominious, you’re bloodied, you’ve been knocked off your feet and are lying prone on the canvas, or you’re standing there defenceless as the other fellow unloads on you again and again, trying to keep your wits about you just enough to get your head out of the way of his fists as he tries to finish you off. My attitude was always: someone’s gonna get hurt tonight and it ain’t gonna be me. But of course no boxer wins every fight. Every man who fights sustains damage, sometimes serious damage.

  But, can I tell you, to me the toughest person in the world is not a boxer. It’s the person who drags himself or herself out of bed at six every morning to go to work to support themselves and their loved ones. That’s real toughness. That’s real courage. That’s what Mum did for us. James is doing it now. My brother followed my boxing career, and told me how proud he was of me for being brave enough to be a fighter. I told him, ‘Brother, that’s nothin’. You’re the one who made a career out of hard work and being responsible. I’m proud of you.’

  A fear came over me when I finished boxing in 1996. I was only thirty-one. What would I do now? No more training five days a week. My law studies had ended too. Now that I was a qualified barrister, Chris Murphy was keen for me to continue working with him. While grateful for everything Chris had done for me, and loving him as a mate and mentor, I was feeling it was time to break away and try to make it on my own by establishing my own law firm. It may sound funny, but I was also loving my work sweeping the streets. I enjoyed being out and about in inner Sydney in the early morning. I enjoyed the company of the homeless people I met on my rounds. What, I thought, if I continued doing that, and spent the rest of the day representing my own clients? And, to be honest, there was a part of me lusting after the long hours I’d have to myself so I could do some serious drinking.

  I tried to focus on what would be best for me. I came to believe that it was right to leave Chris. Working in law at Chris’s level is a hard gig. It’s so aggressive and so competitive and the lawyers in his firm were always undercutting each other and trying to make themselves look better for the boss at each other’s expense. That was done to me many times, and I had screaming matches with Chris when it did. We were still mates, but professionally our relationship was becoming strained.

  For example, I was to appear in court for a client of Chris who had been charged with impersonating a police officer. I said to a colleague who was helping me prepare the case, ‘Mate, I’m going to need the law on this.’

  The colleague replied, ‘Aw … just tell Chris the case turns on its facts.’ (‘Get me the law’ means digging up precedents of similar cases to use in formulating a defence to put before the judge and jury; ‘the case turns on the facts’ is lawyer-speak for simply handling the matter on its particular merits without recourse to documentation on anything that has happened in the past. Obviously, a case handled ‘on the facts’ is easier to assemble than one handled utilising ‘the law’.)

  I said, ‘Chris is not going to wear that.’

  He said, ‘Do as I say, tell Chris the case turns on the facts. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been doing this for a long time.’ I shrugged and thought because this bloke was more experienced than me he was right. He wasn’t right, he was lazy.

  I had dinner with Chris the night before I was to stand up in court and defend our client. Everything was fine between us until we started to discuss the case. I outlined my strategy for the following day in court. Chris said, ‘Where’s the law on this, Steve?’

  ‘Sunshine,’ I said, ‘it turns on the facts.’

  ‘It fuckin’ what?’

  I said, knowing now that I should have followed my instincts and not listened to my colleague, ‘It turns on the facts.’

  Chris shouted at me, ‘You’ve been a lawyer for three minutes! That’s not long, but it’s long enough to know you don’t take short cuts in my firm! You tell me this case turns on its facts? Who do you think you are!’

  It wasn’t my way to blame my colleague for talking me out of what I knew was right. I took Chris’s wrath fairly on the chin, and I deserved it.

  Chris continued to give me both barrels. ‘You don’t want to work, do you? Listen, I’ll get someone else for the case. In fact, come in tomorrow and clean out your desk. I don’t want you working for me anymore.’

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p; I stood up from my chair. ‘I’ll do better than that, Chris,’ I said, my voice now raised too. ‘I fuckin’-well quit right now! You can go back to the office and dump all my files in the rubbish bin!’

