When Errol Christie first sat down with me to tell his life story, I wasn’t prepared for the journey that lay ahead. I knew the headline version — British boxing’s nearly man, the gifted middleweight who should have been a world champion. What I didn’t know was the depth of the world he’d navigated to get there, and what it cost him. Writing No Place To Hide with Errol turned into one of the most important projects of my life. Not just as a biography, but as a gripping testimony of what it meant to be Black in Britain during one of the most turbulent and racially charged periods in modern history.
Errol and I were born in the same year, but our life experience could not have been more different. In the early 1980s, sitting in my parents’ living room in a middle-class London suburb, Errol Christie would pop up on the TV screen. This was the golden age of boxing when millions were glued to the small screen on a Saturday night watching household names like Frank Bruno, Barry McGuigan, Lloyd Honeyghan, and Terry Marsh.
And then there was Errol, tipped to be Britain’s middleweight answer to Muhammad Ali. But as we’ll see – it was not going to be. Here’s Errol pictured below taking a swing at me in the back of a London cab.
Growing Up Black in Coventry
Errol was born in Coventry in 1963, part of the Windrush wave of Caribbean families who came to Britain in the post-war years, answering the call to help rebuild a country still recovering from World War Two. His parents, like so many of their generation, arrived with hope. What they found was rejection, hatred, and a cold, grey imperial motherland.
Coventry in the late 1960s and 1970s was a city scarred by the Nazi Blitz, rebuilt in concrete and an optimism that soon faded. The post-war boom with buzzing car factories nosedived in the 1970s as Britain de-industrialised and unemployment soared. Casual racism gave way to something more violent, organised, and sometimes murderous. Errol trained his fists on neo-Nazi and racist skinheads who soon regretted denigrating him because of the colour of his skin.
No Place To Hide was the title Errol chose for his biography. He was very insistent on that. What he meant was that walking down the street brought danger. Going into a night club often resulted in an unwanted fight. Teachers assumed he would never amount to much. Shop owners eyed him suspiciously as he browsed their shelves. Then Errol returned home to an undiagnosed schizophrenic father who beat the living daylights out of his sons. So, there was no place to hide.
Well, there was one place. A factory boxing gym that he and his brothers discovered one day. The place became his second home, maybe even his first. It was in this sanctuary that he honed his skills from the tender age of 7. By 10, he was already climbing into the ring for amateur boxing bouts. There are rules now that would prohibit such an early start to full-on engagement.
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The Making of an Amateur Champion
Errol Christie was extraordinarily talented. That became obvious quickly. As a teenager he was a joy to watch — fast hands, sharp instincts, footwork that seemed almost effortless. He rose through the amateur ranks with a speed that turned heads, eventually representing England and becoming one of the most decorated amateur boxers Britain had produced. The ABA title. International vests. A reputation that spread well beyond the Midlands.
When Errol described those amateur years to me, his face changed. The wariness that sat just below the surface in so much of what he talked about — the watchfulness born of a childhood navigating racism — seemed to lift. In the ring, he said, things were simple. You trained, you fought, you won or you learned. The prejudice didn’t disappear entirely, but skill was a currency that was harder to dismiss.
He was good enough that the 1980 Moscow Olympics were a realistic prospect. That he didn’t go remains one of the great what-ifs of British boxing. The story of how close he came, and what stood between him and that opportunity, is one of the more painful passages in the book.
Turning Professional
By the early 1980s, Errol turned professional, and the landscape shifted. Amateur boxing has its politics, but the professional game is something else entirely — money, management, promoters, the machinery of commerce grinding alongside the sport. For a Black boxer in Britain at that time, the complications multiplied.
He was exciting. Promoters knew it. Crowds responded to him. He had a style that was compelling to watch, and he backed it with real substance. He won fights. He built a record. He was ranked. He was talked about as a future British and European champion — a man who could go all the way.
What Errol also encountered, at every step, was a sport that reflected the society around it. Black fighters were often steered toward one another rather than given routes to titles. Purses that should have been higher, weren’t. Opportunities that appeared on the horizon had a way of receding. You fought who they told you to fight, on terms they set, and you were grateful for the chance. Errol was sharp enough to see the architecture of it, even if he couldn’t always dismantle it.
But he kept winning. By the mid-1980s, he was impossible to ignore.
The Kaylor Fight: The Night Britain Showed Its Face
If there is one night that crystallises everything Errol’s story is about — the talent, the racism, the courage, the injustice — it is the fight against Mark Kaylor in October 1985 at Wembley Arena.
Kaylor was a tough, aggressive East End fighter with a formidable record and a devoted following. Sadly that fanbase included elements that yearned to see a white man bring a black man down in no uncertain terms. This included National Front supporters who were openly in attendance, directing racial slurs at Errol.
