NIGEL BENN

The Sunday Times - Sport The Big Interview: Nigel Benn The Dark Destroyer used to batter bodies; now he saves souls. By Brian DooganHe is dressed in black, a colour synonymous with his days as The Dark Destroyer, but apposite, too, for his new vocation as a preacher. By the front door of his six-bedroom mansion, high above the Mediterranean on Majorca’s Costa de la Calma (Calm Coast), an open book made out of stone and resting on a plinth bears the inscription: ‘In heaven is rest and endless peace’. Serenely, he leads the way, through the door and up a marble staircase into the living room where a dozen people or more will soon be congregated to listen to him spreading the Word of God. “I believe that the Lord has called me to do this,” he announces. Stretching out a hand, Nigel Benn then invites you to take a seat in his church. It is nine years since Benn last appeared in a boxing ring, but the passage of time does not dull the memory of his ferocity. Pugnacious, almost primeval, he took sadistic pleasure out of his “tear-ups”, engaging in fights that might have been born in the street. His was the personality of a delinquent youth hardened by a four-year career in the First Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, completing two tours of Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. “ Once you’ve been in a situation like that,” he once declared, “you’re scared of nobody.” In 1990 he won the WBO middleweight title from American Doug De Witt, “bashing the granny out of him” in eight rounds before he pummelled Iran Barkley to the canvas three times in a single round in “a do-or-die, hell-for-leather fight”. This was how he fought, “taking punishment, dishing it out”. In a fiercely fluctuating battle in Birmingham he lost to his nemesis, Chris Eubank, but lost nothing of his gung-ho reputation, Eubank describing him as “savage … he was strong enough to kill me and I think he desired to”.Five years later, in his fifth defence of the WBC super middleweight title, which he had seized from Mauro Galvano, he left the American Gerald McClellan near death. Writing in this newspaper, Hugh McIlvanney described the “relentless, mutually destructive aggression from the principals” as “one of the most brutal fights any of us at ringside had ever witnessed”. Yet here he is, “repentant for a sinful life”, a man who cooks Shepherd’s Pie, chicken dishes and Christmas dinner for pensioners in his new neighbourhood and whose stated mission is to establish his own church so that he can “do the work of the Lord”. In August he will travel to Kisumu, the third-largest city in Kenya, where the population is threatened by the highest poverty rate in the country. Malnutrition, poor sanitation, the spread of Aids and large, ill-fed families have culminated in upwards of 20,000 children having to live on the streets or arrive in from slum areas daily in search of food. Benn intends to help his friends and fellow Christian pastors, Kerry and Penny Cook, build a children’s home and ultimately a place of worship in one of Kisumu’s most destitute outlying districts. “My flesh has achieved,” he says of past conquests. “But what have I done spiritually?”That he even poses the question emphasises the metamorphosis he has undergone. Once he battered bodies, now he wants to save souls. A self-confessed womaniser (“I’ve had untold affairs; a lapdancer gave birth to my baby four days before Connor and India, my twins, were born”), he has become an avowed family man, faithful to his wife, Carolyne, a loving father to five children. Responsibility and temperance have displaced the malevolent recklessness of old.“I wasn’t like Paul on the road to Damascus,” he says. “I was more like Jonah, disobedient and reliant on the Lord’s mercy. I lived with Satan so long that the enemy won’t allow me to walk away easily. But by transforming my life — and I have a long way still to go — I know I can transform other people’s lives. All I need is this.” He picks up a leather-bound Bible, opens it to Romans, Chapter 12, and begins to read: “ Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.” He looks up and smiles, his new life vindicated. But what made The Dark Destroyer see the light?HE SAT in silence as the men walked past his car. Some recognised him but could not understand why he was here, parked late at night by Streatham Common, with tears rolling down his face. Nobody dared to stop and ask.But there were plenty of questions he was asking of himself. “What have I got? Why do I keep hurting the people who love me? Where am I going with my life?” There were no easy answers, but one conviction