A thick-set man walks into a pub, orders a beer and puts a pound down on the pool table among the wads of notes being staked on the game. The men playing do not know him and do not like it. One asks who he is. Another, bearded and scarred, gets in his face. The stranger smiles, says he just fancied a game, picks up a cue and swings the heavy end into the scarred man's head. The cue snaps in two. The fight has started, and the stranger is on his own. He is hoping his back-up is not taking his time.
The stranger was John Houchin, known as John the Neck. The back-up was Lenny McLean, the man the film calls the king of the bouncers. The story comes from Houchin's own book, The Governor and Me, and it is told here as he tells it.
Three men on the doors
Houchin was not a lone madman. The film describes him as a top doorman in London who had made his name as a fighter before he linked up with McLean, whom he regarded as his mentor. He worked alongside the best in the business, among them his good friend Alan Crossley, a former British strongman and arm-wrestling champion whom, the film says, even McLean held in high respect. Crossley was a doorman and debt collector too, and close to both men.
Together, the film says, the three were a formidable team when they were sent in to deal with problem pubs, or to sort out heavies leaning on a venue.
The job
This job was a pub where, by the film's account, a group of men it describes as travellers had taken over. The landlord said they were bullying him, helping themselves to drinks and scaring off his ordinary customers. His life, the film says, had become a misery.
McLean took the job on. He warned Houchin to be at his best, because he had been told this group could handle themselves. The plan was a two-part surprise. Houchin would walk in alone and start the trouble. When they all went for him, McLean would come through the door behind them and catch them in a pincer.
The flaw in the plan was timing. McLean was slow to make his entrance, and Houchin was left fighting for his life as the whole group went for him at once.
The cavalry
In Houchin's account, the next thing he heard was the cavalry arriving. McLean came in, he writes, "like a mad crazed rhino", and bodies went everywhere. One man dived head first over the pool table. Another went into the slot machine, which paid out. Houchin says he thought the man had won the jackpot.
Houchin still had hold of one man and had pinned him against the wall under the dartboard, when the man pushed a thumb into his eye and tried to pull it out. Houchin says he grabbed two darts from the board and stuck them in the man's head. The man let go and fell, and McLean put him down again as he tried to get up. The rest made for the doors, and the two doormen dragged out whoever was left.
When it was over, by Houchin's account, McLean turned to him and asked if he fancied a nice lemonade, and laughed to himself in the way Houchin says was so typical of him.
What the books leave out
The film's narrator, who worked the doors himself, draws a different point from the story. Hard-man books, he says, rarely say anything about the injuries: the weeks and months it takes to recover from a night like that, and what it does to a man over the years.
He speaks from his own experience. Years ago, he says, a lad got on his back on a door and tried to gouge his eyes out. Afterwards his right eye streamed and stabbed with pain every few seconds, the white of it was cut in several places, and he had to wear a patch for a while. He lists the rest of what the work cost him: a broken ankle, a razor slash, stab wounds to a leg and an arm, a broken nose, a fractured cheekbone, broken hands, a septic finger from a shard of someone's tooth, and teeth cracked by a rounders bat.
McLean, the film says, was shot twice, and one of those wounds troubled him for the rest of his life. The same kinds of injury, the narrator says, come to every fighting man, in the street or the ring. They wear down the body and the mind, and they fall on families too, on children who watch their father come home hurt.
That is where the film leaves Houchin's pub fight. The darts and the lemonade make the story. The narrator's point is the eye that nobody wrote about afterwards.