Lenny McLean was six foot two, nineteen stone and quick to anger. He did lose in the ring. Roy Shaw beat him in their first fight, and he took losses to former professional boxers, two each to Cliff Fields and Johnny Waldron and one to Kevin Paddock. But boxing and fighting bare-knuckle are a million miles apart, and the film says it has never heard a fully verified story of McLean being beaten on the street or without gloves.
The claims of thousands of street fights in his book are exaggerated, the film says. One fight that did happen, the narrator has been told, took place in a Glasgow pub yard, arranged by Arthur Thompson.
Arthur's fighter
Arthur Thompson is the man the film calls the Glasgow godfather, who ruled parts of the city for years. He started as a strong-arm for moneylenders and went into the business himself as he left his teens. He served 18 months for extortion, decided prison was not for him, and put his money into dance halls and pubs through nominees. The film says the Thompson family lost two sons and a daughter to murder and overdoses.
McLean's good friend, a man the book calls Scottish Ritchie, took him north for a no-rules fight against a man Thompson had in his corner: a fighter the film describes as top man in Barlinnie prison and, allegedly, an animal when it came to violence. The book never names him. McLean just calls him Jock.
The date is not given, but the film places it around the late 1970s or early 1980s. McLean writes about Thompson flying him up to watch Jim Watt fight in Glasgow before the bout, and Watt's last fight in Glasgow was in January 1980.
The back yard
The rest is McLean's own account, read from his autobiography. They came in through the back of the pub. Jock had a group of men with him who looked, in McLean's words, straight out of a gangster film. Jock stripped off to show he was an ex-con. He was covered in prison tattoos, crude and done with pins and razor blades, including a dotted line across his throat marked "cut here" and a word across his knuckles. He came at McLean growling like a dog. McLean says it might have frightened everybody in Barlinnie, but it did not work on him.
He let Jock hit him about a dozen times to blow off steam. Then, just as Jock started thinking McLean could not throw one, he caught him full on the ear. Gloves take the sting out of a punch, McLean says. Bare knuckles rip, and half the ear came away. Jock came back with two low shots, one of them below the belt. McLean kicked him in the kneecap, felt his own big toe snap, and as Jock went down he hit him in the kidney as hard as he could. He dropped his full weight onto the man's back and kept punching until he stopped moving.
By his own account he did not stop there. Somebody grabbed his arm and he put that man down too. It took about half a dozen men to drag him to the wall, and a glass of water in his face, before he came out of it. He describes it as like waking up, his arms and legs still fighting.
A hundred miles an hour
Thompson came over and told him they would get him out of there. McLean asked if they had their money, and whether Jock was dead. Never mind him, Thompson said. Ritchie had the money, and one of Thompson's men would drive him to London.
When McLean shook hands, he realised his hand was broken. Both were. In one of Thompson's Jaguars, heading south at a hundred miles an hour, Ritchie told him the take was 21 grand in all. McLean woke up just before they reached Charing Cross Hospital. They set his hands and he was out within the hour. He never mentioned the toe. By seven that morning he was home in bed with his wife, Val.
Thompson rang later that day. McLean says he does not usually give a fight a second thought, but this time he had a funny feeling, and he asked how Jock was. By Thompson's account, the man had been unconscious for an hour after McLean left. McLean took Val on holiday with the money.
Stardust and fact
The film is careful with what it has. The narrator says the vivid details may be stardust added by a ghostwriter, and the "cut here" tattoo was common in prisons at the time, so the description narrows nothing down. But he has been told by several people that McLean did fight bare-knuckle in Glasgow, at a private, invitation-only event put on by Arthur Thompson senior.
He also answers the slurs thrown at McLean now. A bully, he argues, picks on weaker people, and McLean would fight anyone however big their reputation. He allows that McLean probably had bullying traits, as most men of that world do. His daughter believes he suffered from bipolar disorder that was never recognised in his lifetime, which may explain the mood swings those closest to him saw. McLean was no Superman in the ring, and he admitted it. On the street, the film concludes, there were very few better.