944 Quotes by Stephen Richards

I always thought of myself as being the unluckiest girl I knew. I was, I believed, a ‘jinx’ and I was ‘jinxed’, or so I thought!

As a child, I was attractive to paedophiles. I suppose being indecently assaulted when I was 13 years old should have warned me that there were some weird and dangerous men out there, but I had got over that episode in my life.

Straightaway, they started chatting and telling me their names: Fred and Rose West. I was surprised that they were married, I wouldn’t have fancied someone like him, and she was pretty. I felt she could have done a lot better for herself, but they seemed happy and he was quite charming, in a roguish kind of way.

During the depression, people fought each other for boxes of groceries and if you were lucky you might get a few shillings for fighting six rounds. When Jack Johnson was World Heavyweight Champ, back in the early 1900s, Hartlepool had a brilliant boxer called Jasper Carter. People today will never have heard of him, but almost 100 years ago he put Hartlepool on the fistic map.

In the last round I was so wiped-out that for the first time in my life I tried to get disqualified. He was throwing punches non-stop and he was dangerous with those shots and becoming a little bit too cute for my liking. I backed to the ropes and catapulted off them and nutted him.

Everyone in the place seen me nut him apart from the ref, it caught him on the blind side. I tried to nut him on the eyebrow so it would split open, but I got him on the forehead. The crowd turned right against me, but I made it to the last bell and lost on a unanimous decision.

I must have been crazy for taking that fight, I should have told Anth to get on his bike, but what made it worse was I knew if I were in shape I’d have beaten him inside of two rounds. Some people reckon fighters must have a little madness in them, I reckon they might be right.

After my victory at the Warriors 1, the self-proclaimed and well named Monarch of the Underworld, Dave Courtney, came up to me and commended me when he said, ‘Richy, you can hit, I’m fucking glad you’re not hitting me.’ The way Dave said it and the expression on his face made me laugh.

When I reached the age of five, I was told I was adopted as a baby, at that time I was gun and holster mad, a bit of a lone ranger, as was the rage in those days. My parents, Tom and Brenda, told me they went to see all these special kids and they picked me out from them. Waiting for my reaction, I looked up at my parents and chimed, ‘Did I have my guns on?