Charity

The Collyhurst and Moston Youth Club, Manchester is a voluntary-run club based in one of the most deprived areas of inner city Manchester. It receives no government or lottery funding but relies completely on the tireless and selfless work of its local volunteers. It has been has been credited with helping to reduce crime by encouraging youngsters off the streets and teaching them the discipline, hard work and enjoyment of sport. Brian Hughes received an MBE in 2000 for his services to the community. He has also trained several Olympic, British, European, Commonwealth and world boxing champions. The club is an open-house, where anyone of any sex, race, religion and ability can come. The principles of 'Liquid Thinking' have been applied for over 40 years in the club and are still reaping success today.

A contribution from every book sold and service ordered will go to the voluntary-run Collyhurst and Moston Youth Club, Manchester.

In this humble environment a group of future champion fighters is being nurtured

By Jim White
(Filed: 02/10/2004)

The Collyhurst and Moston Boys Club may only be a 10-minute walk from the shining new development of Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens, but it seems another world. Everyone tells you there is a renaissance going on in Cottonpolis, that this is a city that never sleeps, such is the non-stop rattle of tills in its bars and restaurants. Yet none of the money appears to have seeped eastwards into Collyhurst and Moston. Let's put it this way: Wayne Rooney won't be troubling the local estate agents in his search for a new property to go with his new job down the road in Salford. That's if there are any estate agents in Collyhurst and Moston.

This is such an unrelenting place that only the foolhardy would park outside the Boys Club's Victorian facade. Unless they enjoyed returning to find their vehicle propped up on small piles of bricks, its wheels expertly removed by a team who works quicker than Michael Schumacher's pit crew. Except on the day I visited the place, there on the street bang outside the building was a sleek, low-slung sports coupe, entirely untouched by light fingers.

"That's Robbie's motor," said Brian Hughes, the club's sixtysomething boxing coach. "Nobody would touch Robbie's motor. Not even the lads round here."

Robbie is Robbie Reid, International Boxing Organisation super-middleweight champion and one of a stable of seven professional boxers under Hughes's tutelage at the club, four of whom threw their first punch out there on the local streets. In this humble environment, enveloped in a perpetual whiff of sweat and liniment, a group of fighters is being nurtured that Hughes reckons is on a par with the other famous sporting production line hereabouts.

"These are our Busby Babes, our Fergie's Fledglings," he said. "This is a very special bunch, champions all of them one day, I guarantee you."

Watching Hughes's charges training, with their lightning hand movements, their ducking and jabbing in the sparring ring, the extraordinary number of sit-ups they can sustain, the first thing that strikes the visitor is the air of relaxed, easy confidence about the place. That and the gaggles of local lads, watching the pros in action with the concentrated gaze of the smitten. And it is with those watchers, the members of the club's junior ranks, who turn up and train alongside the pros every night of the week, that much of Hughes's work is done.

"It's a horrible world out there and these kids are adrift," he said. "There's no discipline in the home, no discipline in the school. I don't blame the teachers. If anyone did now what they used to do to me when I was at school, they'd get 10 years for GBH. But if any kid comes in here, this sport can give them something. Even the ones who are hopeless - I'm not being arrogant, but I can tell within an hour if a kid's not got what it takes - we try to make them feel important, feel good about themselves. This is probably the only place in their world where they can feel like that."

Listening to Hughes talk, the mix of gruffness and enthusiasm delivered in the kind of accent and phraseology that seems to have stepped straight from the pages of an Alan Bennett script, is one of life's pleasures. No wonder the dozens of young hopefuls who fill the club's gym treat him with a sort of reverence. Lads who can barely string two words together without one of them being an expletive, the moment they arrive are suddenly full of please and thank you and excuse me.

"We make a bargain when they come here," Hughes explained. "They want to earn enough to take their families out of the hovels they're being brought up in. I can help them to become a champion, but only if they accept our discipline. Part of that is no swearing. Anyone caught using bad language does extra press-ups. The lads themselves police it. They become more anti-bad language than me." This is exactly the philosophy that the Home Secretary was endorsing at the Labour Party Conference this week. With Amir Khan, the Olympic silver medallist, in the vicinity, David Blunkett pledged more money for the sport's roots.

"Amateur boxing training can give young people the chance to keep fit, learn sportsmanship and self-discipline and benefit from the support of a mentor in their boxing coach," Blunkett said. "It can also offer positive routes into training, education and employment as many young people who are beginning to master the sport are finding."

The money is going through an initiative called Positive Futures. Since the Olympics, the number of youngsters in training with Positive Futures has risen from 150 to 530, an increase that comes as no surprise to Hughes.

"Oh aye, that Khan's a breath of fresh air for the game, especially among Asian lads," he said. "And if that's what Blunkett said, well good on him. But to be honest, it won't make any difference to the lads round here what any politician says."

Hughes, incidentally, will not be benefiting from any Positive Futures cash. In fact, he has never accepted a grant in his coaching life, preferring to pay his own way rather than be snarled up in red tape. The money to keep the gym going comes from subscriptions, from the books Hughes writes about the other love in his life, Manchester United, and from the benevolence of those of his fighters who make it.

But, official funding or not, the question still hangs over the Collyhurst and Moston Boys club: why boxing? Isn't the British Medical Association right that other sports can provide similar rewards in terms of self-esteem and discipline without the risk of injury inherent in boxing?

"I love football," Hughes said. "But it isn't boxing." His argument is that to survive in the ring, a boxer needs a far higher degree of self-discipline that any other sportsmen. The necessary dedication to training, to self-denial, he reckons, spins off into their wider lives.

"That Khan's got a head start, his religion has taught him discipline. But the kids we get have no anchor in their lives. You'd look at some of our lads, with their shaven heads and their attitude, and you'd think, Jesus, be careful. They look bullies, but get them in the gym and they learn. What this sport is about is making them into human beings, not bullies. And they get respect in the community for that."

That much is true. The other week one of the few non-locals, whose son is involved at the club, came to watch training and left his motorbike outside. When he went to go home, it was gone.

"The lads in the gym knew who'd have nicked it," Hughes recalled, "and they went out there and within 20 minutes, they'd made the kids who's robbed it bring the bike back. Fella was that relieved, he gave them a fiver each. I'd have given them a clip round the ear, me. But then I'm a bit of a dinosaur."