Memoirs of a Karate Fighter (7 page)

Ewart's arrogance, on and off the mat, had won him few friends. There were many, even amongst his admirers, who wanted him taken down a peg or two. A great roar went up as the referee's hand shot skywards to indicate a full point had been awarded. I began to worry that Ewart's dented pride was about to get him disqualified as he sought vengeance, leaving all the pressure on me to re-establish the lead. From behind me I heard Leslie making no attempt to hide his amusement: he could tell what was to follow. The fight only lasted another thirty seconds. Ewart scored three full points, the last one an excessively powerful punch to the solar plexus that folded his opponent as if he were made of paper. He returned to the team still scowling and when he glared at me I understood his unspoken command: nothing but an emphatic victory would suffice.

I was to face their best competition exponent. He had won several tournaments and had a reputation for being cunning and cagey. In many ways he epitomized the nature of his club: point-scoring was everything. The contrast in the ethos of the two clubs was illustrated when he had once made the mistake of visiting the YMCA and asking Declan Byrne to spar with him; the competitor had no chance against a fighter like Declan and he never returned to repeat his error of judgment.

My opponent started the bout by moving forward aggressively to intimidate me. I immediately reacted with a counterpunch that he just about
evaded. As my fist brushed the side of his head, his eyes betrayed a sudden hesitance. I pressed on, combining feet with fists in my attack. In desperation he lashed out with an open hand and caught me squarely in the mouth, pushing my upper lip against the sharp edges of my teeth. The referee halted the match and called for the doctor to examine the small gash at the edge of my mouth. The doctor placed a plaster on the wound as he announced that the cut would have to be stitched but it could wait until after the bout. The referee asked if I was okay to continue. I nodded, as I was sure I would have my opponent's measure once the bout restarted. The referee turned and gave a private warning about proper control to my opponent who then raised an apologetic hand in my direction. I merely glowered at him in response.

The delay in the resumption of the bout was agonizing for me. I felt embarrassed that I had been caught out by a technique that had caused me a disproportionate amount of damage when compared to its feeble execution. All I needed was the opportunity to make amends.

Sweating profusely, I worked hard, perhaps too hard, to land a technique, but he wouldn't stand and fight me and I failed to register a score. A bell sounded and a disembodied voice announced that there were thirty seconds remaining. Again I attacked and he retreated. Determined to win, I sprang forward and delivered a solid punch that landed just below his throat. He yelled out and confused me as I was sure the blow had landed away from his windpipe. Holding his fist in the air, he raced back to his line. The referee at first appeared confused, before he awarded a half point – to my opponent! Shocked, I looked back to my team, having no idea of what technique he was supposed to have landed on me. With only a few seconds left, he easily avoided my desperate attacks and won the bout.

The two remaining YMCA fighters, Hugo and Chester, won their fights, giving us a four-to-one victory but as I made my way over to the doctor to get my mouth stitched I felt deflated. Declan Bryne took the time to give me a few words of encouragement. “You learn more from your losses than you do from your wins,” he said, slapping my shoulders and drawing an admonishing glare from the doctor. “Don't worry, you were the better fighter, but he conned the referee. That kind of carry-on is why I packed up competing. When you've finished here, Ewart wants
to see you.”

He wandered off to watch the other semifinal in which our second team was facing the Shukokai club coached by Eddie Daniels. When the doctor had finished with me, I hesitated about going over to see Ewart. The feeling of dejection brought on by my defeat remained and, as I walked toward my cousin, Declan's words repeated over in my mind: “You learn more from your losses.”

To my surprise, Ewart was more reassuring than critical and told me that I had fought well all day. Like Declan, he thought my more experienced opponent had kidded the referee. It was approaching midnight as we went back into the almost empty arena for the final. Most of the spectators had already started their long journeys home, back to towns and cities across England, Scotland and Wales, as their teams had been eliminated. In the final, we were to face the Shukokai team, which included Livi Whyte, another Jamaican fighting for Britain, who had been a runner-up in the 1980 world championships. He was a popular man with the YMCA: tough and uncompromising, but always fair. By the time the teams lined up for the final I had already worked out where I had gone wrong in my only loss of the day. I knew my opponent but I had failed to block that out from my mind and unwittingly I had made allowances for his style – but that meant he had gained a psychological advantage and I had not fought in my usual way.

The next few minutes were a blur because I fought my final bout of the tournament in exactly the way I had been trained to do: without conscious thought and thereby allowing my body to react in the manner in which it had been conditioned over many years of practise. At the end of the bout the referee raised his hand in my direction and with that the YMCA had an unassailable lead.

