The Greatest Fight Hardly Anybody Saw [Darren Gibbons vs. Aaron Green]

The Greatest Fight Hardly Anybody Saw [Darren Gibbons vs. Aaron Green]

By Garry White

It would be tempting to term it the ‘Greatest Fight You Never Saw’. But to do so would be to engage in pure hyperbole. Boxing has enough of that already without me adding further to the already pungent cocktail of bullshit. After all, that might merely be the modern, sensationalist way – but I steadfastly refuse to give ground to it. And to be honest, it would be an accolade too far. Perhaps, instead, we could go with ‘The Greatest Fight that hardly anybody saw’. Yet, even that would invoke more than a scintilla of exaggeration. 

However, what I can say without any guilt or embarrassment is that it was a bloody good fight. To such an extent that the hundred or so of us for whom fate dictated our attendance, still give knowing glances to one another, in the manner of SAS veterans, who when in the presence of a comrade lift half an eyebrow as if to say; “We know what we did.” In our case, sat redundant at ringside, we know only “What we saw”. That distant storm, that tsunami, whatever you want to call it, forever stirring the flux at the edge of our memory. 

It is a forever bright yet strangely tangled memory of a night some five years ago in East London. Like Dorothy clicking her red shoes, when life leaves us moribund, we can choose to go back there and create our own versions of what we saw. Always adding to the myth, safe in the knowledge that barely any man alive can dispute the actuality of what we had once witnessed. And like the mafia ‘This thing of ours’ is just that. Our club is a perpetual closed shop. Because, unlike so many things in modern life, no video or other footage [at least not to my knowledge] exists unfettered around the internet – so all that you can do is believe me and dare to dream. 

Although, I did hear some time back on the grapevine, amongst those of us in the know, that there was some scratchy, grainy recording doing the rounds – but like Harry Greb’s entire 298-fight career, our barely 150 seconds of mayhem remain resolutely hidden. There is a secret delight in that. Of owning within the limitations of my memory, something that is irretrievable to others. Best of all, only the few of us who were there back on that summer’s evening would ever know to look for it. For everyone else, it is just an anonymous line on a largely anonymous card on BoxRec. An unmarked time capsule, if you will, containing the careers of two men who in blunt career terms appeared to deliver absolutely nought. 

York Hall 30 June 2018 is their dateline. Top of the bill on this Mo Prior show was Bermondsey welterweight Chris Kongo [then an unbeaten eight-fight novice] who dismantled 100-fight Lithuanian veteran Arvydas Trizno in just 74 seconds. Elsewhere, on the card are the ghosts of prospects whose careers petered out amid boxing’s workhouse finances and the upcoming fog of Covid. Those scant unbeaten records now set in stone, were formed against travelling journeymen like Rudolf ‘Soldier Boy’ Durica, Fonz ‘Eeeeeyyy Cunningham’ Alexander, Jules ‘The Wasp’ Phillips, and the moustachioed daddy of them all – Lewis ‘Poochi’ Van Poetsch. Poochi of the gloriously threadbare off-white dressing gown that appeared to have been filched from the complimentary rail of a dilapidated Margate B&B. Well, he had it all in spades… “but why, oh why, did he never go the final mile and walk out to the ancient tones of Lonnie Donegan?

All those boys did what they were meant to do and lost. Such is the way of boxing. But mostly, I remember them with much greater clarity than the young lads that beat them. This is really boxing’s version of pulp fiction. Not the Tarantino movie but the literary kind. Really, who cares about this type of lift music, this filler on statistical databases, of nowhere people riding the rails to uncatchable dreams and instead finding themselves empty-pocketed in Palookaville? Yet, when you peel it all back in so many ways, it is a truer version of the fight game than much of the canned prime-time razzamatazz. 

Yet I digress. Hidden midway through that extensive card was a billed four-round cruiserweight contest between unbeaten two-fight novice Darren Gibbons and debutant Aaron Green. Invited to operate out of the away corner for his first professional action, the omens were not good for the Nottingham resident. Maybe Green refused to believe the unspoken truth that as the man on ‘wages’ rather than the ‘ticket seller’ he was there to keep his gloves up and his chin down. To hang around, obfuscate, retain his senses, and avoid the insipid taste of hospital food. Maybe he really thought that he could overturn the rusty old apple cart and actually win. Walking to the ring, did these desires radiate through his brain? Did he believe that at this moment he could really be someone in this hardest of sports?

That certainly seemed to be the case as when the first [and only] bell sounded he bounded across the ring like a man possessed. In my notes from ringside, I detailed the following:

“Green (debut) sprang out of the traps with such wild intensity that it seemed he had missed the four-round memo and was working to a 40-second directive. Gibbons [2-0] had a couple of uncomfortable moments and took some relatively clean shots, but Green seemed to lack the arsenal to make anything stick on a more permanent basis.

Backed into the corner by the impressively built Gibbons, he kept throwing punches with casual disregard for any notion of defence. Gibbons, working well to the body, sized up his opponents’ defensive frailties and ended it all with a single booming overhand right, that left the defeated Green dangling face-first through the ropes like an abandoned puppet. The timekeeper recorded the denouement as 2:32 of the 1st round.”

And that was it. Like a leaden-footed, double-fisted 200 lbs mayfly it danced before us, tantalising our senses and then it was gone. Who knows where Green went once he regained his senses and exited the ring and later the communal York Hall dressing room? Did he pass the bruised Victorian buildings and the alleyway where on bigger nights the television crews hook up and freeloading journalists collect their comped passes before fading into the night? Just another figment of our imagination. Looking back, those 150 words that constitute my fight report hardly feel like they do it justice. However, it is far from impossible to envisage that they are a more accurate approximation of events than my earnestly burnished and sugar-coated memories of the fight. Whatever the truth, both men unwantedly did their utmost to further gold-plate the mythology. 

Green never fought again. His entire professional career was encompassed by 152 seconds of frenetic, unbridled mayhem. There is a perfect beauty to this. Not for him, the grim pay cheques earned from unfancied nights on the road. Slipping and hiding, his only triumph elicited from not getting beaten up before moving achingly onto the next fight… and the next one. Who knows where he is now? Perhaps he lives the cliché life of fitness trainer, doorman, or construction worker? Who knows, maybe he is a Quantity Surveyor back in Nottingham? But I hope he is not treading the unlicensed boards in a grim leisure centre somewhere, stale with the scent of bleach and perpetually blocked toilets. 

Gibbons had something. But, as it is for so many, it amounted to nothing. He fought again six months later at the same venue edging a decision against a game Lithuanian. There has been nothing since. The Londoners 13-month career ultimately checking out with four unblemished wins. The victory against Aaron Green was to be his only fight concluded inside the distance.

And for those of us who more than five years ago declined the allure of a trip to the bar and an endless queue [does anybody ever get served at the York Hall in the time it takes a full four-rounder to complete?] well we will always know that we made the correct decision. We have something that belongs only to us and to the two men who fought it out that evening. And still, it remains our own polished gem in a world increasingly filled with rough vulgar stones.