HOW TO SAVE A LIFE
I WAS born on September 4, 1965 in East Dulwich in London, but moved to New York with my family on April 3, 1972. My dad was a construction worker – a mason. One day he got into a scuffle with his foreman. My father was fierce. He wasn’t the type of guy you wanted to fight. He ended up battering this guy pretty good. But it turned out that this guy was connected. He knew people, shall we say. So it was time for us to leave the UK.
My father was a strapping man and handsome as hell, but he couldn’t read or write, so he had an inferiority complex. He would light up a room with his charisma, but he had demons. If he came home and there was a bottle of ketchup out of place, he’d go into a rage. He wasn’t the best human being in the world but I can empathise with him now. When he was 12 years old, he witnessed his father die of a heart attack when they were out fishing. We carry that stuff around with us.
My father demanded that I boxed. He was a big fan of Cassius Clay, so he wanted me to mimic him. I didn’t like boxing and was forced into it when I was about nine-and-a-half or 10. My first experience was at a gym in the shadow of Shea Stadium in Queens, where we lived. I trained there for nine months. My first mentor was a guy named George Pimental. He believed in me and showed me love, which is something that my father
