Geoff Thompson spent years on the doors of Coventry and became one of the city's best-known doormen, a man who studied violence as closely as he practised it. He was taught by John Anderson, the man the film calls the number one fighter in the city. This film is Thompson's own account of one day in a Coventry pub, a job he did not want, for a friend who had nobody else to ask. By his telling, it was also the day he decided to leave the door for good.
A call from the Lion
The call came from a friend who ran a pub called the Lion. Two men were drinking at his bar, and the landlord wanted them out. Thompson understood why he was frightened. By Thompson's account, one of the two had spent fifteen years glassing, stabbing and bottling his way around the city, and a couple of months earlier had driven a glass ashtray into the face of the Lion's elderly barman for refusing to serve him. The barman, Thompson says, needed a hundred stitches and a week in hospital.
The timing made it worse. Three days before, a friend of Thompson's, a fellow doorman and a capable fighter, had been killed by a single stab wound to the heart outside a nightclub in the city centre. Even the pub's own doormen, one of them an ex-soldier, did not fancy the job on their own.
Walking in alone
Thompson drove the five minutes to the Lion singing along to Elton John, his voice carrying the shake he had come to expect before a fight. He parked at the front and walked straight in through the red double doors. The man was ten feet away at the bar, drinking lager with a companion, a tall Scot. Every head in the room turned. Everyone knew why Thompson was there.
What he did not know was that the pub's two doormen, Craig and a big, handsome man everyone called Catalogue John, were round the corner in the car park, taking baseball bats out of a car boot and waiting for him to arrive. The landlord was upstairs at a window, watching for him.
Thompson says his heart was not in it and he did not want to be there at all. His life was turning in another direction, and only ego and a promise to a friend had got him through the door. He told the man he had to leave. The man pointed at his full pint and said he was not going. Thompson told him again, and was told there was a new gaffer now, so he was not barred.
The one-second pause
Thompson describes what went through his mind in the moment before the fight. He counted more than three hundred fights over nine years on the door, by his reckoning without a defeat, and wondered whether the odds were finally about to turn. He thought about his friend who had been stabbed, about his partner, who wanted him off the door, about his mother, who worried herself sick, and about his children. He pushed the thoughts away.
When he warned that they would be fighting if the man did not leave, the answer came back evenly: then they would have to fight. The Scot turned to face him. Thompson asked one last question, gesturing towards the door, and as the man's mind engaged with it, Thompson threw a right hand. He says the man was unconscious before he hit the floor.
Thompson does not spare himself in the telling. He kicked the man as he fell and again as he lay there, and says he hated himself for it but believed that if the man got up, he could lose. The Scot jumped on his back twice and was thrown off twice. Then he broke a beer glass on the bar and held it out. Thompson picked up a pint glass, emptied it on the carpet and smashed it on a table.
"You've got my word"
At that point the landlord, who had come downstairs and seen it all, ran outside shouting for the doormen. Craig and Catalogue John burst in with the bats. Thompson dropped his glass and told the Scot to put his down.
What Thompson remembers most is what the Scot said next. Facing three men, two of them armed, he asked for one thing: Thompson's word that his friend would not be hurt any more. Thompson says he admired that. He gave his word and shook the man's hand, and the glass was dropped. When the doormen moved in, Thompson shouted that nobody was to touch him. The two of them carried the unconscious man out to the car park together. The DJ put another record on.
The landlord was delighted and slipped him a monkey for his trouble. Thompson says he told him there was no need, then laughed and took the money.
The last job
Thompson rang his partner and told her the job was done, and that he was done too. He says he could not do what he had just done another time. As long as he stayed on the door, he would always be fighting, and he was trying to become a man who avoided violence. The Lion was where he made the decision to stop.