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  Bartley had apparently been inspired to start fighting when he saw a fighter kill his own uncle with one punch when he was just nine years old. Bartley would live until the age of fifty-seven, when he sadly met his maker at the hands of liver cancer. But hundreds of Travellers attended his funeral and his legacy lives on, particularly in his adopted home of Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, where there is a monument to him. Someone told me that in the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, Tom Hardy even used Bartley’s voice as inspiration for his character Bane. He must have had some presence.

  But the tradition in my family of fighting men actually goes back even further, to another famous man within the Travellers community who had the same name, the original Boxing Bartley Gorman. My great-great-great-grandfather Bartley Gorman, the first of his name, was a tough Irish bare-knuckle champion in the nineteenth century who fought all over Mayo. His talent and success started the fighting line. Following on from him there was my great-uncle Ticker Gorman, who fought throughout the 1920s and into the 1940s. His mother and father had come to live in England. He was 6 foot 2 and 14 stone and could really fight. So much so, he would spar with professional boxers such as the great Len Harvey, who won British titles at middleweight, light-heavyweight and heavyweight between 1929 and 1939. He also sparred with Canada’s former Commonwealth heavyweight champion Larry Gains, who ended up as a sergeant major in the British Army during the war and was beaten twice by Harvey in title fights. Ticker loved fighting that much he was still taking men on at fairground booths well into his sixties. My dad’s grandmother was a Gorman and she married a man called Peter Fury. Those men fought for pride and honour across the UK and Ireland. The fighting spirit inside them flows down through the generations to this day.

  I’ve carried on that fighting heritage as has my heavyweight cousin Hughie, son of my former trainer Peter, and my cousin Hosea Burton, who lost his British light-heavyweight title in December 2016 and told me afterwards that he would rather have died and won than gone home to his family having lost – that’s what the fighting honour means.

  The title of King of the Gypsies has always been a big deal within the Travellers community down through the centuries. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Othea Burton, had that title, never losing a bare-knuckle fight in his life. He had one famous fight at Puck Fair in Killorglin, Co Kerry in Ireland, which is held to this day every summer. The fight went on for an hour and a half and has entered Travellers folklore, with the strong rumour being that a scene in the great movie The Quiet Man, where John Wayne brawls with his brother-in-law across the countryside, was based on that day when Othea Burton was crowned King of the Gypsies.

  The art of boxing is very different from the bare-knuckle days, but the grit, honour and natural fighting heart remains the same. My dad knows all about bare-knuckle fighting and has the scars of battle all over his body. In his words, when he fought, from a teenager upwards, it was kill or be killed. It was savage, with biting, head-butts, elbows – anything went, and it only stopped when someone said they were done. Then afterwards the two men would go for a pint because whatever differences they had were now settled. Boxing is completely different; it’s more disciplined and a real art. You can’t compare the two.

  Money comes and goes but honour remains. And it wasn’t just the men in the family who could fight either as my grandmother on my dad’s side, Patience, was no pushover. In fact, they say she was more aggressive than my grandfather, who was more or less afraid of his own shadow. He sadly suffered from mental health issues and, of course, in those days it wasn’t treated seriously.

  But my grandmother would have been tough on her sons, my dad John and uncles Peter and Hughie, who would both go on to train me at different stages of my professional career. Patience stood 5 foot 7, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes and took no nonsense from anyone. She made it clear to my dad to always stand up for himself and never back down and if the boys got out of line she would give them a clip around the ear. My dad jokes that she would rather have a fight than her breakfast!

  So fighting was in my DNA and from the moment on 12 August 1988 I came out of my mother’s womb weighing in at just one pound I was showing my fighting spirit just to stay alive. My mum and dad feared the worst again when I struggled for life and the doctors made it clear that it was a 100/1 shot that I would make it through the night.

  But when I opened my eyes after coming back to life for the fourth time, my dad has told me that he looked at me and said, ‘He’s going to make it, he’ll be 7 foot tall, 20 stone, he’s going to be called after Mike Tyson and he’ll be the heavyweight champion of the world.’ I was three months premature and far from out of the woods. I had to stay in the hospital for another three weeks before I could be brought home. But that wasn’t the end of me and the hospital; I would end up going back and forth so often for years to come that I should probably have had a loyalty card.

  Right up to the age of eight or nine I suffered from boiling temperatures that would make me delusional. I’d be screaming at my mum and dad that lions were going to eat me and that the curtains were on fire. I had to be rushed to hospital so many times in order for them to monitor me and to get my temperature down; it was frightening for me and my parents. We didn’t know what was happening to me or when it would stop, and really it just seemed that it was something I had to go through before I grew out of it.

  This may seem unbelievable to many now, when they see me on television fighting on some of the biggest stages in the world, or holding court at press conferences, but I was not an overly confident boy, far from it. I was a bit timid and unsure and always anxious. I worried that something was going to go wrong, and I had no idea at the time why I was thinking like that.