  We went at each other there in the restaurant and then on Oxford Street. We damn near came to blows. Luckily, for both of us, I kept my cool and stalked off home to bed.

  Next morning, Vince Murphy, Chris’s brother who also worked in the firm and was a good mate, telephoned me and said, ‘Just lie low, Steve. You know what Chris is like. He’ll get over it in a day or two and welcome you back to the fold.’

  For a while I was euphoric that I’d made the break from Chris Murphy, then I realised that I owed that bloke so much, and I had made a career being on his team, and so a couple of days later I slunk back to the office ready to work and hoping he hadn’t done what I’d told him to do and trashed my files. I hated coming back with my tail between my legs but figured it was for the best. True to what Vince said, when Chris saw me he flashed me a smile as if our screaming match had never happened. Everything continued the same as before yet, undeniably, something had come between us.

  I still wanted to move on, and I had decided to do so. All that was keeping me there was my gratitude to Chris and my weekly salary. By continuing to work with Chris I was living a lie. Like the hypocrite in the T.S. Eliot poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, I was putting on a false face to be what others expected me to be.

  I have never been a hypocrite. Soon, I resigned and started out on my own. I hung out my shingle, Stephen Dack & Associates, in Elizabeth Street in the city. You do what you need to do to survive and to live your life.

  For the next six years, I handled many cases. Some of my clients had been charged with serious crimes, mostly they were in strife for drunkenness, drugs, fighting, petty fraud. When they could afford to pay me I took their money, when they couldn’t I handled their case for nothing. I gave every case my best shot. Some days, my best was better than others. Too many times I turned up in court still stinking of alcohol from the night before, my shirt wet with the booze that was streaming through the pores of my skin, my head throbbing and my throat parched, my knuckles bruised from hitting someone or something. My thoughts fixed firmly on my next drink.

  [JAMES]

  personal property

  To buy my first home, a modest Federation semi in Dangar Street, Randwick, in 1986, I borrowed the deposit at a cheap rate of interest thanks to Steve, who was then working at the building society. I was determined to have my own home. My whole life until then had been lived with the fear of homelessness hanging over my head. I was always frightened by the very real possibility that I, and the ones who were dear to me, could be evicted by the Housing Commission or a landlord who decided he wanted to increase the rent. I didn’t want outsiders having any say in how I would live my life. I had a burning desire to control my destiny. I bought the house a year or so before the housing boom, and almost overnight it was worththree times what I’d paid.

  The year I bought my first home, I was twenty-five and still working at the New South Wales Department of Health in the Industrial Relations Division co-ordinating the state’s hospital payrolls. I had a staff of five and my department ran like clockwork, despite it being a survival-of-the-fittest environment where you had to be tough enough to stand up for yourself and your staff. I made sure that employees in the hospital system got paid on time and they got paid the correct sum. I was well respected for my hard work, fairness and efficiency and my bosses told me I had a long career in hospital administration stretching out in front of me. For the first time in my life I had some money to spend on things other than the bare essentials.

  Starting in 1987, John McGrath, from touch footy, had been turning up in my office in the McKell Building in Rawson Place in the city. Without checking to see if I was busy or not, and oblivious to the forty or so staffers bustling around in the open-plan office, he’d stroll in and plump down in the chair by my desk and just sit there, looking around. I’d keep working until I couldn’t ignore him any longer and say, ‘What’s up?’

  When he talked, the subject was usually his fledgling Paddington real estate and property management business. His father had died and John used his inheritance to set up Goodhope Real Estate. It was a small and struggling outfit that bought and sold Eastern Suburbs property on behalf of clients, but specialised in Paddington, the suburb that over the century had been in and out of fashion, but was currently in demand for its beautiful old terrace houses and proximity to the city. John had an incredible desire to be successful.

  After a number of John’s visits it became very clear to me that he wanted me to pack in my job and join him. One day he came right out and said, ‘Leave the Department of Health. Join me and you’ll be really busy.’ This struck me as strange: here I was with work up to my ears and here was John able to take the time to come into my office and sit for hours. It occurred to me too, not for the first time, that he took his energy from me. He’d come in slumped and down in the mouth and leave with a spring in his step, ready to go back to selling houses.

