Page 9 - Boxing News Magazine (January 2020)

A NEW YEAR IN AN OLD PLACE

Ayers and Big Bad James Oyebola (James the walls, it’s all on the walls. to represent All Stars. Nobody knows
had also won the previous year at super- Big Bad James rests in peace on the where Everton is now.
heavy) on ABA final night. That was a wall in other pictures. The former British Akay had been forced to start the
night, a real night. There is a picture heavyweight champion as a professional, gym the year before when Teejay, who
of Oyebola and Ayers, getting ready a lovely, gentle beast of a man and the was 12 at the time, had been told that
in a Wembley dressing room. It’s black victim of utter foolishness and cruelty he was too black to be a member
and white, but it might have once been one night in the summer of 2007 – he at another boxing club in the area.
colour. After glory (Ayers beat Alan Hall, was shot dead over a cigarette. There I’m being kind with my words. Akay
Oyebola beat John Shakespeare) there are also pictures of Akay’s son, Teejay, responded by opening up his flat on
was a caravan of cars and cabs back to on those fabulous walls. Teejay, big the sixth floor and getting some other
the gym for a celebration. The doors and smiling. A good fighter and British local kids involved; they skipped on the
opened and everybody walking by at champion as a pro. He died, Akay buried landing by the lifts, did the pad work in
midnight came in, that was Akay’s way. him in 2006. It was the biggest coffin the living room, press-ups in the hall.
A fine way and night. “There is a poster anybody had ever seen. Even Akay The council soon heard. This is not a
somewhere from that year,” remembered laughed that day. There are others on fairy tale, this happened in a block of
Colin, a fighter back then at the club the walls from a list of dead, but most flats in west London in the seventies.
and now part of KO Circuit, which was are missing. There are also some frozen That is where Akay built the All Stars.
Britain’s first structured non-contact reminders left behind from visits, lasting On the first Saturday in January KO
boxing-for-fitness programme. Akay images of giants like Azumah Nelson Circuit was open and 18 showed. I got
invented it and launched it in 1990 – he sparring in the gym (he did a few rounds there when the sweat was still wet on
had no rivals. KO Circuit had real edge with a kid called Johnny Harris, star and the floor. Chip and Colin had taken the
and a lot of the amateur fighters never writer as an adult of the film, Jawbone), session. They were each there from just
liked their gym being turned over to of Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield about the start all those years and deaths
keep-fitters on a Saturday morning. The inside the gym. Teejay lost to Holyfield ago, two men in a gym of hope on a lost
lines were not so easily crossed back at the 1984 Olympics. In 1975, far from little stretch of a neglected London road.
then, but the cash injection helped keep Olympic or ABA or British title glory, All Stars has walls covered in memories
the club from vanishing. The history is on Everton Holmes became the first boxer that everybody in boxing can learn from.

STAR OF ALL STARS:
Oyebola [left] defeats
Gary McCrory in the
1986 ABA super-
heavyweight inal

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