  But when it came to boxing, just like my feeling of invincibility against Wladimir Klitschko years later, I always had confidence; I was supremely confident in what I could do boxing-wise. Growing up in Styal village, near Manchester, I had a lot fun and enjoyed attending my local primary school, which only comprised a total of thirty-six pupils. I played in goal for the football team because I was bigger than most so I was quite effective, and I even played for a while on the netball team with the girls, which I wasn’t too bad at either! That was a great primary school, there was no trouble and I was liked by all the teachers. I was treated with respect and I showed respect, so I enjoyed going there and learning and playing with the rest of the kids.

  My environment, the way I grew up, was a lot different to the way my dad John grew up in the Travellers community. When he was young in the 1960s and 70s he suffered a lot of racism and bullying. It became a ritual that at the end of school every day he would be picked on and would have to fight, going home with a black eye, or cuts and bruises, and eating his dinner with blood in his mouth. Nobody at the school cared because in his view those from the Travellers community were just seen as no-good gypsies, who were treated as if they shouldn’t even be breathing the same air as the rest of the kids in his class. He would go home and complain to my grandmother Patience, and she would just tell him to fight back or he would have to answer to her too! He had no option but to learn how to handle himself, as did my uncles Peter and Hughie.

  . . .

  A lot of people in the UK still seem to have a poor attitude towards Travellers and, to be honest, there are some who give the community a bad name. There are those who steal, who scam people and who will move from area to area leaving a mess. But that’s a minority and, as with everyone in life, we are all individuals and should be treated that way. Instead, racism towards Travellers is tolerated. It is often mentioned, when looking back at the great career of Muhammad Ali, that he threw his Olympic gold medal from the 1960 Games into a river, after being refused service at a coffee shop in his home town of Louisville, Kentucky. I can relate to that because I’ve had the experience with my friend Dave Reay of being point-blank refused entry into a pub because I’m a Traveller. That’s something that just should not be tolerate
d in this day and age.

  My dad said that he became hardened to his situation; it was just normal to have to live with that kind of racism on a daily basis. His family were moving around every eight weeks from caravan site to caravan site throughout Yorkshire, so he would arrive at different schools and keep having to go through the same torture because he was seen as the outsider and someone who was less well off than the rest of the kids. He did have it tough as a young boy and a teenager. There wasn’t much money around and no chance of making friends in that kind of school environment.

  I didn’t have the same experience because I wasn’t brought up in the same rough areas and I never had a fight in school in my whole time there. I enjoyed school; I was part of the community. I suppose it was a different era, and it also helped that the area was a lot different to those my dad had grown up in.

  My dad came to Styal when he was twenty-six; he wanted to try and give us a different life. He knew how hard his young days had been and the cruelty that he suffered so he decided there was no way he was going to put his kids through it. He saw a different way of life. He made friends outside the Travellers community who helped him in his business and he gained respect, though sadly he would admit to not having any really close friends. He’s a straight-talker and not everybody likes that – as I have found out to my cost as well.

  So Dad bought this 200-year-old dilapidated cottage, with no running water or electricity, on quite a large piece of land, and got to work turning it into our home. For a few years we lived in a caravan as he brought in bricklayers, electricians and whoever else he needed to help renovate the cottage. He did all the hod-carrying and labouring and after ten years he had it the way he wanted and we moved in. There was no such thing as a bank loan or mortgage for my dad; he had to earn the money through car dealing and roofing jobs so he could build it bit by bit. Then disaster struck in the mid-1990s when the cottage flooded, and it took another four years before we could move back into it again. But it was a wonderful place to grow up in and my dad still lives there.

  . . .

  While my time at school was very enjoyable, like the majority of Travellers I left school around ten years of age. A long education is not part of the Travellers community culture. The average boy is encouraged to get out and start doing work before secondary school age and my dad just had the same attitude – that there is a big world out there and if you want some money then you need to go out and earn it.

  I was always around my dad as he sold cars and I learned about dealing – making money and losing money. By the time I was twelve or thirteen I had been in and out of every top car, whether that was a Ferrari, Bentley, Porsche; you name it, I had been in it. As a teenager I was buying and selling. I would go to the auctions with my dad, picking up cars. My dad used to have a pitch in Bolton where he would sell cars and I would help out. But from the house I would do my own selling. I would paint and polish up old cars and sell them for a few hundred quid. It was a good, valuable lesson. It taught me to save and appreciate what I earned.

  One of the toughest jobs I had was lifting bricks as well as shovelling stones in a car park that had to be levelled. I would be there from eight o’clock in the morning, work until four and then be in the gym for six that same night and not come out until ten o’clock. It was hard, hard work but I was using the labouring as training and it was developing my arms, legs and shoulders. I was getting £20 per pile that I got shifted so I could walk away with £80 a day and I felt great about that. Shane had been offered the job before me but he couldn’t stick it – it was too tough for him.

