An outsider in his own country
Gary Spiers was one of the finest all-round fighters and toughest bouncers Britain has seen, and he was not born here. He crossed the sea from New Zealand and became an adopted son of England, and it was on the doors of 1980s Liverpool that his name was made.
His education in violence started young. He had Maori blood, and growing up in the fifties he was one of only five Maori children in a school dominated by Westerners. He was a native of his own country and was still made to feel like an outcast, because racism against the indigenous population was rife. He fought bullies every day. It gave him an appreciation of violence, and an understanding of its power to give and to take away. In a well-known interview with the karate expert Terry O'Neil, a good friend of his from the Liverpool door scene, Gary spoke about those early years and the battles that shaped him.
Learning from the masters
Gary went looking for the best teachers he could find. He sought out elite martial arts masters in Australia and Japan and learned from them, and then he brought what they taught him to the one place it could be properly tested.
The door was his laboratory. Working as a bouncer paid the bills, but it also gave him a live testing ground, a place to find out which martial arts truly worked in a real fight and which fell apart. By the time he was working Liverpool he had hundreds of violent confrontations behind him.
What came out of all that was everything a street fighter could want. He was big and powerful, skilled in close combat, wrestling and martial arts at the highest level, and fluent in the dark arts of street fighting. He used his hands, his head, his elbows and his feet, and his reputation says he would use more than that when a night called for it.
He looked the part. He stood over six feet, with a buzz cut, fists like slabs of beef and size 16 feet. Off duty he preferred to walk the streets barefoot. For work he dressed in black and laced up a pair of military stomping boots, and he kept a special bag of instruments behind reception in case of serious trouble.
A Wednesday night in Liverpool
The stories told about Gary are legendary, and one of them is retold, with a little creative licence, in the Enquirer 2.0 series on his life.
The night started like most of his nights did, with a huge meal and a few jokes with the lads before he took his place at the front of the club. Management cuts meant one man on the door on weeknights and three at weekends, and this was a busy Wednesday.
Fifty yards up the street he saw a lad yanking a girl by the arm and screaming in her face. When she tried to pull free, he slapped her to the ground. The rule for doormen is that you never leave your post, but Gary was not going to stand and watch that. He reached them in seconds, shoved the lad away with an open hand, scooped the girl up and walked her back to the club, where a promoter took her inside.
Then he went back to the door to see what his good deed would bring. The lad was coming back, and five mates in Pringle tops, cagoules and Adidas trainers were behind him. They were probably football hooligans in their early twenties, at a time when Margaret Thatcher had declared war on the hooligan cult. The leader pulled a cutthroat razor and told Gary exactly what he was going to do with it.
Gary smiled at him.
Move on, dig. Live to fight another day.
The lad stepped inside his range, and that was a terrible mistake. Gary's first rule was to strike fast and with force. In a matter of seconds he knocked the razor away and dropped the leader, took out the next man with a knee, and put a third down with an elbow. The rest backed off with their hands up and their eyes like saucers. He told them to take their mates and get out of his sight, and they did.
A drunk man eating chips on a bench had seen the whole thing and was trying to work out whether he had imagined it. "All in a night's work, dig," Gary told him.
The teacher
Gary was a sensei as well as a fighter, and the men he trained were serious people. Gary Sandland was one of his students and went on to be one of his assistant coaches. Sandland became the heavyweight full-contact kickboxing champion of the world and defended the title fourteen times in seven years.
Like so many champion fighters of that era, Sandland worked the doors too, and he needed everything he had learned. One night in the late nineties at the Chelsea Reach in New Brighton, around fourteen men stormed the club with knives, chains, lumps of wood and knuckledusters. Sandland and his door partner Steve held the stairs and drove them back out onto the street. It was a time when gangs and security firms were fighting for control of pubs and clubs, before the SIA came in, and many of the big door firms were run by crime families. The world Gary had tested himself in had become far more dangerous than drunken lads with a razor.
The deadliest
When Enquirer 2.0 ranked the deadliest doormen of the nineties, Liverpool against Manchester, Gary went head to head with Dessie Noonan, one of the most feared men ever to walk Manchester's streets. It was too close to call cleanly. Spiers was the more complete fighter of the two, and for sheer menace the nod went to the big man from Manchester.
His fight stories are legendary and very violent, and there is film and interview footage of the man himself to go with them. He was a legendary martial artist, a doorman, a sensei and a true warrior, and quite simply one of the deadliest doormen and fighters ever to walk the earth.