Gary "the Animal" Spiers, one of the most feared doormen and fighters Britain ever produced, said of his old friend Steve Morris: "It would take an axe to stop him."
Behind the nice-guy manner and the educated voice is a man who had a hard childhood and spent decades turning violence into a science. In his own words, read in this film from his autobiography, Morris tells how he fought his way through the army, the dojo, the building sites and the doors of London.
Taught by his father
Morris could fight long before he walked into a dojo in 1967. His father taught him, and he sharpened it in scraps at boarding school in Germany and in barrack-room brawls and street fights as a boy soldier and then a regular from 1958 to 1966. He was thrown out of the army in 1966 for his attitude to officers and for fighting, in barracks and on the streets from Harrogate and Catterick to Nairobi and Benghazi. Some days he had two or three fights.
He knew that without direction he would end up in prison. So he joined Kyokushin karate, said to be the strongest style in the world.
He could not learn to miss
On his first night he was sent upstairs to train with the experienced group. In every competition he entered, he was disqualified for excessive contact. Partners scrambled in the line-up to avoid him. "No matter how many times I was disqualified or admonished for heavy contact, I simply couldn't learn to miss," he writes. "To me, a fight was a fight, period." In 1968, after he put a deep gash over a man's eye, he was expelled by Steve Arneil.
The building site and the door
On the same day he was sacked from Courage for headbutting a bigger workmate with a hard-man reputation. Back working as a hod carrier around Reading, a journeyman professional boxer asked whether he could break a man the way he broke bricks. They went up to the top of the building. Two knees to the face ended it, with a broken nose and a fractured cheekbone.
In London he was offered door work at the Angel. In the summer of 1971, a chance meeting in Chinatown started him on Wing Chun.
Taking punishment
He fought to win and never quit. He was once hit in the head with a rounders bat coming round a corner, and still broke his attacker's arm. If you asked him what his greatest strength was, he says, it would not be power, speed or timing. It would be the ability to take tremendous punishment and keep going.