Warm water cascading from a showerhead was the next thing I remembered. The banter in the changing area centred around Jerome's fight with Livi Whyte. It had been the fight of the championships. Jerome and Livi were friends and colleagues in the British team and knew each other very well. The Shukokai champion was a large man of immense strength and deceptive speed, and the fight had ebbed and flowed until a superbly timed front-hand punch from Jerome had upended the oncoming Livi and put more than two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle onto the flat of his back. The
YMCA teams had come first and third in the British Karate Federation Clubs' championships and even our fiercest rivals now had to concede that we were the best karate club in Britain.

THE MAIN BOILER lay dormant and awaiting its annual summer repairs. It stood, mostly obscured by shadows, in a small, isolated building that was a small distance from the main factory. An old mattress positioned on a mezzanine above and to the back of the boiler was the ideal location for what Mick Davies called ‘the retreat'. Impossible to see from the front of the boiler house, it was a site where a select few who knew about it recovered from a night out at a party, or rested bruised and aching limbs, or simply evaded work. I intended to stay right there for the afternoon after what had been a very tiring morning.

The day had started badly. A charge of adrenalin and the visions of victory had kept me awake for most of the night and I had only nodded off in the early hours. My alarm clock woke me with a jolt, and for the first time, I felt exactly where my opponents' blows had landed on my body as I eased my way out of bed. It was a small source of consolation that my sore mouth distracted me from the dull ache in my chest. But as the adrenalin had dissipated, I was left not only feeling pain but also drained of any enthusiasm for work; it was if I had awoken from an exciting dream and then stepped into someone else's drab and mundane life.

Mick couldn't get enough of the stories of the championships, including the one about how I got the stitches in my mouth. He found that one
to be a great source of entertainment but he was bewildered by how little I made of such an achievement and he constantly scolded me for not bringing in the winners' trophy for everyone to see. It was a tradition in the factory for the workers to bring in any sort of award they had won – usually they were for fishing or pigeon racing – and put them on display in the canteen. Finally, I had to put his mind at ease by revealing that it was more than likely that the local evening newspaper would publish a photograph and report of the YMCA's victory during the week. It was a source of irritation for Mick that the YMCA had shunned publicity for so long, and he had often commented that if his club had achieved a fraction of our victories the local newspapers and the various martial arts magazines would have been bombarded with reports of their triumphs at almost every major karate tournament in Britain. But it was not the way of the YMCA to court publicity. I did often wonder about the wisdom of such a strategy, especially when it seemed that every week I was reading of boastful karate instructors whose egos were only matched by their inflated, often self-awarded, grades in a magazine or local newspaper. From very early on, Eddie Cox and the other senior members had decided on a course that relied on actions speaking louder than words. At the YMCA, victories were accorded the briefest of handshakes when back at the
dojo
– although a first win by a junior member was usually given a mention at the start of the following session – and then it was on with the training, the grinding and repetitive training.

“That means everyone will see you,” said Mick, on hearing of the probable visit by the local press.

“Only if they buy the newspaper,” I said.

“Well then,” he said, as though I had just proved his point, “you might as well bring in the trophy tomorrow and give us all a look.”

I refused. The last thing I needed was questions regarding the ‘karate chops' that featured in ‘Hai Karate' aftershave adverts, or the supposed martial arts expertise of David Carradine, star of the Kung Fu TV series. By lunchtime I was struggling to keep my eyes open, prompting Mick to suggest that I should spend the afternoon in the seclusion of ‘the retreat' while he covered for me.

Once I lay on the grimy mattress I found it hard to doze off. As I had done in my own bed, I replayed the fights of the previous day. It was
only the cut in my mouth that caused me to feel anything less than total satisfaction about how the day had gone: I had fought with – and against – the cream of karate competitors, not only in Britain but possibly in Europe. And I had acquitted myself well, although I knew that I still had a way to go to be ranked along with the very best. Next to the mattress was a stash of Mick's ageing martial arts magazines. I found one from 1976 and again read over an article that then rated the YMCA only joint third in a subjective league table of the top fighting clubs in the country. The victory at the British Clubs' championships was the culmination of five years of hard work to prove that we had been the number one club all along.

There was also a magazine that contained an article on ‘race'. Because of the proliferation of black champions in the martial arts, it tried, in pseudoscientific terms, to explain why black fighters were more suited to karate than their white counterparts; citing everything from longer black limbs infused with twitch fibres, to eyes being spaced further apart to give better peripheral vision. As far as I was concerned, it was an article riddled with backhanded compliments which were calculated to reinforce racist stereotypes.

