In Las Vegas in 1994, when Gerald McClellan was preparing for his rematch with Julian Jackson, the one-eyed hitter he'd stopped the year before to win his world middleweight title, he was in his hotel room. He was bored, anxious. He got a video out and slipped it in the machine. The fight was only a few hours away. It was the biggest of his career. There was nobody about and the world champion settled down to get his kicks.

As the tape rolled, Stan Johnson, McClellan's coach, knocked on the door.

'He's some guy,' Stan recalls. 'I think he'd be in his room before a fight, gettin' a little pussy or somethin' before he go to the fight ...well, Gerald be in the room this time watchin' tapes of dog fights. I thought he be watchin' a sex movie. But I goes into the fuckin' room, Gerald's got a tape of himself watching the dogs with a stockin' over his head where you can't see who he is - in case somebody find the tape no one know it's him!'

This is how Stan saw Gerald and the whole dog thing: 'So he got this black Labrador, just went to the dog shop, told the man, "I need a dog to take care of, I'll take this Labrador home," and the man say to the dog, "Yeah, you got a good home now," and Gerald takes the dog home. He takes the dog down his basement and tapes the Labrador's mouth, takes his pit bull Deuce and says "Get him!" He lets Deuce start eatin' the dog up while he's timing it on a watch, see how long it would take his dog to kill this dog. And I said to Gerald, "Hey, Gerald, this Labrador wouldn't beat Deuce, no way, so why did you tape his mouth shut?" And he said, "Coz I just wanna see how fast my dog would kill him, for one, and, for two, my dog's a championship fighter and you don't need no dog scratched up and bit up by no dog, by no accident. This is like sparrin' for my dog, this is like my dog need to taste blood every day. My dog need to kill somethin' every day, Stan. Just like a fighter need to spar every day, he don't need nobody bustin' him up when he got a big fight comin' up. He just need to bust somethin' up hisself. Right?"'

It was impossible not to be mesmerised by the rhythm of the telling, and by the tale itself. It was a kind of rapping, old-style ghetto cool-speak, all mixed up like a cheap stew, bits of profanity chucked in to pepper it up. Comfort language served up by a badass dude.

Gerald got his comfort between the sheets. Any time of the day or night.

'It was nothin' for him to get some pussy just time afore he go in the ring, even, you know? So that was the main problem with Gerald, it was girls was his problem. But Gerald had a dark side to him, because he was a violent, violent, violent, violent, violent person.' I had to check: that was five 'violents'. Stan was just making sure.

'His whole life was about fightin' and all, pit bull dogs, he pay lotsa money on dog fights, he took money from his fights and he bet. It weren't nothin' him go down the projects in Chicago and bet $10,000 his dog beat your dog. And a bunch o' gang bangers with guns and drugs all come down to watch...'

Donnie Penelton, the Black Battle Cat, he remembers the dogs. He was there too on those dark nights.

'Yeah, Gerald's my first cousin. We grew up together. I'm older than him, and from the age about three, four, he hangin' around buggin' me from about then, yeah. He was a nice, young scary kid. He was a maniac with the pit bull dogs, man. He was like one hisself. Very aggressive. Very crazy. He had like a yard full of pit bulls. We'd mostly take 'em to Detroit with us, to the camps. I didn't like watchin' them dogs fight like that, I guess ...Kinda difficult, but them dogs, they goin' to fight naturally anyway. You know what he say, though? He always say, "Goddam, if I gotta fight for a livin', I be damned if them dogs ain't gotta fight for a livin' too. I gotta buy 'em their food. If it's a big fight and they win, they oughta be buyin' their own damn food."

'He brought Deuce down to fight this guy's dog in Chicago one time, and me and Donnie, we went down there with him ...Gerald was drivin' his Mercedes Benz, a green car with caramel-coloured seats and he had this big, beautiful truck behind where he carried his dogs in cages. So Deuce, he winnin' this particular fight and all of a sudden the dog got on him and he started rippin' Deuce's throat out. So I'm kinda, like, lookin' at Gerald and I was seein' the 'spressions on his face, you know, and just as his dog was gettin' beat, Gerald told the dude, "Stop the fight!" And the dude said, "No, man. No, man, you started the fight." And Gerald says, "You stop this motherfuckin' fight! Stop the fight! I quit, here your money."