was impossible to shake. “I’ve got nothing, that’s what I’ve got, absolutely nothing.” So he reached for the bottle of white wine and emptied it and poured a handful of sleeping tablets down his throat. It was four miles to his home in Beckenham and somehow he made it, staggered into bed and for two days lay comatose. He had cheated on Carolyne again, reaching a crossroads; this affair in 1998 was his last “I wanted someone to tell me, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ I just wanted someone to love me, to say, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ because I knew it wasn’t,” he reflects, head bowed, still ashamed of the pain he caused. “I sat in my car, Carolyne’s car actually, almost in a trance. And I was scared. I felt real fear. For many years I’d had a lot of bad thoughts because of the battle for custody of my kids and all the problems I had over my first marriage (to Sharron). I felt everything was against me and this time I really didn’t care if I ended it all because the only time I’d felt truly at peace was when I was in the ring, fighting.”Growing up, Benn had worshipped his oldest brother, Andy, who earned widespread respect on Ilford’s streets for the way he could handle himself in a scrap. “One brave youth against many,” Benn remembers. In his eyes, Andy, who was in and out of borstal, could do no wrong. Big brother was the one he would snuggle up to at night before feeling safe in the dark. In sibling disputes, which among seven brothers were many, he could be relied upon to side with Nigel.Benn was only eight when he heard the awful news that his warrior knight had bled to death after falling through a conservatory roof. “Andy won’t be coming home again,” explained his tearful father, Dickson. Devastated, Benn stepped into his street-fighting brother’s shoes, ran with boys twice his age and revelled in the thrill of petty crime.It took the army to instil a sense of direction into his life. But this was no epiphany for a young man with an insatiable instinct for violence. Benn joined his regiment’s boxing team and was never beaten in an army bout, but he could not confine his fighting to the ring. Nor was he abstemious about much else. When he broke into boxing’s big time he submitted to the dark forces of seduction and orgy.“It’s horrible when I look back,” he says. “Not a good time in my life at all. I’d walk into houses with my friends and see a big mound of cocaine on a table and they’d all be saying, ‘Go on Nige, have some’. I was around naughty people. I remember being taken once to a huge detached house in Surrey’s stockbroker belt where they were holding a mass orgy, beautiful naked women everywhere. The temptation was everywhere: drugs, women. Girls were throwing themselves at me like Frisbees and I stood there catching them. And that was my life, empty and shallow, chasing some quick, cheap thrill.“It was Carolyne who first turned to the church to try to change all of this, to pray to the Lord to come into our lives, to give us the humility to open our lives to Him. Every night she read me passages out of the Bible and, though at first I wasn’t interested, something was stirring inside and it started to take hold until I began to read the Bible myself and take the lead. The Lord wanted me to take the lead.”Almost three years ago Benn moved to Majorca, “turned over a completely new leaf”, and for the past eight months has held Bible classes in his home, the beginning of his ministry.“I don’t think about fighting any more,” he says. “It’s gone, out of my life, though the fame I attracted has given me the opportunity to do God’s will, to help people transform their lives through my own experiences. My life was changed through Jesus Christ. People want to hear this and the Lord wants me to do many other things. He wants me to open a church. He really has big plans for me. I can feel this in my spirit. I’ve gone through everything in my life so far in order to reach this point, to be ready to do the Lord’s work. If I can be saved, a sinner, so can anyone.