One-Eyed Baz Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is dedicated to all of the following:

  My mother, Dorothy.

  My father, Karl. RIP.

  My brother, Eric. RIP.

  My stepmother, Colleen.

  My children – Leonie, Bailey, Kye and Tyler, and my stepson Nathan. I love you all to the max.

  My grandmother, Ina. RIP.

  Auntie Flo and Auntie Pam. RIP.

  My trainer, Dev Barrett – simply the best. Without you it couldn’t have happened.

  Andre – for always being by my side.

  Todd and Rupert – brothers for life.

  My good friend Malkit Singh.

  My pals Longers and Jell (of the Zulus). RIP.

  Harold and Cream Albert of the Rat Pack, and Wrigley of the Convicts. RIP.

  Anthony Reid – aka Pastor Reid, long-time friend. Bless up!

  The original Tiger Posse and the Townies – you know who you are.

  My darling wife, Tracey Patterson – for believing in me and fighting my case.

  My good friend Jason Kelsey – who is facing the biggest fight of his life. Bless.

  All of my other friends and family – thank you for being there.

  All of the people who have made me who I am today – all of my opponents, all of the football firms I battled with, and all of my enemies. LOL.

  My legal team, Stefan and Lisa. Thank you for your work – if it wasn’t for you, this book would be on hold.

  All of my friends in Holland and around the world.

  All of the Coventry and Birmingham massives.

  And to BCFC – keep right on for life. Zuluuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!

  Barrington Patterson

  INTRODUCTION

  I’ve been training Barrington Patterson in Coventry for more than 20 years.

  My name is Dev Barrett and I’m a karate and kickboxing instructor. I was born in Jamaica and came over to the West Midlands just after independence in 1963, when I was aged 10. I learned to fight at school because of the obvious problem that most people have as immigrants. I started playing rugby, which led me on to boxing, which everybody did in my day. That then led me to karate. I absolutely loved playing rugby at school and I also excelled at karate, so it was a tough decision to make the switch.

  I started off in traditional karate and then I went on to kickboxing. In full-contact karate I went on to win the British title and European Challenge Cup title; I also became the first British fighter to win the world title in the ring. But I found kickboxing to be that little bit more ‘honest’.

  Karate was also good for discipline though. I worked as an electrician and became a foreman. I had a well-paid job and it was a tough decision, but I decided to give up work to focus on my sport fulltime. The sport was only at the amateur level, but what changed it was when my father passed away.

  He worked all his life and didn’t get to see much of us really. He finally took early retirement and went to Jamaica to look at some land; he wanted to go back. He was out there for three weeks and then he died. It seemed as if he didn’t do much with his life and I decided I was going to do something I really liked.

  In 1982, I gave up my job as an electrician to work as a fulltime teacher and trainer. In 1984, I opened up a gym in the city centre. At the time the local authorities were trying to get kids in the community into sport. There was always gang warfare going on in Coventry then.

  A few years later, I was teaching a regular class. It was around 6.30pm and I remember it was as if the lights had gone out – when I looked round there were these two big fellows standing in the doorway. My immediate thought was: Oh God! because I’d heard that the week before somebody had come up and there was a bit of a problem with the other instructor that was teaching. So I obviously thought these two guys had come back to sort out whatever they had going on with him.

  I ignored them for quite a while – I just continued teaching and they stood almost motionless in the doorway. I was teaching a class of young lads at the time and I remember thinking, I hope it doesn’t go off while they’re here. At the time I was a world champion and I didn’t want to approach them in an aggressive way.

  I was walking up and down the dojo, not saying anything to them as I was hoping they would go away, but then I thought, Why? I’m a world champion. I suddenly turned and looked at them and said, ‘Can I help you?’ There was a little bit of movement as if they were quite surprised at the way I approached them. The one in front filled the doorway, a huge black guy who must have been a bodybuilder; this was Barrington. The one behind was quite a bit bigger and taller, quite a smart-looking character. They called him ‘Catalogue John’, I found out later, because he looked like somebody who’d just walked out of a photo shoot.

  They said they were interested in training, so I gave them the times, costs, etc. But I wasn’t convinced; I thought, There’s a bit more to it. I looked at them and I was thinking, What do they want with martial arts, the size of them?

  I remember Barrington saying he just wanted to do some karate. Obviously I thought, Thank God. It was quite scary actually. At that point I thought, We’ll see, but they did stay and watch for a while. After they left, I thought, Maybe, maybe not.

  But they turned up the next time and that’s how it all started; they both came and trained with me. Barrington is still with me today. He just trained as a regular student but, as time went on, he became an icon within the club because he seemed to gel with most other students. There was one group who seemed to get on with him really well, but there were others who seemed to be a bit wary of him because of his ways.

