It was the third week of January, and Neasden was doing what Neasden does in January – grey sky sitting low over the rooftops, everyone walking a bit faster than usual with their chins tucked into their collars, the Christmas decorations still up in a couple of windows but looking like they knew their time was up. That particular bleakness that settles over a place once the new year’s novelty has worn off and everyone quietly accepts that it’s just winter now, and winter has a while left to run.
I’d finished early. A cancellation in the afternoon had given me a few unexpected hours, and instead of doing something productive with them I’d come home, made tea, and ended up standing in my front garden for no very good reason – the way you sometimes do when your flat feels a bit small and the walls have heard enough of your thoughts for one day.
That’s when I saw the kid.
The Kid
His name, I’d later find out, is Marcus. He’s thirteen, lives four doors down with his nan, and has the kind of restless, coiled energy that I recognised immediately – not from memory, exactly, but from somewhere deeper than that. The energy of a person who doesn’t yet know what to do with themselves. Who is looking, without knowing they’re looking, for something to aim at.
He’d been watching me for a minute or two before I noticed him. I’d been shadowboxing, which I should probably explain. It’s a habit I’ve never quite shaken – when I’ve got a few minutes and my hands need something to do, I just drift into it without really thinking. Weight shifting, jab, jab, roll, straight right. Nothing serious. Just the body doing what it remembers.
Marcus was standing at his nan’s gate with a can of something fizzy, watching with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Not taking the mickey – I’d braced for that, being a grown man in a front garden throwing punches at the air. He looked genuinely interested.
“Did you used to box?” he said.
“I did, yeah.”
“Are you any good?”
“I was decent enough,” I said. “Once upon a time.”
He considered this. Took a sip of his drink. Then, with the directness that only children and very honest adults manage: “Can you show me something?”
I said yes before I’d even thought about it. Which surprised me, if I’m honest. I’m not usually a person who acts before thinking. Boxing trained that out of me years ago – Gerry’s voice in my ear, always, slow down, assess, pick your moment. But there was no hesitation. The word was just there.
“Come on then,” I said. “Put the can down.”
Twenty Minutes on the Pavement
I want to be careful here, because I’m aware this could sound like the neat, tidy moment where everything clicks into place and the lesson is obvious and Pete Dawson sees the light. Life isn’t usually that well-structured. I know that better than most.
But I also want to be honest about what those twenty minutes felt like, because dishonesty wouldn’t serve either of us.
We started with stance. Left foot forward, weight balanced, hands up. Basic, foundational stuff – the kind of thing that feels almost insultingly simple until you realise that everything else you’ll ever do in a boxing gym is built on getting that one thing right. Marcus picked it up quickly, adjusted his feet without being told twice, which is a decent sign. Some people fight the stance for weeks.
Then the jab. Not power, not commitment – just the mechanics. Extend, rotate the shoulder, pull back, reset. I must have thrown that particular combination of instructions at trainees fifty times over the years, back when I used to help out occasionally at Gerry’s gym, and it came back without any effort. As natural as breathing.
Marcus threw about twenty jabs in a row, getting a little better with each one, and by the end there was something recognisable in it. Something that had the shape of what it was supposed to be. He grinned – this slightly embarrassed, slightly delighted grin that he immediately tried to make look cooler than it was – and I felt something shift in my chest that I hadn’t felt in a while.
We worked on footwork for a bit. How to move without crossing your feet, how to keep the stance intact while you’re going sideways, how the feet and the hands connect in ways you don’t expect. He was impatient with it, as everyone is at first – footwork is unglamorous, it doesn’t feel like boxing, it feels like shuffling around a pavement in January looking slightly ridiculous. I told him that the best boxer I ever sparred against moved like he was dancing and hit like a lorry, and that one was because of the other. He thought about this and shuffled more carefully.
After about twenty minutes, his nan appeared at the door and called him in for tea. He looked genuinely put out by this, which I took as a compliment. Before he went, he turned back and said – again with that disarming directness – “Same time tomorrow?”
I laughed. Told him I had work tomorrow. But maybe at the weekend.
He nodded and went inside. I stood in the garden for a moment in the January cold, hands in my pockets.
What It Stirred Up
I’ve been trying to write this next section for about a week, and I keep deleting it and starting again because I don’t want it to come out as something it isn’t. I’m not going to tell you that twenty minutes on a pavement with a thirteen-year-old answered the questions I laid out in my last post. It didn’t, not cleanly. The eighty thousand pounds is still eighty thousand pounds. The ten-year timeline hasn’t changed. Dave’s spreadsheet logic is just as sound as it was when he delivered it over pasta and lager.
But something did shift. And I think I owe it to this blog – and to anyone who read that last piece and sent a kind word, of which there were more than I expected and which genuinely meant a lot – to try and describe it accurately.
What those twenty minutes reminded me was not that I should open a boxing club. I already knew I wanted to open a boxing club. That wasn’t new information.
What they reminded me was why.
It’s a subtle distinction, but it matters. When I do my sums in the notepad, when I look at the unit on the side street and think about ring dimensions and equipment costs, the dream is almost abstract. It’s a project. A financial target. A set of logistics to be solved. Which is necessary, obviously – you can’t build something real on sentiment alone – but it can make you lose the thread of the thing if you’re not careful.
The thread is Marcus. The thread is fourteen-year-olds with nowhere particular to be and more potential than they’ve been given credit for. The thread is what a good coach and a proper gym did for a young lad from Neasden who wasn’t sure what he was capable of, and how the effects of that didn’t fade when the career ended but carried through into every job and every difficulty and every moment when it would have been easier to fold.
That’s what I’m actually trying to build. Not a premises. Not a business plan. That.
What Comes Next
I haven’t got a tidy conclusion for you. I warned you at the start of the last piece that I was done pretending to have answers I don’t have, and that holds here too.
But I’ll tell you what I have got.
I’ve got a thirteen-year-old four doors down who asked me at the weekend if we were doing the boxing thing, and to whom I taught the straight right and the basic defensive shoulder roll in his nan’s back garden while she watched from the kitchen window with an expression that I think was cautiously approving.
I’ve got a growing sense that Dave’s version of events – build the business, fund the club, one thing enabling the other – is probably the most rational path available to me, and that rationality isn’t the same as settling. It’s just taking the longer road to the right place.
I’ve got a notepad full of figures and a separate notepad, a newer one, where I’ve started writing down things that are less about money and more about structure and curriculum and what a youth programme at Big Pete’s Boxing Club might actually look like. What age groups it would cater for. What the first twelve weeks of sessions would cover. Whether you’d need a separate class for complete beginners or whether mixing abilities serves everyone better.
That second notepad feels important. It feels like something has moved from the corner of the room where you don’t quite look at it, into the middle of the floor where it lives properly.
And I’ve got Marcus, who can already throw a decent jab for someone who learned it in a front garden on a grey Tuesday in January.
He’s going to need somewhere to go with that, eventually.
I intend to make sure somewhere exists.