“This is why I want to go to Africa. I need to have a mission. It’s a challenge, the greatest challenge of my life. I don’t think my life will end until I’ve done what the Lord has called me to do, to preach the gospel, to transform people’s lives. This is my destiny and I will see it fulfilled.”VINCENT is four years old and lucky to be alive. Recently he underwent surgery to repair an umbilical hernia the size of his head. With no free medical service in Kenya, he was reliant on the intervention of Kerry and Penny Cook, who raised the £1,350 that it cost to pay for his surgery. Now, for the first time in his life, Vincent is running and playing with other children, a bright example of the difference that the Christian Care Centre established by the Cooks has made in this part of Kisumu. But the fight is far from won.Through their efforts in the local clinic and children’s home, they are beginning to combat the high rate of maternal and infant mortality within the community and also the devastating impact of HIV and Aids. But there is still no real social infrastructure and the standard of housing is poor. A second children’s centre would assist in the battle against juvenile crime. Work on this project will begin when they return to Kisumu in the summer, accompanied by Benn.“Kerry and Penny, whom I met here in Majorca, do a lot of work in Africa and I want to be part of it,” Benn says. “I really don’t know what to expect when I go out there. They’ve told me some harrowing stories and I’m not sure how I’ll react to the whole experience. Poverty is rife. People are living in squalid conditions. But maybe I can make a difference. I think I need to go to Kisumu to change who I am. People who have gone there say they ’ve come back with a new outlook. That’s what I’m looking for and I’m looking to change other people’s lives, too, the people who live there.“We are so caught up in our own lives that we forget about people who are struggling and really finding it hard, who are in much greater need. Whatever those people need I want to try to provide for them. They don’t have a church. They need homes, an orphanage. Going out there and seeing it for myself will be a start. I really want to do all I can.”More than 200 people a day pass through the mission’s clinic with ailments ranging from infected wounds and sores to malnutrition. Consolata, a young mother, whose sores on her right foot were neglected for three years, was told by a doctor that the foot would have to be amputated. She was practically bedridden when she came to the clinic with her daughter, Lucia, who was trained to clean and dress her mother’s foot. After three months Consolata was able to walk again on two healthy feet. Baby Samuel, who was barely alive when he was brought to the clinic by his mother, recently left for home in good health.Their stories are told in two illustrated books, which Benn has borrowed from Kerry and Penny to prepare him for his missionary work. He is touched by tales of people walking for two days to attend a prayer meeting or to be baptised in the waters of Lake Victoria. “That’s deep, deep faith,” he proclaims.“Being able to build homes for kids, provide food and medicine, that’s what we’re striving for. Please God we’ll open a church as well. I believe that’s what He wants me to do. Here in Majorca I know there are people who aren’t being spiritually fed. I’ve helped a young boy who was wrestling with drug addiction and now he and his parents are part of our prayer group.“You see, people are dying inside, overburdened by marriage problems, financial problems and drugs problems and they don’t know how to escape. Well, I’ve had a bit of experience of this. I’ve been through exactly the same. I might not be what some people see in their mind as the pastoral type. I’m not whiter than white. But how am I meant to be? I want people to go to church and be able to feel something. I want people to be riveted. Jesus wasn’t a meek, mild-mannered man. Look how he reacted to the men selling animals for sacrifices inside the temple. He turned over tables and accused them of turning his father’s house into a den of thieves. He went in and smashed it up — a bit like me.”WHAT happens to a man when he practically kills another man in front of millions of witnesses? At night, how does he sleep?A decade has gone by and for the first time Benn brings himself to watch the tape. His opponent that night, Gerald McClellan, now spends his days in a darkened room, sat in a wheelchair beside a television he can no longer see. One of the most feared American fighters of his generation, a concussive puncher who had stopped 29 of his 31 victims, 20 in the opening round, he now relies on his sisters, Lisa and Sandra, to provide round-the-clock care.His brain damage has erased much of his memory but still he tries to convince his infrequent visitors that he is in training for an upcoming bout. “It’s so sad, but I can’t blame myself,” Benn maintains. “It could have been me.”The whole country saw it, voyeurism taken to the extreme. There’s Frank Bruno at ringside, imploring Benn to ride out the storm. He’s been nailed by McClellan’s deadly right hand in the opening 30 seconds and he’s falling through the ropes, shocked by the terrorising power of his opponent. He survives because that’s what life on the streets of east London taught him to do, but it takes Dennie Mancini in his corner to revive his spirit, which is crushed.