Geoff Thompson and the Last Fight on the Door

On the five-minute drive to the pub, Geoff Thompson sang along to Elton John's Crocodile Rock on the car stereo, and his voice shook.

He knew that shake. He had felt it before three hundred fights, and by his own count he had not lost one of them in nine years on the doors of Coventry. It came every time. You learned not to mind it.

Three days earlier, a friend of his called Noel, a fellow doorman and a handy man himself, had been stabbed once through the heart outside a nightclub in the city centre. It was in the papers and on the television. Now Thompson was driving to a pub called the Lion to throw out the most frightening man in the city, as a favour to a friend.

If you don't leave now, we're going to be fighting

Geoff Thompson, at the bar of the Lion

He did not want to go. He went anyway.

The story comes from Thompson's own memoir, Watch My Back, the book about his years as a bouncer that later became the film Clubbed. In it he calls the man Ray.

Ray, in Thompson's telling, had glassed, stabbed, bottled, razored and petrol-bombed his way through the previous fifteen years in Coventry. He did not pick his victims. Old, young, fit or frail, it made no difference. A couple of months before, he had driven a glass ashtray into the face of an elderly barman at the same pub, a wound that took a hundred stitches and a week in hospital, because the barman would not serve him.

Now Ray was back at the Lion with a friend, and the landlord wanted him out. The pub's own doormen that night were an ex-soldier of fourteen stone and a seventeen-stone man the others called Catalogue John, because he looked like he modelled jumpers. Neither of them fancied it alone. The landlord rang Thompson.

The car park was full. Thompson walked in through the red double doors, and there was Ray, ten feet away at the bar, in a grey silky tracksuit and cheap shiny trainers, drinking lager with a tall, fair-haired Scotsman.

Every head in the room turned. The regulars at the bar knew exactly why Thompson was there. Two old men in their Sunday best sat over halves of mild. A young girl at the pool table gave him a wink. He had no time for pool.

What Thompson did not know was that the two doormen were round the corner of the car park at that moment, bent into the boot of a Ford Sierra, getting out baseball bats. They were waiting for him to arrive. He was already inside.

He went straight to Ray. "You've got to leave," he said.

Thompson admits in the book that he had no heart in it, and that Ray could hear it. Ray looked at him, then at the nearly full pint beside him, and pointed at it. He had a pint. He was not going anywhere. Thompson tried again. Ray shook his head, lifted the glass, drank, and turned his back.

By then Thompson's feet were already in a small stance. His hands were up and open in front of him, a guard he later made famous in self-defence circles as the fence, keeping the gap between them. He tried one last time. "If you don't leave now, we're going to be fighting."

He writes that in the second before Ray answered, his mind went everywhere. Three hundred wins. The law of averages. Whether this would be the one he lost. Whether, against two big violent men, he might even die. He thought about Noel. He thought about Sharon, who had been asking him to give up the door, and his mother, who worried herself sick, and his kids.

"We'll have to fight," Ray said evenly.

Thompson had not expected that. The Scotsman turned his back to the bar, ready to go. Thompson made a mental note of it. Then Ray turned away again, out of pure arrogance, and Thompson knew he had to hit him before the friend came in.

"So you're not going to go then?" he asked, and brought his right hand back as if showing Ray the door. The question gave Ray something to think about. It also gave Thompson his opening.

He threw one right hand onto Ray's jaw, as hard and as fast as he could. In his own words, Ray was out before he fell. The pint went flying, beer everywhere.

What Thompson did next is the part of the story he has never dressed up. Before Ray's head hit the floor, he kicked it, and when Ray lay still in the beer, he stamped on his face. He writes that he hated himself as he did it. If this man got up, he believed, he could lose, and that frightened him more than anything. Later, when Ray began to stir, he kicked him again.

The Scotsman jumped on Thompson's back. Thompson threw him off and chased him round the bar. The Scot shouted across to ask his name, the way men do when they mean to come back another day. "Geoff Thompson," he shouted back.

At that the Scotsman tried to rip a plastic beer sign off the bar to use as a weapon. It would not come off. So he smashed a pint glass on the bar instead and held up the jagged end.

The music stopped. The DJ stood still. A circle opened up on the carpet. Thompson did not fancy wearing that glass, so he picked up an abandoned pint, poured it out on the carpet, and broke it on the nearest table. He writes that the look in the Scotsman's eyes said he had only smashed his glass to defend himself. But he had smashed it all the same.

Then the doors crashed open. The two doormen came in with their bats, and the landlord behind them. The Scotsman looked from Thompson to the bats and back again.

"Put the glass down," Thompson told him, "or you're going to get battered."

The Scotsman asked for one thing. He wanted Thompson's word that his mate would not get hurt any more. Faced by three men, two of them holding baseball bats, he was still standing up for his friend. Thompson says he admired that. He gave his word, and they shook hands. The Scot dropped his glass. When the doormen surged forward, Thompson shouted that nobody was to touch him.

He and the Scotsman carried Ray out between them and dropped him on the tarmac. Thompson told the Scot that when his friend came round, he would meet him any time, any place. The DJ put another record on.

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Shortly afterwards, Thompson heard that the pair had beaten up a taxi driver who refused to take them. The landlord pressed £500 into his hand. Thompson said he had not done it for the money, then took it.

That night he rang Sharon and told her it was done. He also told her that he was done. He knew he could not do what he had just done one more time. As long as he stayed on the door he would always be fighting, and he had seen at the Lion exactly what he was capable of.

He kept his word. Geoff Thompson left the doors, and he wrote about them instead. The books about fear and violence became films. In 2004 his short film Brown Paper Bag won a BAFTA. The man who sang Crocodile Rock with a shake in his voice on the way to his last fight went on to make a living writing about fear.

The full story is in our film on Gangland.