THE STORYTELLER
The complex life and times of This Bloody Mary author, Jonathan Rendall
THIS encounter, which gave Jonathan Rendall the title for his first, literary awardwinning book, This Bloody Mary Is The Last Thing I Own (1998), may never have happened. That was part of the thrill of Rendall: a source of frustration for editors, an eloquent, decrepit delight for readers. He started his career subbing Srikumar Sen at The Times; Sen remembers “a lovely man, generous, a wonderful sense of humour.” He added, however, “Jonathan wasn’t cut out for the discipline of journalism”; Rendall’s talent meant there was space for him at any paper but, in those fast-paced, high-turnover environments, “he was never allowed to be himself. If he was a journalist at all, it was a gonzo journalist. He was always the protagonist of his stories; a miniature Hunter S. Thompson.”
There are plenty of stories; copy not filed, an afternoon hiding in a sauna to avoid shady characters, reports turned in days after the final bell sounded. There are just as many of grudging forgiveness, exceptions made; his insights worth waiting for.
Rendall was erratic, gifted, self-defeating, but for all his unreliable narratives worked as a boxing writer at several papers including The Sunday Correspondent and The Independent, bringing his deadline-repelling, A.J Liebling and Malcolm Lowry-soaked style to bear on two decades of the Sweet Science. Susie Hilton Knox, his ex-wife with whom he had three children, told me “people often talked about how bad he was with deadlines, but it wasn’t deliberate. He found the process arduous; he agonised over everything. It was torture for him. He was always a believer in the idea of the artist in the garret; that writing had to be painful.”
The Guardian’s Kevin Mitchell, like Sen a one-time colleague, described Rendall as “an extraordinary individual – but fiction is where he should have been. He sometimes mixed fact and fiction. He did it artistically, embroidering to make a great piece; the basis would be there but a lot of stuff around it, you’d think, ‘I don’t know’. You create your own world and if you buy into it, it’s brilliant. It takes a bit of courage to do that. Or stupidity. But there are versions of all sorts of truth – especially now.”
Jonathan Rendall was a character, in more than the ordinary sense. His name wasn’t always Jonathan Rendall, as he explained in Garden Hopping (2006), a self-lacerating adoption memoir, ‘something to do’ for a writer in search of a subject, having left boxing behind. We know about his early life because
Garden Hopping included a letter he sent his birth mother, outlining emigration, personal neglect then redemption, a mission to get into Oxford from a Greek school which had never sent a pupil there. This sense of purpose set a pattern. Rendall’s rare, intoxicating winning runs clustered around times when he chanced pursuit of a seemingly impossible aspiration: first Oxford – he was accepted but slacked off, spent his grant in casinos and emerged with a Third – and later, captured in This Bloody Mary, guiding Colin Mcmillan, a bafflingly neglected featherweight, to a WBO title.
Rendall referred to the period of grace during a winning run as “riding the blue curve” and at the heart of This Bloody Mary is a snapshot of 1990s boxing, the years he was most directly involved. Rendall knew Mcmillan was special; he was – like another favourite, Herol Graham – “poetry in motion”. He thought the dextrously slick Mcmillan might be ‘The Next Sugar Ray’ and couldn’t believe he was languishing on undercards. Partly that was because, as an old trainer said of Graham, “nobody ever knocked out nobody with a poem.”
“The first time we bumped into each other was my second professional fight,” Mcmillan explained. “I fought a guy from Trinidad [Alric Johnson] who was tough; I beat him and afterwards John came up to me and said, ‘Don’t you think that’s too hard for your second fight?’ I was managed by Terry Marsh, the end goal was to look after yourself but at the time you needed someone to make matches. Me and Terry had two or three fights together, I lost an early fight on a cut, and we decided to part ways. I met John again, a few fights later. We spoke about my career and he said he’d make a couple of calls to different managers. Interest-wise there wasn’t much – on paper I had a loss – and in the end he said
YOU CREATE YOUR OWN WORLD AND IF YOU BUY INTO IT, IT’S BRILLIANT. IT TAKES COURAGE TO DO THAT. OR STUPIDITY”
he wouldn’t mind getting involved himself.
“Me and John became very close, he had real belief in my ability. Boxing was very regimented, you had the status quo, but I’d always been a believer in trying to change things, take a bit of control. With John that was the situation, he’d come along as my advisor, put things in place, make the phone calls – he was great. I was fortunate he wasn’t an established manager; I was his sole concern. He had my best interests at heart.”
Rendall the artist, student of chaos and overshot deadlines, made for an unlikely manager; he, Mcmillan and Mcmillan’s trainer, Howard Rainey, seemed an odd squad. Barry Hearn, one of the promoters Rendall tried to convince to sign Mcmillan, told me Rendall displayed a “surly attitude”, his body language that of someone “deeply untrusting” of boxing’s establishment, but there was no doubting his devotion: “He was obviously in love with Colin’s skill.” Rendall’s brush with the business seemed to Hearn founded on “principles that were fundamentally wrong.” Ironically, Hearn said Mcmillan’s forwardthinking desire to call his own shots, due to a belief in, as Hearn put it, “talent being king”, is closer to the way today’s stars operate than most of his ’90s peers.