In the past, the question of race had periodically cropped up between Mick and I. He was inclined to believe the not-so-natural selection explanation, claiming the slave ships sailing across the Atlantic had weeded out the weak for shark food, leaving the slave masters to increase their chances of breeding physically superior beings by cultivating stronger specimens from those who had survived the arduous voyages. I told him it sounded like he had got most of that stuff from the ‘Roots' TV series. But I did not take offence at Mick's views, as I had heard similar arguments raised by black people I knew. I countered with the argument that it was more nurture than nature, and that the environment played a large part in why, like so many of their boxing counterparts, many karate champions were black. After all, teams from the Caribbean or Africa were not winning world championships; the top teams in international karate competitions were Britain, The Netherlands and France, all of which contained a high proportion of black men who were now living and training in Europe. To me it was about the opportunity to train with the best teachers, as well as the circumstances in which they
had grown up, that had led to the proliferation of so many great black fighters, whether in martial arts or boxing. Declan Byrne was a case in point: although his skin colour was different to that of his colleagues, he had a lot in common with the rest of the YMCA in that he was of
immigrant
stock and had spent most of his life in one of the roughest council estates in the town. A big factor in Declan's success at karate was the attitude that such an upbringing can create – but he was the first to admit that for many young black men there was also the added factor of racism which could be manifested in anything from daily name-calling to random physical attacks. It was in this kind of hostile atmosphere that many people were forced to confront aggression and think about defending themselves. It was the added dimension of racism that propagated a mind-set which must have been similar to the one that was found amongst the young men who had trained in Japan's
dojos
before World War Two: a martial art for them was not a sport, nor merely a method of keeping fit, for some it had become a matter of life and death.

Top-level instruction from Japanese
karateka
, who were then amongst the best in the world, also played a part in Britain's success. But, ironically, it was the latent racism within Japanese karate that had made the British team so successful in international competitions, from the mid-1970s right up until the 1990s. After a brief period of condescension in the 1960s, when it was considered that the
gaijin
student did not possess the innate qualities, nor the martial arts tradition to really learn karate, the Japanese then set the bar so high to achieve a black belt that in many cases a European third
dan
ended up having a far greater range of techniques and knowledge than his Japanese equivalent. And yet, when given the choice, many clubs in Britain chose a Japanese instructor to do their grading examinations, as it had been so firmly implanted into their subconscious that the belts they awarded were somehow ‘more authentic'. Japan's defeat in World War Two also influenced how some instructors taught their art. Once, when slightly worse for drink, a Japanese instructor confided in Eddie Cox that he would never teach an American or English
karateka
all he knew. They could speak the language, profess a love for the culture, even marry a Japanese person and train diligently, but there was no way he would impart to them the
ogi
(secret techniques) of Wado Ryu. The irony only struck me after
years of training: many of my peers had become involved in karate as a reaction to the racism they faced on a day-to-day basis, and yet many
dojos
were not the sanctuaries from intolerance they had sought but often hothouses of prejudices based on grades, style of karate, nationality and race.

A couple of days later there was a pleasant surprise waiting for me at my parents' home when I called in one evening: there was a letter informing me that I had been selected to attend trials for selection for an England against Scotland match at under-21 level. I could hardly eat my dinner fast enough before I hurried to Clinton's house.

I found him lying under an old Ford Escort he had bought. His brother Ewart was a Ford mechanic and had told him not to buy it, but Clinton spurned my good advice. I told Clinton about the letter but he stayed under the car and grunted that he had received one too. The sound of banging and scraping of metal continued. I had anticipated a different reaction: at first I had been fearful that my selection might provoke some envy but then I quickly discounted the thought as Clinton had never been jealous of any of my successes, in fact he shared in them as I would not have achieved much without him as my training partner. But when I heard that Clinton had also been picked for the trials I immediately expected more of an excited response, in which we would plan a training schedule together. When he finally emerged from underneath the old car, I saw a strange look in Clinton's eyes that I had not noticed before and it disturbed me. It was distant and disengaged. I was not sure what to do so I playfully punched him on the shoulder as I congratulated him, hoping it would bring him out of t h i s trance. Clinton looked at his shoulder and then slowly up into my face. He blinked, and as if slowly waking, a smile started to spread across his face. “Well,” he laughed, “getting selected can't be no big thing, even Leslie got a letter.”

I was still feeling a pang of concern for my cousin. “But you're feeling all right, Clint?”

He gave me a puzzled frown and gently poked my chest. “Better than you.” He picked up his tools and said, “Come on, let's go inside and work out how we're going to fit in some extra training.”