Ungloved by Benjamin Calder-Smith

Author:Benjamin Calder-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

Colin McMillan

BOXING has always been a constant for me. My first experience of the sport was when I was aged eight. My eldest brother took me to the ABC cinema on central London’s Kings Road to watch the third instalment of the Rocky Balboa story. Waiting for the bus home afterwards, I was shadow-boxing with a lamppost and planting my dynamite-laden little hands into my brother’s palms. I was hooked. Four years later, I saw the Larry Holmes–Michael Spinks rematch on TV with both of my brothers and I sat there watching and wondering, at just 12 years of age, what it was about the sport that had my attention. I continued to watch the occasional fight but it was only with the Mike Tyson–James ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith WBC and WBA heavyweight unification title clinch in March 1987 that it became a serious hobby of mine.

The irony of a 12-round cure for insomnia igniting the eternal flame that fuelled my boxing obsession was not lost on me. Some of my years at boarding school were hard. Boxing was my comfort blanket and my source of escapism. It seemed only fitting, therefore, that on 22 May 1991, less than a week before I left the school which I never felt particularly happy in, I was sitting in my room watching a British featherweight title fight which kicked off a year during which Britain could boast one of its brightest stars and etch into my memory a string of performances that bordered on near-perfection. That performance in May 1991 is as vivid now as it was back then, over 22 years ago. When Colin ‘Sweet C’ McMillan told me he had picked up an ankle injury shortly before stepping into the ring that night, it enhanced my view that, back in 1991, Britain had a genuine star emerging to challenge the featherweight division’s front-runners.

As his book, Fight The Power, illustrates, Colin McMillan had his targets in clear focus and his resolve developed into a formidable foe for those who wished to attempt exploiting him, selling him cheap or putting the sport’s businessmen and back-room negotiators before him when handing out the financial fruits of labour. In detailing his encounter with the American promoter Don King, whom McMillan and his friend and confidante, the late Jonathan Rendall, went to visit after his win over Sean Murphy, McMillan came away from the meeting having had his ears assaulted with a relentless barrage of propagandist spiel. It amounted to an impressive display of showmanship but as McMillan wrote in his book, ‘There had been no mention of how much money we would earn, how long the contract would be for or even who I would fight.’

‘Before I turned pro,’ McMillan said to me as we drank coffee in Rowan’s cafe on Barkingside High Street, ‘I spoke to as many fighters and ex-champions as I could to try and find out their life stories and their experiences. They all had stories to tell about how they had been misused, abused and sometimes taken liberty of.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.