“He’s finished, the other guy,” screams Dennie. “Now go out there and do to him what he did to you. This is kill or be killed!” Maybe it’s the most vicious ring war there has ever been.“It was brutal, there’s no other way to describe it,” Benn says. “It was an experience that left me totally drained. When I took a bath in the small hours the next morning I had to call on some friends to lift me out. I was exhausted.”Round after round there are beastly exchanges of blows. McClellan, who wears a tattoo of one of his fighting pitbulls, Deuce, on his right shoulder, is in a dogfight, and struggling. His gumshield keeps protruding out of his mouth. He’s having trouble breathing. Why are his eyes constantly blinking? But he manages to put Benn down again. It’s round eight and 11,000 people inside the London Arena are echoing the manic calls of Bruno, who’s expending more energy in this fight than he has in most of his own.“I came straight back at him with a right hand, left hook combination after I went down,” Benn points out. It will take two more rounds but right there and then the fight has been won and lost.But what is going on inside McClellan’s head? Why is his vision unclear? What made him stay down on one knee while the referee Alfred Azarro completed the 10-count? Clearly, Don King, his promoter, believes he should have got up as he eyes him with disgust. But he’s already in a halfway house to the hospital as he slides down his corner post onto the floor while Benn is telling the country that “they just brought him over to bash me up”. This is pugilism in a prism.“Gerald McClellan was going to do all sorts to me, that’s what Don King kept saying,” Benn recalls. “Well, don’t think I’m going to be scared. That’s not me. If you put a man in my way, I’ll fight him. I don’t care. I fear nobody.”Fate brought these blood brothers together one last time. Peter Sutcliffe, the neurosurgeon in the Royal London Hospital, is preparing for the operation that will remove the blood clot from McClellan’s brain and save his life. Benn, who has been admitted himself, is wheeled into the cubicle adjacent to his stricken foe. He lifts the right hand that almost decapitated him and kisses it. “Sorry,” he says. And sorry he remains.“It’s a hard thing to talk about. Words won’t change a thing. What can you really say?” he sighs. “It’s not something I can cheer about. He’s his mother’s son. But this is boxing. Not that I ever intended for that to happen. No, never. It’s truly sad. It’s not really an experience I want to talk about.”How could it be? He has just picked up his daughter, Sade, from the airport; Sade, who asked him in the days after the fight a simple question.“Do you know what I really, really want, Daddy? More than anything?”“What do you want, darling?”“I want you to stop fighting. That’s all I want.”THE PHONE rings. The interview is over so he picks it up. It is his agent, Kevin Lueshing. Ambrose Mendy, who was once Benn’s manager, has just called. He has offered Benn £500,000 to come out of retirement and engage Eubank for the third time. Benn laughs and puts down the phone. He walks into the kitchen, picks up a large envelope off the table and strides back into the living room.“This here is an apartment that my wife has just bought for me. Today. Here are the keys,” he says with an air of utter satisfaction, removing them from the envelope along with pictures of the apartment and its panoramic view of Palma’s coastline. “Why would I get back in the ring to fight for half a million when I’m a millionaire?“I’ve just come back from doing a celebrity SAS-style reality show and it was hard, horribly hard. I was with Steve Collins (the Irishman who beat Benn in each of his last two fights) and we were being ambushed by these SAS men, who then kept us up all night, interrogating us. They put us in ice water, everything. Now, I keep myself in shape but when all the filming was done and they announced a big party to celebrate I headed straight for my bed. I was exhausted.“Does Ambrose Mendy really think I’m that hard up that I have to fight Chris Eubank? Does he not consider that at 41 I might just have better things to do? What is it that Matthew wrote? ‘The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send labourers into his harvest.’ I think I know what I have to do.”Anyone who wishes to follow Nigel Benn’s journey into Africa can do so on www.sports-plus.net