Paul "One Punch" Doyle
Paul Doyle is a Manchester villain and football hooligan associated with Manchester United, known to everyone as One Punch. If Doyle caught you on the chin, nine times out of ten you were out cold. He stood five foot eight, stocky and born to fight, with the heavy hands some men are born with and a mind that would not be beaten. He was locked up in prisons as a boy. Much of what our films tell of him comes from his own book, Surviving the Madness, and we say so.
He came out as a young man straight into battles with the established Quality Street Gang. On the day of Prince Charles's wedding in 1981, at the Druids pub in Salford, he and his friend Paul Massey were among the young Salford firm who drove Manchester's old criminal royalty out of the pub. By the mid-1980s the two of them were running stolen credit cards across Europe. When they were caught, Doyle got three years and ten months, and Massey five.
Doyle came home first and made Lower Broughton his base. When a Salford gang tried to impose protection on its pubs, he pulled together a firm from his Manchester United hooligan contacts and pushed them out. By the late 1980s he had moved into security at the Inn of Good Hope on Eccles Old Road, and there he met Graeme Boardman, the well-spoken doorman who became his partner and best friend. Together they ran doors right across Greater Manchester.
By the early 1990s he and Massey were on opposite sides of a war. Doyle has said it began at a family party in Ordsall, where his brother was shot in the leg. By his account he was swarmed at the door of Rockworld and only just escaped with his life, and the hunting went both ways. Then Massey arrived at the Inn of Good Hope with Damian Noonan, one of the best fighters in Manchester, and offered Doyle £20,000 to fight him. Doyle refused the money and fought anyway. Noonan split his nose and blinded him for a minute, and for ten minutes Doyle took the worst beating of his life. Then Noonan tired, and Doyle broke his nose. "Enough now," Doyle said. "Enough," said Noonan. A week later Noonan stood up in a restaurant, called Doyle the toughest man he had ever faced, ordered champagne to toast him and put all three bottles on Doyle's bill.
The Temple in Bolton brought the war to the door. Doyle and Boardman refused to hand it over, and that weekend close to eleven shots came through the glass doors of the Inn of Good Hope. In 1997 Boardman fled to Spain and never came home. Doyle has said publicly that he believes he knows who was responsible and why. No one has ever been charged.
His hooligan life ran alongside all of it. In 1998, on the way to a Champions League game in Germany, he stopped in Amsterdam with around 40 United fans. A six-foot-five Dutchman walked up to him in a bar and announced he was Ajax's top boy. "Well, tonight ain't your lucky night," Doyle told him, and knocked him out cold.
In 2015 Paul Doyle was jailed for sixteen years. These are the films about him, and the ones where he turns up in someone else's story.
Films about Paul "One Punch" Doyle
- Salford: Paul Massey v Paul Doyle
- Damian Noonan v 'One Punch' Paul Doyle
- 'One Punch' Paul Doyle v Ajax's Top Boy