'Gerald had a nice green leather suit on, he picked his bloody dog up, threw his dog across his shoulder, blood run all down his fuckin' coat. Instead o' puttin' him in the truck, in the cage, he put him in the back seat o' the Benz, mad as hell, rubbing his dog, cryin' up and down the road, tellin', "I ain't never gonna do this shit no more, I don't know why I did this, I keep a mess o' snakes afore I put a dog through this again." You know?

'Yeah, Gerald he had some companionship about this particular dog. He'd raised this dog, and this dog, he'd killed a few. This fucking guy, man, once his dog lost a fight and he was $7,000 down. He turns around, he looks at me, and the other guy says, "Hey, you want to wash your dog off before you put him in your truck?" Gerald just pulls a nine-millimetre out of his back pocket, aims it at the dog's head, busts a cap to the dog's head, and says, "Put that motherfucker in a plastic bag. I don't need 'em if they can't fight no better than that. I don't need no motherfuckin' dog that can't fight." This the kinda guy he was...'

I knew before I started that some of this story wasn't going to make easy listening, but this kind of information was confusing. It was not just hard-core boxing stuff; it was the sound of streets I didn't really know. But Gerald and Stan felt at home there. So did Tyson. Listen to Iron Mike's angrier outbursts: he is shouting at the largely white world and he is saying, I'm going home to the streets and you can't come. It's the place that Don King calls home. He's another big hitter comfortable with the argot.

Gerald wasn't a million miles from Don King in his attitude to humanity. King had brought grief - and money - to a lot of lives. He was cold too. Gerald hadn't killed anybody, as King had, but he had that streak in him, an icy vein of ruthlessness. He had to have it. He knew what was demanded to survive in the 'baahxin' bizness'. If you didn't have a hard outside, they'd eat away at your insides and spit you out. That's one thing he learnt from King.

Gerald was not shy of conflict. Used to go looking for it, often. It was part of his protective shell. Getting in the ring and throwing his well-schooled punches for three, regulated minutes per round was a run in the park for Gerald - after all he'd seen outside boxing. His personality was not informed by his trade, but by his life at large. The boxer is just the product. A celebrity. Television packages him and sells him. The G-Man. The Dark Destroyer. Iron Mike. The Hit Man. The Beast. Midnight. Vicious. The Black Battle Cat. Nightmare. All names invented to disguise the man underneath, not describe him.

I could only wonder what else they got up to. Stan, unsurprisingly, had a million stories.

'We in Florida one time,' he says, 'we in trainin', just before we go to fight Nigel Benn. Gerald says, "You wanna go to the mall to do some shoppin'?" So we go to the mall with the champ to do some shoppin', and we come outta the mall, and in Florida you got these pretty little pelican birds, what you call 'em? Flamingos, that's it. They just walk around the mall tryin' to make it look pretty. But Gerald comes out, and says, "Right, watch this, watch this!" And there's this flamingo walkin' around on the road. Gerald gets close and makes a dip with the car, he speeds the car up real bad and - boom! - he hits the damn flamingo! And the flamingo flies up all over the grille! And Gerald, he's laughin', like it's all in Disneyland, and he goes flyin' round the block and he looks at the grille and he looks at the bird feathers and he pulls the bird feathers and pulls the bird outta the grille, and, it's like, "Damn! Did you all see that? Did you all like that?" And then he was on his way out - and you know, you can go to jail for doin' that sort of shit, you know? That's a state bird! You know what I mean?'

I know what you mean, Stan.

'So then Gerald goes around again! He already run over a couple of pelicans and then here come another pelican and you know, like, this motherfuckin' pelican must be wonderin' what's goin' on here, like? He must be like a brother or sister, like, they all busted up. And then Gerald, he says, "Look at this nosy sonofabitch, watch this." And - bam! - he rammed over that one. I said, "Gerry, you gotta stop this, man, we gonna go to jail." And he tried to make it look like it's an accident, that the bird was there, like ...The kid was a violent kid. He loved killin' shit, he loved dog fights, like it was evident, he was want to go out like he went out...'

Like Deuce. Except he made Deuce quit.

25 February 1995: Benn v Mclellan

The fight is brutally dramatic from the first round, when Benn is felled after just 35 seconds and falls out of the ring onto television monitors. The count is very slow, with Benn given fully 13 seconds. Remarkably, he is able to box on, and despite being under severe pressure responds with some fearsome punches of his own. From the second round, McClellan realises something is wrong, he has trouble breathing and his right hand, which has given him trouble in the past is very painful. At the end of the sixth, according to his sister Lisa, McClellan returned to his corner and said, 'I wanna quit, Stan.' Johnson denies this. McClellan had never been past round eight in a fight. By round nine the fight was already a brutal, savage classic.

