SNATCHED!

Brighton’s ‘other’ boxer talks about prize-winning fights - and scrapping with Brad Pitt

Scott Welch is tough. Not tough in the usual Brighton way of having forgotten to moisturise that morning, but tough in the sense of walking across Britain, cycling to Spain and then rowing to Africa, a recent charity fund-raising effort that took two solid months. This toughness also helped him clinch five boxing titles over a seven year career, plus a co-starring role in Guy Ritchie’s gangster film Snatch (reviewed below). And it all began in the beautiful seaside resort of… Great Yarmouth.

“I actually went to school with {Snatch star} Jason Statham, and got into boxing at a local club,” Scott tells me. But his boxing career nearly finished before it had started. “I wasn’t interested in training, I just wanted to get in the ring and fight. There was a guy getting ready for his first fight. I just ran across the room, smashed into him with non-stop punches and he went straight down. The problem was that I didn’t really stop when he was on the floor! The coach said I’d never box in his club again.”

Scott moved to Brighton when he was 16 and found it “a massive wow factor after Yarmouth.” But his boxing luck was still out – at 86 kilos, he was just too big to find a match on the amateur circuit. It took a couple more years, and some intensive coaching at the Hove ABC (Amateur Boxing Club) under Dave Brown, before he had his first amateur match – which he promptly lost.

But that’s where his losing streak ended. Over the next few years, Scott racked up an impressive amateur record of 30 wins against 8 defeats (5 of which he later reversed), culminating in the ABA Heavyweight title of Great Britain. And then the big time beckoned. “In amateur boxing, every fight was a tough fight as we were all so well matched,” Scott remembers. “But turning professional was a different story. As a pro, it’s a business - it’s basically kill or be killed out there. Everything about you has to be a bit more vicious, a bit more serious.”

As a professional boxer, Scott travelled the world, racking up the Southern Area belt, before moving on to British, Commonwealth and WBO Intercontinental titles. In 1997, he had a crack at the WBO World Title fight in Nashville, narrowly losing to Henry Akinwande on points. In all, he had 26 professional fights, with 22 wins and an impressive 17 knock-outs. Of course, all good things come to an end.

“I retired in 1999 at 31,” says Scott. “I said to myself, I’m still young enough to do something else. If I’d left it until 35 or 36, I’d have had more battle scars, be a bit more shop-worn as we say in boxing.” But boxing hadn’t quite finished with him. Guy Ritchie was filming his bare-knuckle movie Snatch in London and wanted authentic boxing co-stars.

Scott wasn’t sure he was right for the role but went along to an audition anyway. “I stood in front of a video camera, said a few words and stood in a boxer pose. Then I pulled a mean, ugly face, which is quite easy for me!” He got the job, and was soon shooting in a warehouse in the East End. “I said to Guy Ritchie that I didn’t want to go down in the fight. I had been a heavyweight champion and there was no way I wanted to be seen to be going down to a middleweight like Brad Pitt.”

“Guy said I could choreograph the fight, so we worked together for two weeks together, staying at Sting’s place. Eventually, I accepted that in order for the fight to be exciting, I had to go down and stay down.”

But could Brad have been a real fighter? Scott isn’t sure. “He’d just done Fight Club, but hadn’t done any boxing for that. He was smart and picked it all up quickly – he got the Ali shuffle and everything. But it’s hard to say if he could have been a real fighter as he never took any real shots.”

Out of the ring, Scott enjoyed his time among the stars. “Brad is a great fella and we got along fine. He’s real good fun, just a warm, funny guy. We also saw Madonna on set (she’d just started seeing Guy Ritchie) and Jennifer Aniston was there, too.” The temptation to do more acting work was there but Scott had other ideas. “I’d been away from my family for seven years when competing, and it was time to come back and be a husband and father to my kids. I wasn’t prepared to give that up again to follow acting. I’ve done some commercials and a few other bits of filming since then, but always close to home.”

From being a 16-year old wowed by Brighton, he still loves the city. “I’ve been all round the world to beautiful places, but there’s no other place I want to be. Once you’ve spent some time in Brighton, it’s very hard to leave.”

