This is one such book. Alex Wade is a journalist who was once a newspaper lawyer, making sure no horrific legal faux pas slipped through the net in the wee hours. Now he can add the word author to his CV.
The success of his book is down to its honesty and irresistible storytelling. Essentially an insight into the world of white-collar boxing, it also deals with the first 30-odd years of Wade’s life — a life littered with booze, violence, infidelity and self-hatred.
White-collar boxing started in New York and found its way into Britain. Its protagonists are lawyers, bankers, surveyors, teachers and City types who infiltrate the sport as a means of working off excess aggression and adrenaline after a hard day at the office. Wade was one such convert. It became his saviour, his route to freedom from an alcoholic lifestyle that was leaving him feeling like ‘an unwashed tramp’ and close to imploding spectacularly.
Wade was the son of a domineering father, who would often put him down and let him know he was a failure and ‘scum’. Wade comes to some sort of closure late in the book, accepting that the bully of a man was trying to egg him on to greater things.
Wade paints an amusing picture of Alan Lacey, the man behind the Real Fight Club, which organises the bouts. Lacey is typical of those involved: over-enthusiastic and a boxing nut whose every sentence seems to end with the exhortation, ‘Go on, son!’ The main rule of the Real Fight Club is that it is all about having fun and not getting hurt, but Wade would argue with that. Aged 37, in his first bout against Vince ‘Dynamite’ Dixon, he took an almighty right that was anything but ‘fun’. In front of an 800-strong audience at Bethnal Green’s York Hall, the author somehow dredged up an inner resource to continue — and ended up giving as good as he got. Both men were standing at the end of the third, both had avoided humiliation. There are no winners as such: just three rounds of two minutes apiece, non-decision bouts. The sport, with its interminable hours of training and getting into shape physically and mentally, worked a treat for Wade, gradually helping to turn around a life that had become a terrible mess. He admits he will continue to use the ‘wisdom’ of what he learnt at the Real Fight Club to survive in everyday life — and that is quite an achievement. A superb book
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