Check This! A little disturbing!

Fighting for life Nigel Benn's 1995 world title victory over Gerald McClellan brought all the contradictions of boxing together in one moment of clarity. It was beautiful and ugly, thrilling and frightening. And in the decisive round, those who saw it knew the intensity had gone too far. This is the real story of the night that left a fearsome fighter irreparably brain-damaged Kevin Mitchell Sunday November 4, 2001 In Las Vegas in 1994, when Gerald McClellan was preparing for his rematch with Julian Jackson, the one-eyed hitter he'd stopped the year before to win his world middleweight title, he was in his hotel room. He was bored, anxious. He got a video out and slipped it in the machine. The fight was only a few hours away. It was the biggest of his career. There was nobody about and the world champion settled down to get his kicks. As the tape rolled, Stan Johnson, McClellan's coach, knocked on the door. 'He's some guy,' Stan recalls. 'I think he'd be in his room before a fight, gettin' a little pussy or somethin' before he go to the fight ...well, Gerald be in the room this time watchin' tapes of dog fights. I thought he be watchin' a sex movie. But I goes into the fuckin' room, Gerald's got a tape of himself watching the dogs with a stockin' over his head where you can't see who he is - in case somebody find the tape no one know it's him!' This is how Stan saw Gerald and the whole dog thing: 'So he got this black Labrador, just went to the dog shop, told the man, "I need a dog to take care of, I'll take this Labrador home," and the man say to the dog, "Yeah, you got a good home now," and Gerald takes the dog home. He takes the dog down his basement and tapes the Labrador's mouth, takes his pit bull Deuce and says "Get him!" He lets Deuce start eatin' the dog up while he's timing it on a watch, see how long it would take his dog to kill this dog. And I said to Gerald, "Hey, Gerald, this Labrador wouldn't beat Deuce, no way, so why did you tape his mouth shut?" And he said, "Coz I just wanna see how fast my dog would kill him, for one, and, for two, my dog's a championship fighter and you don't need no dog scratched up and bit up by no dog, by no accident. This is like sparrin' for my dog, this is like my dog need to taste blood every day. My dog need to kill somethin' every day, Stan. Just like a fighter need to spar every day, he don't need nobody bustin' him up when he got a big fight comin' up. He just need to bust somethin' up hisself. Right?"' It was impossible not to be mesmerised by the rhythm of the telling, and by the tale itself. It was a kind of rapping, old-style ghetto cool-speak, all mixed up like a cheap stew, bits of profanity chucked in to pepper it up. Comfort language served up by a badass dude. Gerald got his comfort between the sheets. Any time of the day or night. 'It was nothin' for him to get some pussy just time afore he go in the ring, even, you know? So that was the main problem with Gerald, it was girls was his problem. But Gerald had a dark side to him, because he was a violent, violent, violent, violent, violent person.' I had to check: that was five 'violents'. Stan was just making sure. 'His whole life was about fightin' and all, pit bull dogs, he pay lotsa money on dog fights, he took money from his fights and he bet. It weren't nothin' him go down the projects in Chicago and bet $10,000 his dog beat your dog. And a bunch o' gang bangers with guns and drugs all come down to watch...' Donnie Penelton, the Black Battle Cat, he remembers the dogs. He was there too on those dark nights. 'Yeah, Gerald's my first cousin. We grew up together. I'm older than him, and from the age about three, four, he hangin' around buggin' me from about then, yeah. He was a nice, young scary kid. He was a maniac with the pit bull dogs, man. He was like one hisself. Very aggressive. Very crazy. He had like a yard full of pit bulls. We'd mostly take 'em to Detroit with us, to the camps. I didn't like watchin' them dogs fight like that, I guess ...Kinda difficult, but them dogs, they goin' to fight naturally anyway. You know what he say, though? He always say, "Goddam, if I gotta fight for a livin', I be damned if them dogs ain't gotta fight for a livin' too. I gotta buy 'em their food. If it's a big fight and they win, they oughta be buyin' their own damn food." 'He brought Deuce down to fight this guy's dog in Chicago one time, and me and Donnie, we went down there with him ...Gerald was drivin' his Mercedes Benz, a green car with caramel-coloured seats and he had this big, beautiful truck behind where he carried his dogs in cages. So Deuce, he winnin' this particular fight and all of a sudden the dog got on him and he started rippin' Deuce's throat out. So I'm kinda, like, lookin' at Gerald and I was seein' the 'spressions on his face, you know, and just as his dog was gettin' beat, Gerald told the dude, "Stop the fight!" And the dude said, "No, man. No, man, you started the fight." And Gerald says, "You stop this motherfuckin' fight! Stop the fight! I quit, here your money." 