Often, it wasn’t a case of “will it kick off tonight?”, but more like “how many times and where first?” Both the street and the door taught me a lot about myself and about just how I responded under pressure. I’d work from Thursday through to Sunday night in some nice places and at some less than savoury venues. Here, I learned a lot about pre-threat cue behaviour, as well as many other human behavioural elements, communication skills, and my reiteration of the importance of pre-emptive action where possible. What the door term provided me with was, in effect, a training laboratory that accelerated my learning curve, regarding what worked and what didn’t in live violence confrontation. This chapter of my life, combined with my early upbringing and leaving home and school at an early age becoming in effect a street kid and being involved in gangs, which led to my fair share of pub brawls and street fights meant I had already gained an insight into predatory behaviour and street violence. I continued this for the next 14 years, working at venues all over the South of England, including London, Portsmouth, and Southampton, where I live. It was around this time that I started my term on the door as a pub/nightclub doorman. This allowed me to gain some significant strength and size, as well as a fair degree of competitive success at amateur level.
My interest in training and martial arts never ceased, but unbeknown to me at the time, my real education for understanding violence and predatory behaviour happened on the street!Īt the age of 21, I immersed myself into the world of strength training and eventually became a competitive Olympic weightlifter. I was pretty much a street urchin growing up I learned to live on my wits, had some unsavoury gang-related involvement, and generally rubbed shoulders with the bad element, if you like. I come from South East London and left home and school when I was 13 years old.
During this period, I also did some judo and aikido before moving on to study a wide variety of martial methods, both Eastern and Western, including Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, Filipino, western boxing, wrestling, grappling, and close-quarter combatives. Like most students at that time, I started with traditional Japanese karate with Wado-ryu, then Shotokan, and finally Kyokushinkai. I started training in martial arts at the age of 11, some 37 years ago now.