and firm.
‘Minter.’
My father was taken aback. ‘Minter? Do you know what he said?’
‘What?’
‘He said a black man can’t beat a white man. Can you really support someone who says that about us?’
I had no way of checking if it was true or false. I had no response. As far as I was concerned, Minter was English, and being English myself, I wanted him to win.
Nineteen eighty had, so far, been a fantastic year for sport. In my mind, Minter–Hagler was not at this point living up to the other sporting events I had watched. It was the first year that sports stars rivalled Batman and Superman as the heroes we all wanted to be on the school playground.
It started in May when West Ham United, my local football team, won the FA Cup. Football in the late seventies and early eighties was not glamorous. The balls rarely moved, rarely bounced because the pitches were always so muddy. The players didn’t look like athletes: a combination of wild facial hair, unkempt Afros, mullets and perms, thick ‘porn’ ’taches, rolled-down socks and ill-fitting football kits made it unattractive.
Trevor Brooking, the Hammers’ stylish midfielder with the leathery face of a miner, had been one of the few players during that period to shine on those boggy pitches. Brooking scored the winning goal against Cup favourites Arsenal. He was already a hero to football fans in the East End. But when he scored that goal, he became a sporting idol to every East Ender.
After the FA Cup, I spent most of the summer watching sport. Not really by choice. My parents rarely let me out to play in the street. Didn’t know why, but I kind of knew. They never told me directly, but my sisters’ stories revealed that the environment I had been growing up in was violent.
Manor Park was bleak. People were nice. But Manor Park seemed to lack ambition. Most of the older kids I knew would leave school at 16, find work, get married and, if they had airs about them, move 20 minutes up the road to Ilford. Nothing wrong with that, but it didn’t feel as if much existed beyond Newham’s borders.
Manor Park suffered from the usual inner-city problems: kids carrying knives, frequent robberies, high unemployment, little or no green space, little for kids to do. But racism had been among the borough’s biggest problems. Felt it. Nothing direct. Heard the rumours. Saw the looks. Sensed the tension.
The National Front (NF), a violent, extremist, far-right movement, used to distribute racist leaflets outside my primary school (Avenue) and my two older sisters’ secondary school (Little Ilford). I had heard rumours about black families, not far from where I lived, who had petrol poured through their letterboxes and had their houses set alight. I overheard the story of some white youths who had dressed in Ku Klux Klan outfits and set alight either a four-foot cross or a black kid. Didn’t know which. The term ‘P*ki bashing’, which would involve skinheads beating up Asian people, had been a part of the daily vocabulary in primary school. Indian and Bengali kids were frequently beaten up by white youths on their way home from Little Ilford, our local secondary school. At my school, some white kids just wouldn’t befriend you. I could take the constant questioning, about the colour of my skin (‘were you burnt?’), about my heritage (‘where are you really from?’), about my name. But some kids would just flat out refuse to play with me (‘you must stick to your own’).
My reality was not so bad in comparison to other black and brown people in Newham. Blacks and Asians had been regularly terrorised throughout the borough. There had been unsolved racially motivated murders, school children violently beaten up inside the school gates (not just outside), arson, and frequent unjustified assaults and arrests by the police. You never knew the names of the victims. No one, it appeared, was ever caught. Didn’t seem to make the news. Only made the news if blacks and Asians fought back, which would then be reported more as a reason for moral panic than a right to protest.
Black and Asian families had also been historically discriminated against by Newham Council and other local services. They were systematically put to the back of the housing priority line. They faced problems at work, often enduring the worst conditions. They had to cope with an education administration that followed the Minister of Education’s policy that ‘no one school should have more than 30 per cent of immigrants’.2 I didn’t know there had been a policy that problematised black and brown kids. I didn’t know that black and brown kids were regarded as a threat to cohesion. I didn’t know that schools were deliberately excluding black or brown pupils to keep numbers down or sending them to schools for the educationally subnormal. That’s what alternative provision for ‘troubled’ pupils was called back then. Always wondered what happened to some of my school mates. They didn’t do what was best for black pupils. We were treated as unwanted statistics.
I didn’t know about the Virk brothers, the Ramsey family, Akhtar Ali Baig, Kennith Singh, the Toussaint brothers.* They were the victims or survivors with no names. The sources of rumours that were in fact a reality.
No freedom. That’s what it meant for me. My parents had clearly been aware of the challenges in Newham, so they essentially locked me in the house during the evenings and in the holidays.
During the summer of 1980, I watched England fail miserably at the European football championships in Italy. My only memories were of Ray Wilkins lobbing two defenders and then casually lifting the ball over the goalkeeper in England’s draw against Belgium and the tear gas used by police to restrain English football hooligans. Crowd violence would be the norm in English football through the eighties.
I saw my first live sports event that summer, when my father took me to Lord’s to watch the second Test between West Indies and England. West Indies’ opening batsman Desmond Haynes hit his highest Test score in that game with 184, while Viv Richards won man of the match for a typically destructive 145.
The Moscow Olympics followed, my abiding memories being Seb Coe’s sulky face after surprisingly losing the 800 metres final to Steve Ovett, Scottish sprinter Allan Wells running as if breaking down a door in a police raid to win the 100 metres gold and Ethiopian Miruts Yifter ‘The Shifter’, who looked about 50, winning the 5,000 and 10,000 metres double with finishing bursts that Mo Farah would have been proud of.
By the time I returned to school that September, sport had taken on greater meaning. I would re-live sporting contests in my mind in the classroom, while walking down the street, while eating dinner, and pretty much at most points during the day. My love of sport required no dependency on other people, except of course my father, who controlled the television. There were no restrictions on my imagination. And television was never boring because there was always another major sporting event around the corner.
In the lead up to the Minter–Hagler fight, Minter had reportedly said: ‘It has taken me 17 years to become champion of the world. I’m not going to let a black man take it away from me.’ Minter later claimed that he ‘didn’t mean it the way it might sound’.3 If it had been a ploy to sell more tickets or gain more support, it was ill advised.
The rivalry between the two fighters allegedly began in Las Vegas when Hagler refused to shake Minter’s hand. Minter’s stablemate Kevin Finnegan, a former Hagler victim, added fuel to the fire by claiming that Hagler once told him, ‘I don’t touch white flesh.’4 These were unsubstantiated claims from a man who had admitted to hating Hagler. Hagler had previously said, ‘I make a point of never shaking hands with future opponents.’5 He preferred to shake hands with his rivals after they had fought.
Minter’s reported racial comment set the tone for the contest. By also wearing Union Jack underpants at the weigh-in for the fight and then entering the ring with an oversized Union Jack and St George banner, Minter did little to subdue the jingoistic atmosphere that had built up at a time when England had been bursting with racial tension.
England’s economic depression made race relations sink to one of its lowest points. By 1980, England had entered recession and unemployment topped two million. The blame for the country’s lack of jobs quickly turned