I MISSED the carnival in Texas last Friday and every single one of the sideshow attractions that made it.
It would have sat well with some of the crazier nights watched from ringside in the boxing business. It was bigger, there was more money, but it was not unique. We have loved a farce forever in our dear, dirty sport.
At a night club in Essex in about 1997, I went to watch the King of Tenerife Doors – there was a belt, honest – fight the uncrowned king of filming small-hall shows, Eric Guy. As far as I remember, there was no belt on the line.
Guy had dropped a bit of weight, but not much and entered the ring in a t-shirt. His opponent, and I have no recollection of his name, had beaten Blaine Logsdon in some type of Hardman tournament in the Canary Islands. I’m not inventing this, it happened. Logsdon lost 22 of his 48 professional fights but had stopped Crawford Ashley at one point. He was tough and anybody that had beaten him, deserved a bit of respect. Well, that was the sensible thinking.
On the night, with a standing-room only and heavily fueled crowd, Guy boxed his ears off and the man was a lump. The place was like a Guy Ritchie film set; Turki Alalshikh would have loved it. It was, all jokes aside, a bit tricky inside the club and leaving at midnight took a bit of guile.
For fun, the night the Pink Pounder fought at the Cafe Royal on a White-Collar show was ridiculous. It is said tickets for the dinner-boxing event were changing hands for five grand. The Pounder was a very popular boy and very gay. “I’m a boxer, who happens to be gay,” he told us at the time. “Not a gay man, who happens to be a boxer.”
His name was Charles Jones, and it was hard to judge him on his talents; he was not a great fighter, but he was brave on both sides of the ropes. Alan Lacey (he makes two appearances in this column), the promoter, had trouble finding an opponent. In the end, Lacey had to hire a real boxer from the St. Pancras club to hold the Pounder up. There was bedlam in the Cafe Royal that night. It never ended well.
And then there was a standing-only night at the Brixton Academy in the summer of 1993. Now, this night is so famous that some people insist it never happened. Well, it certainly did, and it was under British Boxing Board of Control rules. I use the word ‘control’ and ‘rules’ loosely, trust me. Once again, Lacey was at the very centre of the chaos and fun.
It was called Boxmania, named by the show’s producer, Ambrose Mendy. Lacey was the first-time promoter. On the night, over 2,000 walked up and paid. There were claims of sabotage and intimidation of anybody attached to the promotion. Mendy and Lacey were fuming, a great pantomime double act and there were threats that just about every man and his dog would be sued for interference. It was gold, funny stuff.
There were six official and sanctioned fights, and one exhibition. There was an announcer somewhere hidden high in the roof of the Academy, who used the crystal-clear sound system to count whenever a boxer was dropped; the members of the Board spent all night trying to locate him. They never found the voice.
Kirkland Laing, Ross Hale, Gary Stretch and Justin Fortune all had wins. The hidden MC gave it plenty; it was still good to watch Laing, even at the end of his career. Laing fought just three more times. I saw Lacey running around at the start of the show and he looked under pressure – the Board were demanding the location of the unseen and booming voice; the fighters and officials were demanding their money.
In the ring, the Beast arrived. John Mugabi was hoping to have a sanctioned fight, but had to settle for an exhibition against Andy Wright. Now, Wright was a tough man and proud and local. So, you know that this does not end nicely. This was never going to be one of those sunny-side-up exhibitions.
Wright had been in slugfests with John Kaighin and Steve McCarthy; he was not a loser. Mugabi had been a world champion, had been in the war with Marvin Hagler, but had not fought since losing to Gerald McClellan at the Royal Albert Hall in 1991. He was still dangerous and wild. There was a real edge in the Academy when the bell sounded.
The Board’s referee, Larry O’Connell, knew from the start that it was no exhibition. Larry did his best to keep it clean and calm; no chance and in the third he stopped it. It was brutal, but elsewhere in the Academy there was real drama: Alan Lacey, under pressure and in possession of all the door money, had gone out for fresh air and vanished. It was a “hey presto” moment in the Brixton night, not a good place for magic.
Had he been kidnapped by rivals? Had he been mugged? He was still missing when the lights came on. At that point, only a few men had been paid. It was a long night of searching for all those involved. It was a truly mesmerising circus.
Thankfully, Lacey was found the next day. He had been to hospital overnight, he was dehydrated, mentally and physically drained, he had heart palpitations and, thankfully, he still had the man-bag packed with cash. The boxers and officials all got paid. Boxmania was retired forever, Mugabi would win the Australian super-middleweight title a few years later, Lacey quit the promotional game to open a gym, Mendy is still ringside. That was, trust me, a carnival night.
