The Lost Boys Of Croydon's Fight Clubs

The frenzy of youth •

A shrine to Bradley Hutchinson who was stabbed in September 2023. Photo by Tam Hussein.

Under a March sky slashed with evening red, the three shire horses grazed peacefully, deaf to the din in the neighbouring field. A police cordon hinted at the cause of the commotion. The day before, the remains of a chopped-up body had been found by passersby. When I heard the news, I whispered a prayer: “Please don’t let it be Amin.” 

I wanted to call him, just to put my mind at ease, but I stopped myself. I didn’t want to open that door again. 

The murder scene, on the fringes of Croydon, wasn’t far from a boxing club I’d taken Amin to a few years earlier. The reception had been immediately hostile. As soon as we walked in, he locked eyes with an Irish Traveller kid in the ring. They knew each other. Things had escalated after they clashed on Snapchat, and the kid had sent out a KOS — Kill on Sight — call to his friends. It meant Amin was marked as soon as he set foot in the area, which he still did fairly often to visit an uncle. “It’s worth the risk,” he once told me. 

But was it?

***

My mother raised the three of us alone. I remember her talking to the walls about the bills that had not been paid. Many of my friends were in a similar situation, and sold hash and weed to help make ends meet. But I never had the chance. From a young age, our mother had always warned us against doing anything that might corrupt the family name. For us, it was doubly important because Bengali culture tended to blame the woman for the breakdown of a marriage, and my misbehaviour would be attributed to her. 

But in 1990s London, honour only went so far. And during one rough period, when I was 17 and started to spiral out of control, my uncle encouraged me to take up boxing at the local mosque. There, I met Tobias Taitt, the sparring partner of Julius Francis, the man who fought the baddest man on the planet, Mike Tyson. Taitt was a huge man with a hearty south London accent whose grin seemed to say: “Akhi (my brother), your life isn’t tough.” 

Compared to mine, Taitt’s life had been Dickensian. He was the son of a Caribbean immigrant, passed from care home to care home. By the time he was 15, he was a serial criminal who had tasted prison food many times over. It was Islam and boxing that had set Taitt straight. And so I copied him: first, as an unruly teenager who entered the ring; and second, 20 years later, when I became a boxing coach in Croydon myself. 

Every single youngster who was assigned to me was a child of paternal absence. They either came to us via social workers trying to comply with court orders, or via the state trying to intervene before they got mixed up with anything more serious. Sometimes, they were linked to the county lines networks where they worked as drug runners for gangs. Other times, they were debt slaves working for the same gangs to pay off their “debt”. They were all profoundly damaged, but most were decent lads. 

The process of pushing them towards emotional maturity was almost always the same: assess the level of anger or trauma within the kids and build trust. You tell them to glove up and take them on the pads — and then let them give it their all. Depending on their temperament, you either praised their work (“That’s strong!”) or goaded them to put the work in (“Is that all you got?”). Sometimes, you might even hit them, just to see how they react.

After that, they would normally swing at you wildly — and you’d lightly jab back until they realised you knew more than them. Without breaking their fighting spirit, you’d tell them you beat them not because you had more heart, but because you can control your emotions. Hopefully, something within them will click. It’s about controlling their capacity for violence, about tempering their rage. It is a process that takes years. It is a process that, in most families, a father is meant to do. 

But for the most part, their fathers weren’t around. That’s probably why I treated some of the boys as my own, inviting them to my home to eat with my family. Amin was one of those boys.

***

Amin was a big kid with a big heart and a baby face. He was a hundred-percenter — the sort of friend you’d want beside you in a scrap because he would back you up without asking any questions. You were his friend and that was enough. The problem was, a lot of the time trouble would find you because of him. 

Amin was also a very angry kid. He had seen how his father, a violent and abusive man from Pakistan, had treated his mother. She had eventually left him and managed to raise six boys, three of whom are now on the way to law school. But Amin, the fourth, wasn’t academic at all. He was all heart and emotion. 

In 2018, when Amin was 14, his mother, who I knew through a mutual friend, asked me if I could have a word with him. He was misbehaving in school and she had decided to move her children to a small commuter town in Surrey to keep him away from trouble. When we talked, he started to blame his father for his behaviour.  

“My dad’s not around,” he explained. 

“Neither was mine,” I replied. “Sounds like you’re making excuses.”  

Amin went silent, puzzled by my lack of sympathy. There were plenty of kids without dads who weren’t getting into trouble. 