Only now did it dawn on me that we were watching two men careering towards the ultimate sacrifice. This had not been a prospect I had dwelt on in any of the previous rounds. To this point, it had been a collision of undeniable intensity, perhaps the 'best fight' most of us there had ever seen live, but contests between two dangerous punchers such as these invariably end in a countout, negating the possibility of death. Here in the ninth, however, doom cloaked the night. It was as if it had gone too far and nobody could do anything about it. The finish the crowd secretly craved was now a real possibility. Our own inner fight was with our guilt.

It seemed that McClellan was in the greater trouble. It also looked as if he were aware of his predicament. Benn, on the other hand, was hurting physically but his head, although constantly pounded, was clear enough for him to navigate his way through this terrifying jungle of pain. His brain was in place.

At ringside, we had the luxury of reflection, however brief, and could wonder about the morality of seeing Benn and McClellan risk dying for money and a title. There are moralists who will say that is a question we should be asking before rather than during a fight. But we don't. We surrender to our weaknesses.

If there is any morality in boxing, it surely resides inside the ring. That is where the honesty is. Elsewhere, in words and contracts and skullduggery, lies the profound sinning.

The final round

Albert: 'Nigel Benn hoping that he got a second wind between rounds ...A left hand by McClellan!'

Ferdie Pacheco (TV commentator): 'The only way McClellan can lose this fight ...well, he can lose it many ways ...but one way he can lose it is to be cautious ... He can't give it away. He's gotta fight.'

Albert: 'A confident Gerald McClellan. Benn just looking to hang on.'

Nigel lands another heavy right. McClellan is in serious trouble. That right has spun him into another zone. He is the one hanging on. It all starts to untangle now, halfway into the tenth. Nigel sweeps a right over the top of Gerald's injured head. Gerald goes down on his right knee. He rests his left glove on his other knee. He looks up at referee Asaro, who is counting. In French. 'Un! Deux!'

Time slows. Light is everywhere. McClellan is alone in a public place. Yet he is strangely serene. Relaxed, almost composed.

'Trois! Quatre!'

Pacheco: 'Gotta get up.'

'Cinq! Six!'

Pacheco: 'Now that is the strangest knockdown I've seen.'

Gerald gets up at seven. Walks into Asaro. Holds his gloves out. The referee looks at them, rubs them on the fighter's shorts. Lets him loose. Gerald's eyelids are working hard now, like a butterfly in a storm.

Nigel speeds another right on to the top and back of Gerald's head.

Albert: 'Everybody's on their feet, 11,000-strong!'

Benn shoots an uppercut, then a short, stiff right. Every punch is zeroing in on the danger area around the temple. McClellan is gone. He takes another half-blow and goes on that vertical slide, like an elevator smoothly travelling to the basement. He comes to rest on his right knee. Strikes the same pose as only seconds before. As does Asaro. With one minute and 35 seconds left, the referee starts to count again.

'Un! Deux!'

It is done without ceremony or emotion. This is Asaro's role.

'Trois!'

Benn walks to a neutral corner, casually, like Joe Louis used to do. Like Joe, Nigel is used to seeing men fall before him. Except Gerald is kneeling. Waiting for something to descend around his shoulders, a veil of light.

'Quatre! Cinq!'

But the young American, getting older by the second, is not easy with the time-out this time. There is no peace in it. His body is shutting down. He blinks, gasps, gulps in the air. First time, he looked up at Asaro. Now he looks only at the canvas. Asaro has nothing to communicate to him now, nor has Gerald anything left to say. He just has to wait.

'Six! Sept!'

Asaro uses both hands, all 10 fingers, palms facing his own chest. He is shouting at McClellan. Gerald will wait until Asaro has stopped shouting before he moves again.

Benn shifts in from the corner a couple of feet to have a closer look at his prey, thin legs boyishly balancing a fighting man's body. His gloved hands are still coiled in tension. He's counting too. He counts and hopes. He hopes Gerald will not get up. If he does, he has work left to do. If he doesn't, the roof is going to blow. Everybody in the building is counting. The world has gone into super slo-mo. The noise has ebbed. Maybe a yard from McClellan, I can see the figure of Don King in his dinner jacket, standing, two hands resting on the ring apron, and screaming at his man. I turn my head slowly back to McClellan, a half-naked, totally defeated fighter.

