Shortlisted in the Best Autobiography category of the British Sports Book Awards 2011.
Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2010.
This is not the story of a celebrity sportsman. It's not the story of a
life covered in glory with its attendant cavalcade of famous friends,
easy wins and glamorous encounters. Errol Christie may have been one of the most promising British boxers of
his generation a Fight Night poster boy, captain of the England boxing
team, English and European champion, and a cocky, Ali-esque dancer with a
reputation for devastating early knockouts but this is not that story.
This is a story about fighting. Coventry in the dying days of the
Seventies was a tough place to grow up especially if you were poor and
black. At the same time as the young Errol Christie was raising the flag
in the ring, his fists were seeing off skinhead tormentors and NF
bootboys on the streets. Britain was sickening from a vicious racial
divide, and even when the big time turned up Errol soon discovered that a
black boxer who refused to play by the white rules would never be
tolerated. In 1985, after a string of professional knockouts, Errol
faced Mark Kaylor in a brutal bout that tore open the country's
simmering racial enmities. In the eighth round he went down and stayed
down, the roar of the hard right in his ears. But the years that
followed would see Errol square up against a far tougher adversary as he
found himself out in the cold, struggling to get by, and alone with
only his own shattered confidence and no place to hide.
No Place to Hide: How I Put the Black in the Union Jack Synopsis
Seeing my future crumble before my eyes, I grasped for the rope. Before my eyes, I saw an eight year old kid at the Standard Triumph putting on gloves for the first time. A teenage schoolboy champion effortlessly destroying everything put before him. All that struggle and here, in front of all my enemies, it would come to this this ignominious end.'
Errol Christie is a former professional boxer and amateur champion. He
has since become a trainer and is one of the country's leading coaches
of white collar boxing', with students including Dermot O'Leary and
Gianluca Vialli. He also works in inner city schools, using boxing and
his experiences of racism to campaign against knife and gun crime.
Tony
McMahon is one of Errol's students. An online, TV and print journalist
he is also the co-writer of Aurum's Original Rude Boy, the
autobiography of Neville Staple.