The forgotten hope of British boxing has spent an hour laughing about Mad Frankie Fraser’s hands, George Clooney’s jaw and a racist’s tooth when conversation turns to his own lungs. Errol Christie has found something funny in the darkness of his cancer.

It has been a year since he was wrestled to the ground and a subsequent X-ray told a tale of the unexpected.

‘I was coming out of Lewisham train station last year and this copper comes up and takes me down,’ Christie says. ‘Quite rough, you know?

Former British boxer Errol Christie opened up about his amazing life and his battle with cancer

The 52-year-old grew up in Coventry with his family before moving to London to turn professional

‘Probably sees a black guy and thinks, “He’s up to no good”. Thought I was a bad boy, a robber or something. But I’d done nothing. Anyway, I get thrown in the car and taken to the station.

‘After a while they let me go but there was pain around my chest for a few days that I thought was from the copper, so I went to the hospital for an X-ray. They had a look and saw something. That was it. Cancer. At least they found it.

‘So I have to thank the copper, really, don’t I? Thanks, pal.’

Christie is laughing. It’s what he does, this 52-year-old man who has met everyone, from gangsters to billionaires, and has taken his share of big hits along the way.

He was middleweight champion of Europe as an amateur and the brightest professional prospect in the country, his fights watched by millions on ITV in the Eighties.

Christie was middleweight champion of Europe as an amateur and the brightest prospect in the country

‘I was on there before Eubank, Benn, all of them,’ he says. He was also in the Guinness Book of Records as a teenager for holding all 10 amateur titles available in Britain at the time.

He was meant to go right to the top. But he didn’t.

Today, Christie is sitting in a pub in Lewisham. He has been arguing for more than £75 a week in benefits while he is treated for small cell lung cancer.

Sportsmail's Riath Al-Samarrai spent the day talking with Christie about his life in and out of the ring

‘There is no cure for it. But they can treat it so I’ve been having chemo and all that,’ he says. ‘Life ain’t meant to be easy, that’s what they say, isn’t it? But you have to look at the bright side.’

He laughs loudly.

This trip through his memories starts in Coventry, where he was one of eight children in a three-bedroom house with a schizophrenic father who had been a yam-picker in Jamaica and a mother who worked as a nurse.

‘My dad was crazy,’ he says. ‘He was illiterate and used to beat us. Every day I would hide and hope one of my brothers would get it.’

The former boxer now lives in Lewisham and poses for a picture where he had a market stall

Christie’s first memory is of sitting in a high chair watching his father throw hot milk over his mother’s face. ‘It was mad in the house and madder outside.’

A deep scar on his forearm is from the day he got attacked by a white skinhead with an iron bar. When the police turned up, he jumped two storeys from a car park to escape. ‘They were going straight past the skinheads and heading for me,’ he says. ‘I should have died right there from the fall but I landed on a pile of sand.’

A scar between knuckles on his right hand tells another tale. ‘This boy was being racist to me,’ he says. ‘Each day people were racist to me. Groups of them would corner you with their Doc Martens and bomber jackets. I used to call them Germans, these National Front types.

Christie greets a friend in the street as he showed Sportsmail around the streets of Lewisham

‘When I was about 13, and I was England’s schoolboy champion, this German started on me. I hit him and he went down. I looked down at my hand and his tooth was sticking out of my knuckle. I pulled it out and handed it back to the lad to put under his pillow.

‘Racists were great for my boxing in the Seventies and Eighties. You see, they only attack in groups. Racist on the left, bang! One in the middle, bang! Do a little spin to the right and two bangs for you, fella! That’s good training when you do it every other day for a few years.’

Christie had taken up boxing aged eight, going to the gym at the old Triumph motor factory around the corner from his house. An old shop steward type, Tom McGarry, was the trainer there and became the first white face Christie trusted.

The fighter realised he had cancer after being tackled by a policeman and feeling pain in his chest

‘He was the first person to see me as something,’ Christie says. ‘This man trusted me, gave me the keys to the gym and said I could come and go when I wanted. My life was all about training in there and beating up the racists.’

Christie moved to London to turn professional. He won his first 13 fights with 12 knockouts, owned two houses and drove a Porsche.

‘I went to Detroit to train under Emanuel Steward at the Kronk Gym,’ he says. ‘I sparred Tommy Hearns. His hands were like concrete but he never put me down. The biggest mistake I made was not staying in America.’

Christie won his first 13 fights with 12 knockouts, and owned two houses and drove a Porsche

Christie returned to England as the country’s bright hope. In one sparring session he claims he knocked out Chris Eubank’s tooth and in a publicity shoot he was paired with Muhammad Ali. ‘He told me I was pretty but not as pretty as him,’ Christie says.

But he lost his 14th fight, won a few more and then, in 1985, lost a British title eliminator in front of 10,000 at Wembley Arena to Mark Kaylor, a good fighter but hardly elite. Two defeats quickly became four and four became eight.

By his mid-20s, Christie’s career was going nowhere and when the stock market crashed in 1987, he lost a home in Dulwich and the Porsche. He was burned out. ‘Strange how it works out but you can’t moan,’ he says.

In 1985, he lost a British title eliminator in front of 10,000 at Wembley Arena to Mark Kaylor

Christie sits on the canvas receiving a count from referee Harry Gibbs after being knocked down by Kaylor

In Christie’s case, the subsequent years have been weird, wonderful and tough. His 2010 book, No Place to Hide: How I put the Black in the Union Jack is compelling, brutal and critically acclaimed, charting a life that has seen him move on to work as a bouncer, a ‘terrible’ stand-up comic, a construction hand and a trader on a Lewisham market stall for 14 years.

‘I sold baby grows and clothes,’ he says. ‘I remember hearing that Primark was opening. They were selling stuff for pounds and I thought, “All right, I can deal with this, they are the same price as us”. Then the £1 store opens and I’m thinking, “OK, that’s hard”. Then the 99p shop turned up and I thought, “This is a problem”. I sold the stall to this geezer — the best deal I made.’

He was also a personal trainer to celebrities. ‘I was training Gianluca Vialli when he was at Chelsea,’ Christie says. ‘Nice man, very humble.’

Christie has fought off racists over the years and used to sell baby grows on his market stall

The fighter says that he was forced to sell his stall due to the competition of stores opening on the high street

One client, a film producer called Simon Franks, got into a punch-up with George Clooney. ‘I asked him later if he set up his big left with the jab,’ Christie says. ‘Nice man, wouldn’t say boo to a goose.’

For now, the personal training has stopped, with Christie is taking a break as he undergoes treatment.

His long-term plan is to visit schools to talk about the benefits of sport; the short-term intention is to ‘hit the big C in the mouth’.