Scott takes his acting fame with a big pinch of salt. “A film star lifestyle would be great if I hadn’t done anything in my life, but I’m very pleased with what I’ve achieved. I’ve had my career. My career was boxing.” Since retiring from competitive bouts, Scott has raised huge sums for the Chase hospice for sick children in Guildford, completing the gruelling 250-mile Marathon des Sables in the Sahara and climbing Kilimanjaro. He plans to tackle the Atacama desert next year.

Scott is also Head Trainer back at the Hove ABC, working alongside his old coach Dave Brown. “I really enjoy it,” he says, “I’m putting it all back in. We’ve got a few good prospects, and there’s a lot of younger lads coming through, too. One boxer, Ben Murphy, is on the verge of turning pro after the championships in October.”

Scott’s pride at coming full circle is evident, but don’t think this old boxer is ready to hang up his gloves just yet. Perhaps the most telling evidence is Scott’s description of Brad Pitt’s best uppercuts and right hooks during the filming of Snatch: “I allowed Brad to hit me all round the body. At one stage, he damaged his thumb on my elbow.” Like I said, this guy is tough.


SNATCH REVIEW

In 1999, Cool Britannia was at its peak. Tony had gurned his way into Downing Street, the internet boom was in full swing and Britpop bands like Oasis were global megastars. In cinema, too, we were punching above our weight, with local lad Guy Ritchie luring Hollywood hot properties Brad Pitt and Benicio del Toro over the pond for a comedy heist movie to follow, er, his first comedy heist movie.

The premise of Snatch is ludicrously simple: see what happens when you drop a diamond as big as a fist into London’s unlicensed fighting scene, inhabited by individuals with more testosterone and deadly weaponry - and less fashion awareness and common sense - than is strictly healthy. These men (there isn’t a female character with more than two lines) are played by a bizarre mixture of genuine stars (Pitt, de Toro), Ritchie regulars (the Jasons Statham and Flemyng, Vinnie Jones) and a few local oddballs (Mike ‘Runaround’ Reid, Goldie).

You’ve got Russian gangsters, South London wide boys, larcenous diamond dealers and a fine selection of cauliflower-eared bruisers. And before there were chavs, there were pikeys. Brad Pitt out-mumbles Benicio del Toro (now there’s an achievement) as the slap-happy Mickey, a bare-knuckle gypsy boxing genius. The resultant movie is a chaotic sequence of violence, incompetence, cross and double-cross as the cast swap an escalating series of threats, quips and bullets.

Snatch isn’t the place to come for deep emotion or complex characterisation. Ritchie relies on a cast turning performances up to 11, plus a manically eclectic music video soundtrack, to drown out voices in his audience’s heads, whispering that they’re basically watching a Carry On film made by a Tarantino devotee.

Strip out the twee British references – interminable cups of tea, caravans, fat men in cars and pets – and you’re left with a film that’s almost actionably close to Pulp Fiction, right down to the coincidental, chronologically confused car crash and fight-throwing sub-plots.

Having said that, the boxing scenes, especially the extended bout starring Brighton boxer Scott Welch (see Reader’s Lives page xx), are well handled. Ritchie’s frenetic direction settles down and acquires some focus, benefiting from some exemplary camera work and editing. Once the whiny ring of cheesy dialogue fades to the roar of a bloodthirsty crowd, you’re left with two animals slugging away at each other – the complete antithesis to Ritchie’s over-romanticised adulation of the gangsters’ underworld.

Ultimately, Snatch is less of a coherent movie than a selection of hammy cameos layered with cheesy dialogue, a greasy spoon sandwich that looks good in the café window but is liable to cause indigestion to all but the toughest stomachs. You could argue that Snatch’s success set the scene for genuinely enjoyable heist flicks like Ocean’s Eleven, but then you could also argue that it only encouraged Ritchie to make the miserable Swept Away and Revolver.

Either way, Ritchie, like Britannia, is no longer Cool and Snatch now seems almost quaint – a McGill postcard world where villains look like villains instead of just another guy next to you on the Tube with a rucksack.


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