  While resisting his invitation to join him full time— what he was offering was not quite compelling enough for me to switch careers at this stage—I agreed to help him out as a trainee salesman at house openings on weekends when I was free. He offered to pay me $100 a weekend. I needed a car to get around the city, and I didn’t have one, so I took $60 from my $100 pay and hired one on the days I worked for John. I also paid a mate $50 from time to time to borrow his wheels.

  One day I attended a function held by the Real Estate Institute and I noticed in the car park that these real estate salesmen all drove expensive cars: BMWs, Mercedes, new Volvos, Jags. Having just met a number of them I knew for a fact that most of them weren’t exactly Rhodes Scholars. I wondered what kind of money they were earning selling houses that could pay for such expensive cars. Whatever they were being paid on commission, it was far more than I was getting in the public service.

  After a while I realised that the key to selling a house was to do your homework, become an expert on the property you’re selling and the state of the market in the neighbourhood. I pored through documentation of past sales, boned up on the council doings, and jogged through the streets of Paddo and Woollahra for my exercise so I knew the best and the worst streets and could explain exactly why.

  Steve was helping out then too, and for a while he was flatting with John. My brother came in handy. As John’s business started to take off, along with the burgeoning housing market in Sydney’s east, Paddington in particular, John was targeted by rival agents trying to scare him off. They’d ring him at home and threaten to send him broke. If these callers were very unlucky Steve would pick up the phone. Steve eats people who make threats for breakfast.

  I found that I had a talent for the real estate game. Even though helping John was just a part-time sideline to my work running the state’s hospital payroll, and my brief was simply to show people around at openings and try to get a sale, I knew as much about my role as any full-time sales person. And I was always completely straight with customers.

  I was fortunate enough at this stage of my life to luck upon another wonderful mentor. Margaret Hargreaves is the mother of a girl I went out with. Margaret owns hotels, and when I was starting in real estate she was so generous to me with her knowledge of business and of life. She taught me that it is possible to work hard and maintain high standards, and still have a good time.

  John McGrath and I were very different from each other in many ways which was somehow good for the business. His was a ‘scripts and dialogues, audio tapes and motivational videos’ approach, mine was a more ‘life experience, play it by ear’ approach.

  We were a good team, and inevitably because I was landing sales and he was getting positive feedback about me from clients, he increased the pressure on me to join him full time. I was still reluctant. I had worked hard to establish myself at the D
epartment of Health and I derived satisfaction from the work I did there. John wasn’t generating a lot of money then, but he was confident it was only a matter of time before Goodhope Real Estate became a major player. Then, he said, there would be lots of money coming in, and I could earn a good chunk of it as a real estate agent being paid a 2 per cent commission for every house sold. ‘ The harder you work,’ John assured me, ‘the more you get paid.’ Now, that appealed. I wanted to control my own destiny. I thought constantly of the pot of gold at the end of John’s rainbow, the nice car, the overseas holidays, the exciting lifestyle I had never in my life enjoyed. I kept asking myself, What if?

  One day in 1989, when I was thinking hard about my future – should I stay with the Health Department or should I join John? – I had an epiphany. I arrived at work, and as I looked around the big open-plan office I literally saw thick, grey cobwebs enveloping all my workmates, their desks, their computers. It gave me a huge jolt and I realised it was a sign. I suddenly knew with crystal clarity that I was wasting my life staying in a safe but non-challenging job. I owed it to myself, and to my mother’s memory, to go for it and try to be the best I could be. The timing was not wonderful. The stock market had recently crashed and taken the real estate market with it. Tycoons such as Alan Bond and the other daring entrepreneurs of the 1980s were reportedly on their uppers, and waterfront properties on Sydney Harbour foreshores which yesterday had been worth $10 million or $15 million, were today worth $2 million. Nevertheless, my mind was made up. I resigned and went to work with John. He and I were in the same boat: we had big dreams and not a lot of money.