PRISON BREAK
“I WAS JUST HAPPY TO BE OUT, SMELLING THE GRASS, WALKING FREE”
IT was never his intention to start fighting the day he left prison, not after seven years of doing too much of that inside. Instead, all he wanted to do was go to his mum’s house, walk through the nearest field, and continue walking until he arrived at Meadowhall shopping centre, where he would then sit in a cinema screening room and watch a film. En route he would pass Brendan Ingle’s boxing gym in Wincobank, but had no interest in visiting, not that day, nor any other, and no longer any interest in fighting, full stop. Now outside, the only thing Richard Towers craved was escapism. “I can never remember what I watched,” he said. “I guess it didn’t matter.”
What did matter and what he does remember, however, all too vividly perhaps, is that during the walk back from the cinema to his mother’s house he saw a man he recognised putting his child and dog into a car. “He was the ‘cock’ of our school when we were kids,” Towers explained, “so I put my hand up and said, ‘How are you doing, pal?’ I was just happy to be out, smelling the grass and walking free.”
The man, though, found in the same grass and air Towers was savouring something else. A different smell. A different taste. “You f**king what?” he said.
“I was just saying hello to you,” said Towers, still walking. “Yeah, I know, you black c**t,” the man said. “F**king walk on, you coward.”
Rather than walk on, Towers stopped to play with the word ‘coward’ like a bit of gristle stuck in his teeth. Sadly accustomed to racial abuse, he focused only on ‘coward’ and asked the man to repeat what he had just said. By now, though, the man had removed a golf club from his car and was marching towards Towers,
