“I’ll soak up the energy and feed off the crowd,” Danny Christie says as he considers the pinnacle of what, to many, must seem one of Carlisle’s less conventional sporting journeys.
Christie has been in and out of prison and, as he describes it, engulfed by a drug addiction for much of his life. This weekend, though, he will be on stage at Wembley Arena, fighting in a major bare-knuckle boxing event.
The 37-year-old from Currock will face Terry Brazier, an experienced mixed martial arts (MMA) professional, in a light heavyweight bout. Christie’s route to Wembley is from straightforward but he is excited for the opportunity.
“I’m looking to put a show on, a spectacle,” he says. “I’m doing this for me, but I also have to take into account that it is for other people’s entertainment. I’ll showcase my skills to the best of my ability and hope people like what they see.”
The bare-knuckle scene is a growing one, and Christie will be on the same bill as stars such as Mike Perry and Michael Page at the BKFC 27 event in London. As well as the fight enthusiasts who attend, a large pay-per-view audience will watch online.
It is one way of putting it that many who go down this particular fighting route have something of a past. On a sweltering day in Carlisle, Christie talks about his. He is accustomed to doing so, having for several months shared his story on a YouTube channel which attracts tens of thousands of viewers.
Yet there is further intensity to our conversation as, with curtains drawn and a fan whirring in his front room, Christie talks. He says he has clarity now thanks to a programme which has helped him go drug-free for several months.
“I’ve been a drug addict for the last 20-odd years,” he says. “I probably didn’t realise that until three or four years ago. The truth is I was 11 when I first smoked weed, and I remember loving it. I remember the feeling of this psychoactivity that kicked off.
“It was like my brain had turned into a supercomputer. All this relevant information was being processed and funnelled and filtered. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I could never actually do it, but I thought, ‘I’ve landed here. This is for me’. It slowly took hold.”
Christie says his regular use of prescription and illegal substances went alongside his fighting tendencies. He says was a promising junior boxer with Currock House Amateur Boxing Club, but drugs dominated his psyche. “Self-control is something I always lacked,” he says. “There was very little between thought and action. I used to act impulsively on the first thought, which usually was violent or at least aggressive.”
Taking responsibility for this is, he says, central to his new mindset. So is a willingness to go further back. When I ask what, in his past, shaped him, he says: “My dad died of a drug overdose when I was three.
“I never properly realised this until I got clean, but growing up the whole time I had this sense of abandonment. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, hurt, wronged and harmed a lot of people for my own ends. I lacked the father figure, the direction and discipline that was needed. I just ran amok from an early age.”
Does Christie have any memories of his father? “I have one. But I’m not certain if it’s an actual memory. It’s this picture of my dad having just got out of prison and wanting to come and see me, and my mam and dad sort of fighting over me. ‘He’s coming with me’. ‘No, he’s coming with me’…
“I was maybe 11 or 12 when my mam told me what had happened. I blamed my mam. Somehow, some way, I found someone to blame for the way I felt.”
Christie says this former attitude was easy to uphold because he did not recognise his drug-taking as a problem whilst continuing to function on the surface: holding down a job, paying rent. Yet he says there was a point a few years ago when, in prison over an intimidation charge amid an online feud with fellow Carlisle fighter Decca Heggie, “I just decided enough was enough.
“The chaplain came to my cell door. My auntie had died. I’d lost other relatives in that period, and it broke me to the point where I couldn’t stop crying. I went to the chapel, in Preston jail, and then remember looking at myself in the little mirror in my cell, and knew then and there I needed to change.”
Yet it took, Christie says, until the day before New Year’s Eve last year for him to submit totally to the idea of being clean. “I’d been on a bender, if you can call it that. I had a friend come up, and we used for a couple of days. When he left, I cried an absolute river again.”
He says there was another family motivation which lurched to the surface. “My granda, who became my dad, really…he died about 18 months previous. I remember saying, ‘I need to stop for my granda’. It’s one thing to disgrace somebody when they’re alive. Doing it in death is something very different. He always wanted the best for me.”
Christie says he was initially violent in prison. “I got seven nickings in my first ten days, which I was told was the wing record. It’s how I channelled it. I had so much negativity going on in my life and, deep down, I was terrified. I was vulnerable. I would challenge and fight anybody, but it was a lot of front.
“The second time round was very different. I was very calm. I got my head down and got on with it. This is when I realised I was an addict, and it took me the best part of two years to get some clean time.”
Christie says he tried different ways to get clean but only through his current method has he achieved this. He now lives with a programme and the support of a ‘fellowship’. On the day we meet, he says he has passed a hundred days. “I’ve got the programme to thank for my new way of thinking. The old thoughts are still there sometimes, but I don’t act on them.
“I’ve now got a mindset beyond my wildest dreams. My money management is better, relationships are so much better, feelings are deeper and more meaningful.”
There is a bible in the corner of Christie’s front room. Does he owe his new “mindset” to a Christian faith? “I worship the God of my understanding,” he says. “I do read the Bible every day, but I’m not a Christian. If God could be understood, by our tiny 3lb brain, he wouldn’t be worth worshipping.