'Huit! Neuf! Dix!'

Asaro crosses his arms and waves them in the accepted manner. It's over.

In a frozen moment, McClellan's right knee lifts from the canvas, Benn's knees dip, he spreads his arms wide, accepting the embrace of the crowd.

The whole room goes out of control. Inside the ropes, the canvas is covered instantly in expensive, shiny shoes. Fat rich men jostle for the spotlight vacated by the fighters; outside, row upon row of the mob move and shout as one. They high-five and laugh the smile-free laugh of the cruel voyeur. They are drunk on violent conclusion. They have thrown their last inner punch and they will soon be deflated.

The energy in the ring has travelled through the night like electricity to the crowd, who, collectively, could probably provide the material for a very acceptable orgy or riot, so high are they. This is what they paid for, this is why they came to Docklands when they could have watched the fight at home on television. This is why we fight and why we watch others who fight. At the moment of victory, you do not have to ask the question. In fact, the question is never asked. We just know.

The mob is at one with Benn. The champion's eyes roll, he screams with the wild joy of the conqueror...

Albert: 'Nigel Benn has won!'

Pacheco: 'I can't believe that!'

Albert: 'One of the most bizarre endings to a fight. One of the most compelling fight nights you'll ever see!'

Benn went up on to the second strand of the ropes, in his own corner. This was the place he'd gone back to nine times, after each round of scheduled torture. Now it was his place of celebration. He was waving his right glove at the crowd. There was anger, retribution and a fierce kind of happiness on his face. He screamed - but at nobody in particular. He'd shown us. Like Ali. He'd proved them wrong. He shook up the world.

And now, without turning away from the darkness, Benn pointed his glove dismissively in the direction of the spent challenger, whom he could not see because of the enveloping confusion in the ring. Stan and Donnie were wiping Gerald down - there was only blank resignation on the beaten man's bruised features. And, from where I sat, what looked like the cold fear of resignation.

Fighters can hate each other, physically, for half an hour or so, and then they're as close as is possible outside romance. But Nigel didn't move towards Gerald's corner, as convention dictates. There would be no ritual hug here. No warrior recognition. Nigel was in his own zone.

What I did not see during his celebration was a hint of a smile. His body message was triumph in battle, without a peace treaty. It was ugly and it was beautiful. He'd overcome. He was Superman.

Gary Newbon approached him with his ITV microphone. Benn set himself for another confrontation. He was still high on the fight, and he would stretch the joy of victory as far as it would go. Scientists have recently discovered that the winner in a fight has hyper-testosterone levels, while the loser's testosterone count drops. Darwin would have argued this prepares the winner for mating, and saves the vanquished from himself, reducing his will to fight, so that he will withdraw, perhaps to fight again later.

Benn might have been ready to mate, but he was extending no fraternal warmth to the man in the suit coming towards him. Newbon was in a sweat. He'd had his post-fight interview rows with Benn before, but it wasn't that which concerned him. It was the general air of confusion, and the plight of McClellan. The uncontrolled shouting and general shoving was not helped by King's superactive sidekick, Mike Marley. Marley, a former New York boxing writer who had crossed over to the promotion side, was waving his hands about, pointing to TV people, to journalists, to trainers and various hangers-on. King stood about with a slightly comical regal air, waiting, as ever, to be interviewed. He occasionally looked towards McClellan's corner. Frank Warren was in the ring too, and subdued. He could see that McClellan was badly hurt.

Newbon tried to calm Benn, to capture the excitement with dignity. The TV clock was running down. Newbon had to ask his questions before the ads kicked in. He started to tell Benn how great he was, how he'd defied the odds. He wanted him to listen then respond with a few appropriate soundbites, as is the deal when TV is paying the freight. But Benn doesn't do soundbites or platitudes.

'Nigel,' Newbon began, 'that was not only your greatest performance, that was one of the greatest boxing performances of all time in this country.'

'Yeah, well, all you lot were geeing him up, giving it this, giving it that. I knew he wouldn't be able to go the distance...'

Benn, never looking at Newbon, broke off to wave his still-gloved fist again at the simmering crowd. 'Yeah!' he shouted.