  I was a teenager with a dream of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. I was training, working and reading. I would read Boxing News magazine and the Bible. That was my life and all those family experiences, the lessons on life and my family background gave me the grounding to be the person and fighter I am today. My dad and his dad were both great salesmen – my dad could sell sand to the Arabs and ice to the Eskimos, and I have that natural ability as well. I think I’ve also shown that I can sell myself pretty well when it comes to big fights!

  I lost out on a few deals along the way but I was learning, and when I would tell my dad that I had come up short he would just laugh because, as far as he was concerned, I was learning about life. I may have left school at ten but I was sharp with the numbers and becoming street-smart. And anyway, I was never going to be a doctor or anything like that. I was always going to be a fighter. Some people can be very clever, very academic, but as green as a fresh field, whereas I was at the university of life from a young age. But I do believe that a formal education is very, very important for kids.

  The Travellers community, for the most part, hasn’t moved on in that regard and I think they need to because for me education can unlock the door to so many opportunities. It can break down barriers and allow people from different parts of society to mix and gain a greater understanding of each other. For me that can only be a good thing if you want society to improve; and for racist thoughts and attitudes to disappear then education is absolutely key to that happening.

  The importance of a good family unit is a clear positive within the Travellers community. We see today how the breakdown in family life has badly damaged society, but when it comes to education I think there needs to be a new way of thinking. At the moment the general thought among Travellers is that only idiots go to school, but that’s just because they can’t see the benefits of a good education, the possibilities that it can open up for young people.

  That’s certainly what I want for my kids. I want them to have a good childhood, to have strong morals and I’ll be encouraging them to go to secondary school and beyond. Maybe we could even have the first Dr Fury one day! I would be very, very proud if one of my children were to be the first to graduate from university and I would even love to have a shot at doing a degree myself.

  But for me, having left school, it was time to start earning some money. This meant doing all kinds of jobs, like brushing snow away from driveways for a few quid and then eventually, when I was about thirteen, going out with my brother to collect scrap. I was able to drive by this point and not that far off 6 foot tall. So my brother Shane, my cousin Justin and I would go around the local estates and collect anything that people were throwing out. We’d spend all day at that and then take it to the scrap yard that night and maybe end up with forty or fifty quid.

  I often used to think that the way we were living was something like that popular television programme The Darling Buds of May, where the family grew up in the countryside, living life their way. I used to keep a lot of chickens, including some American fighting cocks, about fifty to sixty at a time. I didn’t have them for fighting. They were my pets and I would go all over the country, even to Ireland, for shows.

  I loved looking after them. It was a bit of an obsession and I remember one day getting up at 5 a.m. and walking twelve miles with my cousin Justin to a market to buy a prized chicken. I was about thirteen and we bought this beautiful chicken; we thought it was a great buy. But for some reason we started arguing on the way home about who would carry it and it got a bit heated. It got to the point when I ended up pushing him away and that led to the chicken flying out of his arms and as it flew up a train was coming and it went smash into the oncoming train. All we had to show for our efforts and money spent on this lovely chicken was a load of feathers blowing over the railway track and a large splat on the front of the train!

  . . .

  My brother Shane and I have always been close because we are only a year apart. He has always been around when I’ve been preparing for fights, and growing up we shared a passion for boxing. But like most brothers we’ve had our disagreements … like the time he came into the garage and tore down all the wood I spent hours stacking under the orders of our dad. I was fuming because it had taken me all day to do it and I knew if Dad came home and saw it wasn’t done I was going to be in big trouble. If Dad asked you to do something
it was expected to be done, no questions asked. So I just lost my rag with Shane, lifted a big piece of wood and ran after him, giving him such a whack that it knocked out all of his baby teeth. When Dad saw his gaping mouth and the remains of his teeth he knew what had happened, and who had caused it, so needless to say I was the next one getting a good smack!

  Growing up, the big passion in my life was always boxing. It was there from a very early age. As soon as I could use a pencil I was drawing pictures of gloves and different boxing kits, colouring in shorts and socks and gloves and then also writing short stories about boxing, describing fights. I’d take them and show my dad and tell him that one day I was going to be a boxer.

  My other two brothers, John and Hughie, had some interest in boxing but not the same passion as I had or even Shane for that matter. My dad had fought as a heavyweight in the late 1980s and early 90s, boxing some of the best in Britain, including Henry Akinwande, who went on to win the WBO heavyweight title. But Dad felt used and abused as a professional fighter, believing he never had the chance to truly progress. He never really wanted me to become a fighter because he feared I wouldn’t get a fair crack of the whip. He hated the politics of professional boxing and that’s why he never encouraged me to be a boxer.