Damian Noonan v Paul Doyle, the straightener nobody agrees on

The first punch Damian Noonan threw split Paul Doyle's nose straight down the middle.

Doyle had built a name on ending fights with one shot. That is why Salford called him One Punch. Now, by his own account, he could not see. For about a minute he was fighting a man he could not see at all, and in that minute the big man from Manchester gave him the worst beating of his life.

What happened after that minute is still argued about in Salford and Manchester. Doyle wrote down his version. Noonan never did.

You beat me, but it's only because you were fitter.

Damian Noonan, as Paul Doyle remembers it

It was a summer evening during the Salford door wars, at the Inn of Good Hope, a pub where Doyle ran the door. Paul Massey turned up uninvited. Massey had been Doyle's close friend once. By then the two men were at war over who ran the doors of Salford, Manchester and Bolton.

He had not come alone. With him was a crowd of associates from both cities, and Damian Noonan.

According to Doyle, Massey made him an offer. If Doyle would fight Noonan in a straightener, one on one with bare hands, he could win twenty thousand pounds. Doyle saw it for what he thought it was, a way to cut him down in front of everyone and take the doors off him. He also knew he could not say no. He refused to fight for money. He would fight for nothing, there and then.

They fought there and then, in front of Massey and a crowd of his associates. On Doyle's side there was Graeme Boardman, his door partner, and not many more.

The Noonans were the biggest name on the doors of Manchester. Desmond, Damian and Dominic Noonan had come up out of poverty in the city, and by the late 1980s their family was said to control most of its nightclub security. By the end of the 1990s they had men on doors in other cities too.

Damian was the one people talked about as a fighter. He was broad, heavy-handed and physically imposing, and at the time he was rated one of the best fighters to come out of Manchester. He was also, in Doyle's description, larger than life and an outspoken joker. He was a good friend of Paul Massey.

Doyle was smaller and craftier, with years of boxing behind him. He had been fighting since the secure units he was sent to as a boy. That night, everybody watching expected one of two things. Either Noonan's size would tell, or One Punch would find the one.

Neither happened. The account that follows is Doyle's own, from his book Surviving the Madness, and nobody from the Noonan side has ever put theirs in print.

Noonan came forward with everything Doyle feared in a fighter: size, strength, aggression and confidence. The first punch landed, and Doyle went blind. He swung back and hit nothing that mattered. Noonan kept coming, punch after punch, and Doyle felt every one. He backed away and tried to fight from range, to give himself room to breathe.

When his sight came back, he started darting in with short bursts and getting out again. It did little. Noonan seemed to soak it all up. Doyle writes that if there had been a referee, the fight would have been stopped. He had always said he would drink his own blood before he let a man beat him, and he says that night he was almost drowning in it.

He thought it was going to end with him on the floor, and the thought of Massey's crowd cheering it was eating at him. He reckons he had been getting hammered for about ten minutes.

Then, he says, Noonan stepped back and gasped for air.

That was all Doyle needed. He went in hard. Now it was Noonan trying to hold on to his shoulders to stop the punches. Doyle says he broke the big man's nose with a shot like the first one Noonan had hit him with, and that it broke his spirit too. Noonan backed away. Doyle caught him with an uppercut as he bent over. Noonan stayed on his feet, but nothing came back.

Both men were finished. Doyle says he took Noonan by the throat and tilted his head back, and could not decide whether to hurt him or let it end. "Enough now," he said. "Enough," said Noonan. Then Noonan added something that Doyle has kept ever since.

"You beat me, but it's only because you were fitter."

Doyle walked away with two black eyes and a nose split down the middle. He gave Massey a long look on the way back to the pub. As he passed Boardman, he gave him a little smirk, as if to say, how did I manage that?

About a week later Doyle took his wife out for a quiet meal at their favourite Indian restaurant. As he pushed the door open, his heart sank. At a big table, surrounded by his friends and a few drinks down, sat Damian Noonan.

Doyle reckoned they were outnumbered ten to one. He walked in as if he did not have a care in the world, and feared for both their lives.

Noonan stood up and called across the restaurant. In Doyle's telling, he announced that the man who had just walked in was the toughest man he had ever faced. He could not knock him out with one punch, he said, but he gave him the fight of his life. Then he told the waiter to send over the best champagne, and a couple more bottles to his own table, so they could all raise a glass.

Doyle had one glass, to be polite. His wife saw off most of the rest. As Noonan's party left, the big man shouted across the room that he hoped Doyle had enjoyed his drink. Doyle raised his glass.

When he asked for the bill, he found out why Noonan had been grinning. All three bottles were on it.

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So who won? Doyle says he did. He calls it the best fight of his life, because he was inches from defeat against one of Manchester's greatest fighters and turned it round. The difference between them, he says, was fitness.

But the same book holds the doubt. Doyle himself writes that some of the people who watched it believed it was his worst fight. Another version of the night, told in our film of the Salford door war, calls the result a draw. It has Noonan battering Doyle early, Doyle hanging in as Noonan tired, and Doyle coming off worse physically but not broken. In that world, not being broken was worth a lot.

Then there are the two things Noonan is supposed to have said. When it ended, he said Doyle only beat him because he was fitter. In the restaurant he said Doyle had given him the fight of his life. Both come from Doyle. Neither is the sound of a man who thought he had lost badly, and neither is the sound of a man who thought he had been beaten clean.

Damian Noonan cannot settle it. He died in 2003, in a motorbike accident on holiday in the Dominican Republic. The full story is in our film on Gangland.