Paul Sykes
Britain has produced plenty of violent prisoners, but few ever fought for a British heavyweight title, and almost none watched two of their own sons receive life sentences for murder. Paul Sykes did both.
He was born in 1946 in Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire: post-war terraces, mills, foundries and hard shifts. His father had served in the army and then became a prison officer. From the age of seven Sykes was in the boxing gym three nights a week, taught to absorb punishment and answer pain with force. At home there were backhands for small mistakes and beatings described as preparation, followed by a chocolate bar, as if that could undo them.
By his early teens he was drinking heavily. At 16 he travelled to Germany for a bout, drank the night before until he had to be carried out of a bar, and lost. By 17 the anger had left the ring. He walked into a petrol station with a cosh, struck the attendant and took the money, and was sentenced to four years. The son of a prison officer went through the gates as an inmate.
In 1965, in the heavy fabric shop at Wakefield Prison, a planned escape lasted seconds. An instructor was struck with a mallet and the chief officer was hit with an iron weight and suffered a fractured skull. Sykes said he realised what he had done and was sorry, and told police his father had visited and told him to tell the truth. He was charged with wounding with intent, and his sentence grew. Out in the late 1960s, he was soon back inside for a robbery in Blackpool, serving five more years alongside some of the most dangerous men in the system, among them Charlie Richardson and Roy Shaw. It is widely reported that Sykes fought Shaw twice and won.
Professional boxing did not civilise him. In his sixth fight he knocked out the American David Wilson, who sagged over the ropes, and Sykes kept punching until the referee pulled him away. Wilson spent a month in hospital. A fight with Lenny McLean at the Rainbow Theatre was talked about, then cancelled after Sykes fought four doormen at a club in Wakefield the week before and needed eight stitches above the eye. In June 1979, with only eight professional fights behind him, he met John L. Gardner at Wembley for the British and Commonwealth heavyweight titles. He started strongly, ran out of energy, and the fight was stopped.
When the wins slowed, so did the money. The drinking did not. In 1981 he took £1,000 to attack a union official in Blackpool, waiting outside the man's home with a metal bar. Before his capture he also seriously injured a police officer, and the officer's Alsatian was left with a broken jaw and a fractured skull. Preston Crown Court gave him five years, and the judge called him a hitman for hire. He had gone from Wembley to a cell in under two years.
He was never convicted of murder. His sons were. In 2004 his eldest son stabbed a man to death in an argument over cider and was given a life sentence. His younger son, born in 1983 while his father was in custody, murdered a former police officer during a robbery in 2008 and got life too. Paul Sykes died homeless and dependent on alcohol, with both sons serving life, and a legacy that still divides people. These are the films about him, and the ones where he turns up in someone else's story.