“In a nutshell, I thank my higher power every day. It’s part of my gratitude – prayers and meditation of a morning. I write things down every day, concentrate on what I can control, and pray and hand the rest over.”
Christie insists that, having got this far, he has finally lost the “desire” to take drugs. Yet he accepts that “I’ll always think and feel like an addict. I had a moment three weeks ago, the last time the continental market was up town. We go with the kids for the Polish hotdogs. There were people having a good time, drinking...and I got this jealousy, because I can’t drink socially like everybody else does. Once it touches my lips, it takes over.
“I had a feeling…almost of resentment. Not towards others – towards what I couldn’t do. It sealed it for me. ‘I can never do this’. It’s that self-awareness I never had before.”
Christie’s disputes with Heggie, the well-known bare-knuckle champion from Carlisle, are no secret to many. He says he does not wish to air them again and indeed asks that his fellow fighter is not named in this article. It is impossible, though, to avoid doing so given that it was a controversial fight between the pair that triggered his Wembley opportunity.
The two men agreed to settle their differences, which had been aired in a series of often abusive and hostile YouTube videos, in a bare-knuckle ring in Manchester. Christie was subject to a restraining order, and deciding to fight Heggie saw him in breach of this.
Footage of their battle last November was watched by millions of people online. The men emerged coated with blood as they punched and pummelled one other. It was a way, they said, of settling “beef”, yet Judge Nicholas Barker described the fight as “unpleasant and offensive to right-thinking people…two men in a slugfest, seeking to batter the brains out of each other.”
It led to a two-year suspended sentence for Christie, but an American promoter was among the many who watched the fight. “They got in touch and said, ‘We like what we saw, we know you can fight. We want to give you a three-fight contract. Would you consider it?’” Christie says.
“At first I thought someone was winding me up. But I looked into it, realised it was legitimate and I was like, ‘I’m in’.”
This drew Christie to the high-profile, sanctioned bare-knuckle scene which, he accepts, will never be everyone’s cup of tea. “I could totally agree with what the judge said – it was a very violent, shocking affair to watch. It might repulse people. They might recoil,” he says. “My kids watched that [Heggie] fight. I wasn’t exactly pleased with that. It kind of traumatised them for a little while – the blood and levels of violence. If I had a choice I would take that back: the visual harm it potentially caused on my kids.
“But it was what it was. And this format [at Wembley] isn’t like that. It’s a professional format. I think, eight or nine years ago, bare-knuckle attracted a lot of the wrong people – criminal types, quite a dark crowd. But now you’ve got lads coming over from the UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship], ex-professionals, lots of elite fighters. There’s definitely new eyes on it. Who would have thought a bare-knuckle event would be on at Wembley? Times are changing.”
Christie says he has a “high-mileage body” and does not want to fight for the rest of his days. But he adds: “For me, there’s no better form of entertainment. If me and you are speaking here, and there’s a fight on that telly, I’m over there.
“I never feel more alive than when I’m in a fight. Something happens to my neurochemistry, when I know I’m in danger and someone’s trying to take my chin off.
“It’s a very primal feeling. It’s riveting. I’m never more switched on or alert. You can almost feel the atom split right there and then.”
Christie says he used to enjoy “street fights” in his drug-streaked youth and would seek out violent situations. Given Saturday’s contest is not the settling of any sort of feud, will he find the hostile impulses to take on Brazier?
“There isn’t a hatred. I’m just relying on my skill set,” he says. “I’m quite a spiteful puncher and I can see myself doing damage.
“I think I’m gonna hurt him. I know he’s coming to hurt me. But when the fight’s over, I’ll be happy to shake his hand.
“I just want to know what I can do with these boys while I can. I don’t want to get to 40 and be like, ‘Shoulda, woulda, coulda’.”
Christie says that, for Wembley, he has trained harder than ever, when not occupied by his scaffolding work and the YouTube channel which, he says, is making good revenue. He also says he has had “lengthy conversations” with his five children – aged eight, ten, 12, 16 and 17 – to explain what he is doing this weekend.
He says he will carry Carlisle pride into the ring tomorrow too. “I was born in a back bedroom over there,” he gestures to the window. “Buchanan Road, Currock.
“It means something to me. I love this place. I’ll have Carlisle on my shorts: the Great Border City, the coat of arms and ‘Be Just And Fear Not’. I’ve got a Carlisle song for my ring walk tune. It’s called ‘My City’ by a lad called Mista Cryptik. I’m really happy to put Carlisle on the map.”
He also accepts that a man of his past will not be cheered to the ring by everyone. “I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea,” he says. “I’ve made a lot of amends for a lot of the bad I’ve done. That includes my mam. It was my grandad’s dying wish for us to get along. She’s only 17 years older than me and we’re very similar, which has caused us to clash. But things are good with her now.
“In terms of other people, I don’t have an opinion on anyone who perhaps dislikes me, or wishes me harm. I won’t challenge anyone who has a negative opinion on me. They are things I can’t control. That’s their business.”
The fan continues to whir as Christie’s words cut through the steaming heat. “All the negativity, sadness, sorrow, loss, misery and pain…it’s all led me to where I am now,” he says. “It’s part of my story. I don’t regret anything.”
For more information on BKFC 27 London, including how to watch, click HERE
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