Rendall’s faith in Mcmillan, and connections built from Fleet Street and days at the Thomas A Beckett, led the Barking boy to spar at Gleason’s Gym, and to Las Vegas, meetings with Ray Arcel and a narrow escape from Don King (“he wanted to sign but he didn’t stipulate what was going to be in the contract”). Rendall’s unorthodox approach also saw Mcmillan become a precursor to boxing’s new media darlings; a front cover of lifestyle magazine The
Face among several faintly glamorous endorsements – all part of an attempt to build Mcmillan’s image, elevate him into the limelight. It paid off: Mcmillan bagged a promotional deal with Frank Warren and primetime ITV exposure for his biggest nights.
In 1992 Mcmillan, with Rendall in the wings, fought Maurizio Stecca, a classy Olympic gold medallist and then-wbo featherweight champion. Mcmillan’s performance was a masterclass, his unanimous decision victory seemed the start of the sharpest blue curve of all. As Mcmillan put it, “There was a time where there was Eubank, Watson, Benn – I was up there with those guys. We had a unification fight coming up with Paul Hodkinson, my contract with Frank Warren was coming up, we would have been in a beautiful position. One split second can change your whole life, particularly in boxing.”
That second arrived almost immediately. Mcmillan dislocated his shoulder during his first, seemingly straightforward, defence against Ruben Palacios and that was that for his world title, for all those months running together in Battersea Park, Rendall wearing suit trousers and work shoes, “looking like Columbo”. Mcmillan would return, but never the same, his shoulder not robust enough for top-level fights, a short-lived reunion with the British title his last, dimmer, highpoint. There’s no bitterness in Mcmillan, partly due to the fact his relationship with Rendall was one where he called the final shots – “I’m the eternal optimist, at least it happened after, rather than before. I’ve done it, I’ve become a world champion. I can live with every decision I’ve made because it was down to me.”
This Bloody Mary was written after Mcmillan’s winning streak ended and as much as it’s a record of “Sweet C’s” title run, it’s steeped in Rendall’s disillusionment with boxing, less the sport than ‘the superstructure’. Rendall was, for all his toughguy pretensions, surprisingly skinless, a moralist out of his element, as Mitchell explained – “He had an honesty at odds with his love of fiction, he was very righteous about some things.” Susie agreed: “Jonathan had impossibly high expectations of people, even if he didn’t always live up to them himself. He could be puritanical, but he was also very funny, and charismatic. He had wild enthusiasms, and he’d bring other people along. But he was a very difficult person. Alongside all the highs there were always real lows.” Mitchell said much the same of Rendall’s swings from bliss to despair – “Sometimes he could be light-hearted and jolly, but a minute later he’d put on this stern face, this mask.” Mitchell added: “I think if he could he would have transported himself back to the 1920s or ‘30s, he would have been safe then, with like-minded souls around him.”
Rendall says in Garden Hopping: “I wondered if a part of me wanted to change back into the old costume. But it was too late. That’s life. That really is the test of life, actually. To come back in new conditions.” This trait characterised his life post-mcmillan. His career after This Bloody Mary saw a book called Twelve Grand (1999) in which he frittered an advance on bets and wrote up the story, part fantasy, a debatable smattering of fact. A TV series of the same premise followed, as well as Garden Hopping and the final, posthumously published, Scream, an oral testimony of figures surrounding Mike Tyson during his own, more operatic, ride on the blue curve. What Rendall found in gambling, and other, even less edifying, habits, was the same thing he’d found in fights, from his first addictive encounter with a ‘dance under the chandeliers’ – total absorption, escape from “the silent war” he fought against pragmatism and modern life’s trudge along consumerism’s glinting boulevards, whether for the duration of a race or a round of blackjack. As Mitchell put it, “he had a life that was so filled with false energy, he was looking for something real.” There are few things as real as the ring. It might have been that potential for purity which heightened his disillusionment, as in This Bloody Mary where an ex-pro likened a career in boxing to “riding on a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.”
Rendall was never a mug punter; he knew in life, as in boxing, “only the names change”. He died in 2013, aged just 48, in poignantly uncertain circumstances. “But poetry won. And it always would”, he wrote, after a ‘pilgrimage’ to see Herol Graham’s comeback having apparently walked away from the sport, as Rendall too, apparently, had. Rendall won’t come back in new conditions but, as well as his three children, he’s left behind a few stylishly written books, a few gripping TV shows, and Mcmillan’s world title chiselled in the annals. He wrote a poem about the ill-fated Coshocton, a horse fifth in the 2002 Derby until it fell and was fatally injured; another curtailed winning run, another case of just missing the big time: “Pick a horse it’s all the same/but I’ll remember Coshocton’s name.” At the foot of the last blue curve, at the laying down of arms in the silent war, maybe that’s all Rendall ever hoped for himself.