'But Nigel . . .'

'No, no, you listen to me! I'd like to thank my trainer, Kevin Sanders. Everyone sayin' we ain't goin' anywhere without Jimmy Tibbs. Proved him wrong. And not only that, the person I'd like to thank most of all is Paul McKenna, who hypnotised me and made me believe in myself.'

Newbon, fearing a roll-call of everyone Benn had ever known in boxing, tried again to ask another question. Nigel would not be silenced.

'No, no. You listen to me. I'm always listenin' to you.'

They came to a muddled compromise and Newbon attempted to talk Benn through some highlights. But Gary started to lose it. As he swung around towards McClellan's corner, he said, 'Mike McCallum's actually very badly hurt and they've got a stretcher in here, Nigel. I'm sorry. Mike McClellan. Gerald McClellan. Sorry. I'm getting confused here.'

It was all unravelling. Mike McCallum, the world-class middleweight, had fought on the undercard. Newbon, who had his producer yelling corrections down his earpiece, motioned Benn away from McClellan's corner, where they'd been standing. And still there was no sensible dialogue between fighter and interviewer.

Out of the corner of his eye, Newbon had seen that McClellan had slipped from his stool and was lying on his back. His producer told him to get on with the interview and Newbon looked towards the board doctor to see if it was all right to continue. 'Gary!' shouted his producer. 'Get on with it!'

Benn had either not heard Newbon telling him about McClellan or had ignored it. 'No, mate. They only brought him over to bash me up, mate. I'm gonna say what I want to say. Let me tell you that now. They only brought him in to bash me up, mate. No chance ...no chance ...no chance...'

Benn was oblivious to everything and everyone, including McClellan. He only wanted to talk about the fight. At that moment in his life, it was his courage and his victory that defined him. He would allow nothing to intrude on that. 'I don't care if you knock me down, I was ready to go with him. Whatever he wanted to, I was going to match him. All the way, mate. All the way. Now you might start believin' in the Dark Destroyer. I'm number one. Second to no one!'

Benn's eyes had dimmed from wild to steady. Trance-like, even. He was still darting hard glances around the ring, only half-listening to Newbon, who had tried to signal to his production people to finish the interview as the ring descended into unmendable chaos.

'We're going to wrap this interview here, Jim, because we've got a serious problem with Gerald McClellan.'

Newbon was hoping the director would pan back for a final summing-up from Jim Rosenthal. The show had gone on long enough for Newbon. He was visibly affected by the fight and by Benn's responses and McClellan's collapse.

'It was terrible,' Newbon said later. 'My director wasn't really aware. Not his fault. So I'm saying, "This is serious, this is really serious." Everyone got a bit het-up and then we all realised there was a problem. We went into long-shot to get off the air.'

Benn turned away without ceremony. King touched his gloves in a gesture of congratulation, but Benn was not going to be soft-soaped by the promoter he reckoned had wanted him beaten.

Rosenthal, up in the gantry, wound it all down and the credits rolled over some of the key action. McClellan was still lying in his corner. The medics had gathered and the ambulance driver had his engine running outside the arena...

McClellan comes round in the ambulance and rips off the oxygen mask. Disorientated but briefly revived, he says to Johnson, 'What the fuck happen? I got knocked clean out, didn't I?'

Johnson squeezes Gerald's hand and tells him what he does not want to hear: 'No, man. You didn't get knocked out. You went down to one knee and you walked back to the corner and you quit.' This is the cold professional boxing assessment. Technically, it is accurate. McClellan refuses to believe it. He turns to Donnie and says, 'Donnie, you tell this motherfucker he lyin' to me, ain't he!' Donnie shakes his moonface from side to side and answers, 'No, G-Man, that's exactly what happen.'

In a little while, as the resident neurosurgeon Mr Sutcliffe and the staff at the Royal London Hospital begin preparing to save Gerald's life, Nigel Benn is wheeled into the cubicle next to him. He gets up, kisses Gerald's hand and says, 'Sorry.' Except Stan said later he never heard Nigel say that.

He heard something else, though.

Don King arrived soon after Benn to see the man who had been his fighter, the product he hoped would generate big money, but who would now definitely not play any further part in King's plans. Standing not far from Gerald's bed, Don turned to Stan and Donnie and said, 'Gerald quit, man ... He quit like a dog.'

Some dog.

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