In the Coventry of the 1980s, the film says, one doorman stood above the rest. John "Awesome" Anderson kept the city's clubs and bars as safe as they could be by taking on some of its toughest men, and he was the mentor of Geoff Thompson, who went on to write about those years. This film reads a chapter of Thompson's about one night when Anderson had to deal with a man nobody else on the door wanted to touch: a twenty-stone rugby player with a reputation for being impossible to knock out.
The man who couldn't be knocked out
Thompson's description of the man takes up a paragraph on its own: twenty inches of neck, legs like tree trunks, arms held out from his body as though carrying invisible buckets of water, and a permanent frown. He paid his entrance and pushed his way to the bar. Anderson noticed him as he passed, and his instinct told him they would be fighting before the night was out.
A rugby player who knew the man came over and told Anderson who he was: a monster on the rugby field, and the man who could not be knocked out. On the nightclub scene, Thompson writes, the man the doormen called Twenty Neck was famous. He went round most of the city's clubs and intimidated customers and door staff wherever he went.
Thompson calls men like him bouncers' bogeymen. They did not care how well a doorman could fight or how big he was. They wanted to fight him anyway. With them, all the usual ways of avoiding violence were used up before anything started. You fought, or you gave up the door.
The door staff back off
By Thompson's account, that night the man started playing up. He took other customers' drinks, refused to pay for a beer he had drunk, bothered the women at the bar and hit a young man for being served before him. After several complaints, two of the doormen went to the bar and told him to leave. He laughed at them and told them to let him know when they were ready to put him out.
Thompson admits the lads were psyched out. One of them went to reception and told Anderson. Anderson took off his jacket and walked to the bar, asking on the way why they had not dealt with it. Too late now, he told them. He would deal with it. Thompson writes that he does not know a single doorman who has not been psyched out like that at some point. That is what the head doorman is there for.
What the big man missed
Standing next to Twenty Neck, Anderson looked ordinary. In clothes he seemed stocky but unremarkable, and the man smirked at him, as if to ask whether this was really their head man. Thompson says that was the mistake many big men made with Anderson. Underneath the shirt he could bench-press 400 pounds, he punched like a professional boxer, and he had the will that comes from several hundred fights with the city's best and worst.
Anderson flicked his cigarette at the man's feet and told him he had better leave. He was told he was not big enough to make him. The man turned back to his beer. The bar stopped to watch.
Thompson, who had stood in the same position many times, says what he saw was a man in complete control of himself. Anderson leaned back on his right foot and tapped his left to the music to hide the shake in his legs, and kept his voice low to hide any tremor in it. On the outside he looked like a rock. Inside, Thompson is sure, he felt what every man feels before a fight.
Three seconds
Anderson believed that fights were won in the three seconds before they started, and this is where the chapter slows down. He reached out and gave the man's glass hand a gentle tug, as if to take it from him. The man yanked it away to his right. Anderson had learned two things. The man would not leave without a fight, and he was too big and strong to restrain. And when his glass was touched, he pulled it to his own right, which opened a window for a left hook. Anderson liked left hooks.
"You've got to go, mate," he said, and touched the glass again, letting a little hesitation into his voice. The man pulled away to his right exactly as before. The left hook travelled perhaps six inches. It was so fast that many people did not see it. A man standing beside Anderson was so close that some customers thought he had thrown it, and he did not tell them otherwise.
The man hit the floor so hard, Thompson writes, that glasses bounced on the nearest tables. The club went silent, then broke into applause. He needed twenty stitches where his teeth had gone through his cheek. The man who had stood beside Anderson smiled and said: "He's leaving now then, John."
The man who could not be knocked out had been knocked out with one punch. For Thompson, the lesson was in everything Anderson did before it.