  I always knew there was something about Barrington. Because you always have some characters in the world, a personality with a little bit of something different, like Muhammad Ali.

  Barrington was one of those.

  DEV BARRETT, former British, European and World W.A.K.O. (World Association of Kick-boxing Organizations) full-contact champion

  CHAPTER ONE

  I never had any real problems at my first junior school, Farm Street in Hockley – which was later demolished. At home though, me and my sisters and brother all used to play around, argue and fight with each other all the time. It was competitive – with broomsticks, mops, whatever – but it never got to the stage where we pulled out knives on each other. None of us ever picked on an outsider either; it was always only each other.

  One day, when I was seven, my sister Jennifer and I were playing in the garden. We often played together, as she was older than me by one year and she never had any fear of me. Jennifer is the oldest one over here – I’ve also got an older sister and brother in New York. She thought she ruled the roost – but I thought I did; I’m not the older one, I’m the bigger one!

  On this particular day, we had an argument and, in anger, she dashed a full can of Coke at my head which caught me in my left eye. She meant to throw it at me – it was a woman’s anger – but I’m she sure didn’t mean it to cause the harm it did. I just felt the whack! And then I had blurred vision in my eye. It was like being punched on the jaw – you just feel
a sharp pain. Then my mum took me aside, sat me down and put some water on my eye.

  She could see something was wrong, and I was immediately rushed to A&E at Dudley Road hospital in Birmingham. At the time, the hospital had the nickname ‘Slaughter House’, because everyone who went there seemed to die, the thought of which was going through my seven-year-old mind. I was diagnosed as permanently blind in one eye that same night.

  I never noticed anything different about my eyes though. I was young and I soon adapted, but to other people I became the playground joke. They called me ‘One Eye’, as my left eye was much smaller and obviously sightless. When I had my first fight, at eight years old, I got beaten up by two black kids of the same age who called me ‘Cyclops’. I took a real beating; I felt really angry and went home to tell my mother, who cussed me in patois and told me, ‘Fe gwan back out and fight back de bwoy!’

  I never did. I was too scared and there were two of them, but it taught me a lesson and convinced me to get tougher. I continued to have playground scuffles at least once a week and would win nine times out of 10. I started to like it; I loved the buzz, and I firmly believe that this shaped my character into what it is today.

  * * *

  I was born on 25 August 1965. My mum, Dorothy Pearson, met and married my dad, Karl Kenneth Patterson, in Kingston, Jamaica. He first came over here in 1958, and then he brought my mum over to England to live with his mother, who was a nurse in Burton-on-Trent. My mum and dad had five kids together after my dad settled here, working in a factory. She already had two kids back in Jamaica – a boy named Christopher and a girl, Joy, who now lives in New York. When my mum came over here, she let Joy remain with her own mum’s family, as was the way with so many Jamaicans who, like my mum and my father’s mum, came to this country in search of a better life. Joy and Christopher made their own way. I keep in contact with Joy and visit her when I can, as I do with my stepbrother, who still lives in Jamaica.

  After my parents settled in Burton-on-Trent, they went on to have five children. My sisters Jennifer and Sara and a sister who died of cot death in the 1970s, me and my brother Eric all had the Patterson surname. My mother would return to visit Jamaica on various occasions, but we lived in Burton until I was about four years old. We lived in a house on a hill with a garden that backed on to fields, where there were horses and cows.

  We had to move to Handsworth, Birmingham, where my mum’s mother lived at the time. My dad had got into some trouble and was sentenced to eight years in prison. I never really knew my father until I was about 14 years old; before that I have little recollection of him at all. I knew from my mum that he was in prison and that was all I needed to know; as we were children, it was never discussed further. He’d had an argument with an Asian man who came to our house, and my dad grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed him, something he confirmed to me later.

  I have one other memory of Burton when I was a kid: it was before a visit to my grandmother’s. My dad was still out of prison then and he was there when my mum tried to leave with us. He refused to let us go, but the police were called and we were escorted out.

  Because my mum effectively became both Mum and Dad, and Gran was always around the house, I never felt that having my dad in prison affected me while I was growing up. I got the impression my dad was a bit of a rogue himself, from the stories he told me later when he came out of prison. For a time he’d lived in Bermondsey, south London, and it was a hard area with not many black people, where there would be scraps with teddy boys.

  Handsworth was really multicultural in contrast to where we’d just come from. When we moved into my grandmother’s four-bedroom house in Lozells Road, I started to realise that there were more black people outside of my own immediate family – not just black, but Asian and other races too. The other change in my life was that my gran, Ina Johnson, took the role of my mum, now that she had to do several jobs to keep and sustain us all. The four of us had been brought up just by my mum and we never ever had a thing.

