“I OVERTOOK a lorry on my motorbike and saw the road bend round. I saw this barrier and thought ‘if I hit that, I’ll be dead’. I looked down at the speedometer and it said 80mph, so I just hit the throttle.
“I went into the barrier and everything went black. Next thing, a guy is holding my head saying ‘you’re OK, you’re OK’. I thought ‘how fucked up am I? Even God don’t want me’.
“Next thing, I’m in an ambulance, then in hospital. It’s all blackouts in between. I had five or six operations in the first three days; I was in high dependence for four or five weeks. When I came round, the doctor said ‘we were gonna chop your arm off, it were that bad, but someone recognised you and said you’ll need that’.”
While that hospital worker recognised Crawford ‘Chilling’ Ashley the boxer, he no longer needed the limb for competition. The crash – deliberate in its deadly intent – came precisely because Ashley was no longer boxing. The Leeds light-heavyweight was, like so many before and after him, struggling to find purpose outside of the ring.
“I just felt like I didn’t belong here, and everywhere I looked, I didn’t see nice people,” he says. “I just wanted to go to sleep, I just wanted out.”
He’s not entirely sure when the crash happened – “Me and time don’t really have a relationship,” he says – but
