A Boxing Memory: Howard Rainey

A Boxing Memory: Howard Rainey

By Garry White

Jonathan Rendall may have intended his much-admired ‘This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own’ to be a missive on getting out of boxing, but for me, it was quite the opposite. Rather than get me out, instead his artful narrative, revisited after a long estrangement both from it and boxing, proved sufficient to pull me back in. Despite its depictions of grime and unrestrained greed, underneath it all, there was a dishevelled yet still appealing undercurrent. 

Most of that appeal wasn’t radiated from the day-glo ‘look-at-me’ ramparts of the sports leading figures. Not your promoters, managers, media folk, or even the glove-wearing marquee names. Instead, it came from somewhere entirely different and, at the same time, familiar: the dank gyms, the back street boozers, and the dilapidated cafes. Rendall took the subdued grey of all these prosaic locations and illuminated them rainbow-like onto the page. 

Who wouldn’t give their right arm to turn the clock back some 30-something years and hang out at the Beckett, Henry Cooper’s pub, or the euphemistically titled ‘Starlight Rooms’? It was a place that may sound like a rival to the Savoy Grill or the Driscoll Brothers’ latest business venture, but which Rendall describes as merely “A portacabin under Waterloo Bridge, dispensing strong tea.” And of all the places and faces that populated Rendall’s narrative, there was one that formed in my consciousness more acutely than any other. It was, of course, the imposing figure that was Howard Rainey. The former heavyweight was Colin ‘Sweet C’ McMillan’s trainer at a time when Rendall was acting as the future WBO featherweight champion’s unofficial advisor. 

So much of the book centres on the maverick relationship between these three men. All were outsiders in their own way, who as a collective were for a while able to rub up an establishment, that at least in the eyes of Rendall had done its best to impede them. The surety of Rendall’s pen transforms a character like Rainey from the flat page and makes him at once three dimensional. 

All of Rainey’s little mannerisms are played out. His ever-present Sheffield United shirt, his long Yorkshire vowels stretching themselves around his favourite F-word expletive, and his use of the word ‘Captain’ to replace the name of any friend or acquaintance. Rainey comes across as an original and genuine eccentric. Not the modern manufactured, attention-seeking kind, but the genuine article whose character was stamped right through to his bones. It seemed that people in boxing, much like the population at large, when confronted by an original and intelligent thinker, sought not to attempt to understand him but instead took the lazy route of mockery. His innovative training techniques and self-taught understanding of physiology were so far beyond them that it was easier to just laugh at his eccentricities instead. 

But beyond all that, even above the home-spun knowledge and wisdom, the simple thing that elevated itself above it all is Rainey’s decency. His undiluted kindness drips off every page. At one stage, Rendall writes, “Howard was the kindest and most generous man I’d ever met. Once in possession of money, he was quite incapable of not giving it away in the form of volunteered ‘loans’ – few of which were ever paid back – to boxers, neighbours, and south London ‘faces’ down on their luck.”

Rainey -or ‘Howie’ as he was known to his friends – helped many people over the decades. He helped a host of pro boxers to a combination of more than 60 titles. Mostly, he didn’t take his cut from his fighters’ purses or trimmed it down to the minimum. He loved the sport so unconditionally that it could be argued that he sacrificed the better part of his life for it. For Rainey, his time in boxing was literally a feast or famine existence. When his boxers were earning and prior to him dispensing all of his ‘hard-earned’ to a retinue of waifs and strays, he would eat like a King. Well, at least like a king whose chosen fayre was American cheeseburgers and gut-busting fry-ups. But in the downtimes, it felt like he hardly possessed the funds to eat at all. Rendall remarked: “Sometimes I’d meet up with Howard after about a week, and his weight would seem to have dropped by about a stone, his skin strangely opaque.”

Howard Rainey died just before Christmas. It had been more than 30 years since ‘This Bloody Mary’ had hit the shelves, and the man that he had become bore little resemblance to the one vividly recounted in Rendall’s book. He was 79, and his character had long since been smothered by the heavy blanket of Alzheimer’s. Saddest of all, it seemed that boxing had almost forgotten him as well. All those fighters and other contacts that he’d loved and subbed over the years had gradually melted away, along with his memories and own sense of self. His wife Lorna was recently quoted in a moving editorial penned by Matt Christie in Boxing News, “He dedicated his entire life to the boxers he trained but we hear nothing from most of them anymore,” she said. “He took very little money off them, which is why we’re so poor today. I look back at all he did, the hours he sacrificed, and I wonder what the point of it all was. It seems like such a waste.

“Everyone goes on about a ‘boxing family’. Shut up with your boxing family. It doesn’t exist.” It is hard to disagree with her, and it is no surprise that Christie titled his editorial: ‘Are you not ashamed?’

Not long after that was written, and just a few weeks before his death, Rainey was at last recognised and remembered by the sport he devoted his life to. Yet, his belated induction into the British Boxing Hall of Fame has all the markings of something that was sadly too little too late. In that same editorial, Lorna mentions how Rainey would walk around a care facility with his boxing book, desperate to find a kindred spirit to talk to. To picture that for a moment in your head is to be confronted by something unimaginably sad. To be alive but forgotten. To have been at the epicentre and now confounded by illness to the invisible periphery. A sort of living death if you will. 

I suppose as much has always been true of life and ageing. The whole shooting match can be crystalised as an inevitable journey to the centre and then back out again to the periphery of old men and children. Just another man from a time and place now irredeemably out of place.

Howard Rainey was never a superstar. He was bigger and better than that, for he provided the broad shoulders that lifted others into the foreground to claim their potential. There is a lesson in that which is worth remembering as each day we face off against the ‘cult of the self’. That celebration of uniqueness, though laudable in its aims, but one ultimately doomed to soak in the poisoned waters of self-entitlement.

And when all is said and done, I am sat on an empty train writing about a man I only ever met vicariously through a picture painted by someone else. There is something in that as well. 

“I think it’s important to add that his funeral brought them all back to his side – around 250 attended, and all of his champions shared a room with him for a final time – that meant everything to me for him.” Lorna