  Then, a couple of years later, my aunt split up with her fella down in London, so she came to live with us as well. My sister Jennifer is a year older than me, Sarah is a year younger and my brother, Eric, was three years younger. With just a few years between us all, now we had our cousins living with us too – when my mum’s sister got her divorce and moved in with five kids, who were all similar ages to us. Now there were three families in one house in Lozells, all trying to survive and look after one another. We used to take turns in sharing the beds and using the bathroom.

  The Asian family living next door were the same – overcrowded. Everyone was, but you all got on. The Asian family used to bring some food over to the house; it was a close-knit community, black, Asian and white people were just as poor as each other. In Lozells, everyone was in it together and the only segregation was from the police. I’m a Lozells man – that was my area.

  I had a good relationship with my mum but I had a lot of energy as a boy. We were a typical Jamaican family that ran a strict household. If my gran said we had to go to church, then we had to go to church. It would be the sort of church where you’d vocally praise the Lord, with all this singing and shouting ‘Hallelujah!’ There would be church in the evening too, plus Sunday school, and you had to go: my grandmother used to say, ‘No church, no dinner.’ She had a big influence on us.

  I stopped going to church when I was about 13; I felt old enough to make my own mind up. The rest of my family still attend and still try to convert me. I always say the same thing: ‘The only time you will see me in church is funerals and weddings.’ I believe in God – I just don’t feel the need to go to church.

  It wasn’t easy growing up in a Christian family, what with being a football hooligan and getting nicked for fighting. You can imagine what my mum used to say! But she accepted it was my way of life and she always stood up for me – no matter what. She just accepted that’s how my life was.

  Amidst all the madness, my mum met and settled down with a nice bloke called Shaggy. He was a good man and they went on to have a daughter, Lorraine, who now lives with my mum and takes care of her since Shaggy passed away. I have a special bond with my half-sister and I’ve always had time for her.

  * * *

  Lozells is also the area where I went to school, at Farm Street. Those were the days of the Rastas and their sound systems: Observer, Eternal Youth, Jungleman, these were the sounds of the day. There was music coming from every street corner, like it was a festival every day. Rastas burning spliff stood on corners as police drove by; some guys didn’t think about doing it undercover, it was like they wanted everyone to know.

  I’ve always been into sports, rather than being academically minded. My first introduction to a fighting sport was after another scuffle, when I was nine or 10, and I walked past a local church-hall sign saying, ‘Judo lessons here.’ So the following week, I went along and joined there and then, just on my own. They made you wait and then you had to bow to everyone, including your opponent, and bow before you went into the dojo, which you couldn’t enter with anything on your feet. It added a bit of discipline, because before that I was a bit of a rogue. This was something different to coming home and changing out of my school clothes to run around the street. I ended up doing judo two or three times a week there for five to six years, and I earned my purple belt before I stopped and went back to the streets.

  My motivation for judo was that I wanted to learn how to fight properly and increase my ratio of wins to 10 out of 10. By this age I never wanted to lose a fight again.

  MALKIT SINGH

  My name’s Mal, I’m from Salisbury Road in Handsworth. Barrington and me used to go to school together in the mornings, and in the evenings we used to do everything together, including training. We started judo together, with Mr Fields as the teacher. When Barrington used to go out he was concerned about people taking the Mickey out of him because of his eye, or getting bullied. By the time we were about 13 or 14 years old,
he’d taken a lot of shit. He wasn’t that big, no bigger than other kids, but there was this one guy, the school bully, who was six foot three. We’d get off the coach and we used to have to line up by the railings and wait for the teacher. Barrington was standing behind me and I was facing forwards when I heard this commotion and someone shouting, ‘One Eye, One Eye!’ Barrington got hold of the bully and was kicking the shit out of him before the teachers came along and stopped it.

  That was a shock for me because I’d never seen him do that before. We’d just started judo but it wasn’t like a contact sport, it was more throws and holds, but this was punching and kicking. He just really wanted to do the bloke; it was a good job the teacher came along. He must have flipped, but from that day on no one ever said anything insulting to Barrington again.

  If there was a fight in school and Barrington was involved, then the whole school would watch. We’d seen him batter the cock of the school, a good fighter with big fists who not many people would want to take on; to see someone like that get the shit kicked out of him was a turning point. I seriously think that if that teacher hadn’t stopped it Barrington would have killed him; he was on the floor and he was punching the daylights out of this big bully. He had loads of fights after that and everyone would be watching in a massive circle.

  He was doing judo at school but he also started going to martial arts at a club outside. I wasn’t going to those clubs, I was just doing it in school, but he really liked it.

  Since we had moved from Burton, we had become very impoverished. I remember feeling different to other children. I had worn clothes passed down from neighbours and holes in my shoes; our Christmases and birthdays were all terrible. I never had any breakfast and part of my day consisted of thieving for food; I stole milk, cheese and bread from doors streets away from my house – but never in the same road, as that was disrespectful.