Before the fight even got underway, Kaylor and Christie clashed at the photo shoot. It wasn’t a great moment for boxing. Plus in the real world, in both 1981 and 1985, there were inner city riots across Britain. It seemed as if this scuffle was a microcosm of the disturbances in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, fuelled by youth unemployment and racism.
The authorities were urged to ban the fight but it went ahead – astonishing on the 5th November. That’s Bonfire Night in the UK, when fireworks are set off. A worse date one cannot imagine. From the start of the fight, Errol didn’t feel he was treated fairly by the referee. But he fought magnificently. He put Kaylor down. He dominated passages of the fight with the kind of boxing that reminded everyone watching why he was considered so special.
But Kaylor bounced back. Even though Christie floored him twice, he rose again and by the eighth round, landed the decisive blows. Both fighters were used to demolishing their opponents. Errol had only been beaten once in a 21-fight career. He fully expected to crush Kaylor. But it was not be. The resulting defeat weighed heavily on Errol. He felt that not only had he let himself down but his fanbase and wider community.
The Kaylor fight robbed Errol of momentum at the worst possible time. He was twenty-two years old. He should have been on the cusp of a world title shot. Instead, the defeat and its aftermath sent his career down a different road. He fought on — there were further contests, further moments of brilliance — but the trajectory never fully recovered.
The Long Road After Boxing
Professional boxing is not kind to the men it discards, and it discards almost everyone eventually. Errol’s post-ring years were difficult in ways the sport prepares nobody for. The discipline and identity that the gym had given him since childhood — the thing that had set him apart, given him purpose, carried him through — was suddenly gone.
Errol said to me that being a boxer is especially tough when things go south. Unlike footballers who have old teammates to console them, a boxer is a loner – a “killer monk” as Errol termed it. To make ends meet, he had a spell selling baby clothes in a street market and even attempted stand-up comedy.
Eventually though, it was a return of sorts to boxing that proved to be his salvation. Errol became a trainer. Not to the kind of working-class kid he’d once been but well-heeled City of London types. These were wannabe white-collar boxers and even friends of royalty. Plus those, like me, who just wanted to repair a middle-aged body.
I took up boxing at 42 years of age. Errol, my trainer, smirked. I was late to the game. But he trained me hard until we were sparring in the ring wearing head guards. The rounds were 90 seconds long but how the time dragged as Errol’s fists landed jabs and crosses on my head and body. Sometimes I had to pinch myself that I was boxing with the middleweight legend I’d watched on TV two decades before.
Then he told me that he desperately wanted to write his biography. This led to nearly three years of working on the book with endless note taking sessions. I held the pen but Errol made sure every word on the page was true to what he had experienced. For him, the book was a much needed therapy session.
Once published, by Aurum Press, the book was put up for two awards and reviewed in national newspapers with full-page articles in The Guardian and The Independent. Errol was interviewed several times on the BBC and, pictured below, on Sky News.
Taking the Message into Schools
Errol wanted to give something back to young people today growing up in challenging environments. Through my contacts, I got Errol into schools to show how boxing can be used to combat gun and knife crime. He was extraordinary in those settings. Using the force of his character, booming voice, and infectious enthusiasm for the sport – Errol got the youngsters in gloves practising basic moves while he railed against the curse of guns and knives.
Boxing, he told them, gave him somewhere to put his anger that didn’t destroy him or anyone else. It gave him structure when the world around him offered chaos. It gave him a community that judged him on what he could do, not where he came from. He wasn’t telling them to become boxers. He was telling them that the discipline boxing had given him was available to anyone willing to seek it out.
The response from schools was remarkable. Teachers told us they’d never seen certain students engage like that. One of them turned to me and said: “Please keep him here!”
What the Book Means to Me
Errol Christie died in February 2017, aged fifty-three. The book we made together is his testament.
No Place To Hide is about boxing, but it is really about what it means to be Black in Britain — the particular experience of navigating a country that wanted your labour but not your presence, your talent but not your full humanity. Errol never romanticised that experience. He didn’t package it for comfortable consumption. He told it as it was: hard, sometimes brutal, full of injustice — and also full of love, pride, moments of transcendence, and a stubborn, magnificent refusal to be diminished.
His story deserves to be read. Not as history — though it is history — but as testimony still relevant today. The specifics change. The fundamental challenge, for too many young Black men in Britain, has not changed as much as it should.
Errol gave me his story. I hope we did it justice.
Tony McMahon is the co-author of No Place To Hide, the biography of Errol Christie, British middleweight boxing champion.
NOTE ON THE AUTHOR:
Tony McMahon is an investigative historian often see on TV: https://tony-mcmahon.com/
He is the author of several books on different historical topics including the Knights Templar: https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Knights-Templar-Hardback/p/51654
Tony is the co-host of the Talking Templars podcast on YouTube and other channels.