Later in the year, I received another call from his mother. She told me that Amin had got into a fight with the kids at school and pulled out a knife. The police, she said, were taking it seriously. I accompanied him to the police station, and watched how he tried — and failed — to convince the officers he was innocent. We all knew he was lying. His story had too many inconsistencies. So I made an offer. Let Amin go — and I’d teach him to box.

***

For all its violence, boxing is a force for good. It helps to strip away the ego. There is always someone who can take you down a notch or two. Amin, though, didn’t need much of that. He instinctively understood the student-master relationship. He was a joy to teach. I stole time from my own family to train him in the park during the weekends and evenings and he responded well. Though he was big, and cheated during running exercises, he made good progress and I started taking him to spar at clubs in the area. I wanted to show him exactly what sort of beast he’d have to be to win in the ring. 

We drove down to the infamous Brighton and Hove Boxing Gym, managed by former British heavyweight champion Scott Welch, where Amin trained and nearly fainted from the humidity. We also went to various clubs in Croydon, and it was around this time, in 2022, that I found out about the KOS call. When I drove to his house to talk about it, Amin was nonchalant. He said he wouldn’t hesitate to kill the boy as well. “It’s either me or him,” he said. 

In denial, I told myself that Amin would be fine as long as he stuck to his training. From time to time, I would call to check in. He would send me videos of himself working the bag in the back garden. But I couldn’t always be there to keep him on track. The music he listened to, his social media posts about the deaths of friends, his knowledge of where invisible gang lines began and ended — all underlined how we were living in different worlds. And in his world, Amin was a rising star. I was never going to be able to keep up. 

Amin was eventually expelled from his school for fighting and sent to a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) on the outskirts of Croydon. It was obviously bad news. After his first day there, Amin told me how he’d ended up in a fight. He smiled and described how he threw overhand just like I’d taught him. I asked myself if I should even be teaching him how to punch. It seemed to be backfiring. He was expelled and started at another college with an even worse reputation. That’s when he decided to stop boxing. Our time was up. 

Still, from time to time, I would bump into Amin on Croydon’s streets and he’d give me a bear hug. He told me once that he had come across a gang of teenagers who’d pulled a gun on him.  

“Why is it that trouble follows you, son?” 

“We live different lives, Uncle,” he replied. 

He was right. A year later, in October 2023 I got the call. Amin had been stabbed. He had come across a kid walking through a park. The kid asked him where he was from. He replied “Who wants to know?” and so it started. 

Amin was fortunate to survive, but was soon home and laughing about it. I wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him. I wanted to scream at him: do you know what it means for a parent to see their child die before them? I had a feeling he knew who the perpetrator was and was already plotting revenge. But it was just a feeling. Surely he wouldn’t be so stupid? But perhaps he would. That’s when I decided to kill him in my heart. I wasn’t going to call him. I had to protect myself from the hurt.

***

A few days after the human remains were found in Rowdown Fields, Amin called me. My heart jumped. He was alive. 

What was left of the body, I would later learn, belonged to a 38-year-old woman who, a court recently heard, had been subjected to a "sexual and sadistic" murder. It was a crime designed to make the news, to incubate our most voyeuristic impulses. By contrast, the day-to-day violence, of the sort Amin dances through, will never carry the same allure. But that doesn’t make it any less real — or any less tragic.  

Just along from where that young woman's remains were found is a lonesome tree with boxing gloves draped over its branches. It is one of many shrines built in recent years, with many more to follow. The locals know this. We spot these little memorials with increasing frequency, and wonder what might happen when we send our teenage sons to fetch some milk. But we can’t shelter them forever. It doesn’t work like that. 

“What’s going on, Uncle?” Amin said. “I’ve been thinking about you.” 

“Me too,” I replied. “It’s been a long time.” 

“Too long Uncle, too long.” 

“What are you doing with yourself?” 

“Don't worry Uncle,” he breezily responded, knowing that I was trying to assess if he was in trouble. “I’ve left that life behind. I’m doing a bit of landscape gardening now. Man’s gonna set up his own business soon.” 

I thanked God. Perhaps the worst of the madness of youth had passed. Perhaps Amin might make it just yet. Or perhaps I was simply telling myself a story. 

“Uncle, we need to link up after Ramadan.” 

“Yes, my son, I’ve missed you.”

For those reading this as a forward, my name is Tam Hussein an award winning investigative journalist with a particular focus on conflict. The Blood Rep is my newsletter that covers security, jihadism, militancy and criminal networks. Do read my books To The Mountains, The Travels of Ibn Fudayl and The Darkness Inside.