'Gerald had a nice green leather suit on, he picked his bloody dog up, threw his dog across his shoulder, blood run all down his fuckin' coat. Instead o' puttin' him in the truck, in the cage, he put him in the back seat o' the Benz, mad as hell, rubbing his dog, cryin' up and down the road, tellin', "I ain't never gonna do this shit no more, I don't know why I did this, I keep a mess o' snakes afore I put a dog through this again." You know? 'Yeah, Gerald he had some companionship about this particular dog. He'd raised this dog, and this dog, he'd killed a few. This fucking guy, man, once his dog lost a fight and he was $7,000 down. He turns around, he looks at me, and the other guy says, "Hey, you want to wash your dog off before you put him in your truck?" Gerald just pulls a nine-millimetre out of his back pocket, aims it at the dog's head, busts a cap to the dog's head, and says, "Put that motherfucker in a plastic bag. I don't need 'em if they can't fight no better than that. I don't need no motherfuckin' dog that can't fight." This the kinda guy he was...' I knew before I started that some of this story wasn't going to make easy listening, but this kind of information was confusing. It was not just hard-core boxing stuff; it was the sound of streets I didn't really know. But Gerald and Stan felt at home there. So did Tyson. Listen to Iron Mike's angrier outbursts: he is shouting at the largely white world and he is saying, I'm going home to the streets and you can't come. It's the place that Don King calls home. He's another big hitter comfortable with the argot. Gerald wasn't a million miles from Don King in his attitude to humanity. King had brought grief - and money - to a lot of lives. He was cold too. Gerald hadn't killed anybody, as King had, but he had that streak in him, an icy vein of ruthlessness. He had to have it. He knew what was demanded to survive in the 'baahxin' bizness'. If you didn't have a hard outside, they'd eat away at your insides and spit you out. That's one thing he learnt from King. Gerald was not shy of conflict. Used to go looking for it, often. It was part of his protective shell. Getting in the ring and throwing his well-schooled punches for three, regulated minutes per round was a run in the park for Gerald - after all he'd seen outside boxing. His personality was not informed by his trade, but by his life at large. The boxer is just the product. A celebrity. Television packages him and sells him. The G-Man. The Dark Destroyer. Iron Mike. The Hit Man. The Beast. Midnight. Vicious. The Black Battle Cat. Nightmare. All names invented to disguise the man underneath, not describe him. I could only wonder what else they got up to. Stan, unsurprisingly, had a million stories. 'We in Florida one time,' he says, 'we in trainin', just before we go to fight Nigel Benn. Gerald says, "You wanna go to the mall to do some shoppin'?" So we go to the mall with the champ to do some shoppin', and we come outta the mall, and in Florida you got these pretty little pelican birds, what you call 'em? Flamingos, that's it. They just walk around the mall tryin' to make it look pretty. But Gerald comes out, and says, "Right, watch this, watch this!" And there's this flamingo walkin' around on the road. Gerald gets close and makes a dip with the car, he speeds the car up real bad and - boom! - he hits the damn flamingo! And the flamingo flies up all over the grille! And Gerald, he's laughin', like it's all in Disneyland, and he goes flyin' round the block and he looks at the grille and he looks at the bird feathers and he pulls the bird feathers and pulls the bird outta the grille, and, it's like, "Damn! Did you all see that? Did you all like that?" And then he was on his way out - and you know, you can go to jail for doin' that sort of shit, you know? That's a state bird! You know what I mean?' I know what you mean, Stan. 'So then Gerald goes around again! He already run over a couple of pelicans and then here come another pelican and you know, like, this motherfuckin' pelican must be wonderin' what's goin' on here, like? He must be like a brother or sister, like, they all busted up. And then Gerald, he says, "Look at this nosy sonofabitch, watch this." And - bam! - he rammed over that one. I said, "Gerry, you gotta stop this, man, we gonna go to jail." And he tried to make it look like it's an accident, that the bird was there, like ...The kid was a violent kid. He loved killin' shit, he loved dog fights, like it was evident, he was want to go out like he went out...' Like Deuce. Except he made Deuce quit.