The Prizefighter

Pity the boxer. Adept at an occupation in which rivals punish their opponent’s internal organs, notably the brain, the boxer faces injury and even potential death every time the bell rings. It takes bravery, dedication, and determination. Few beyond the desperate ever seek to make a living through the gruelling sport. Many fans know the routine: An impoverished childhood. A struggle for recognition. A lack of fair purses. Crooked promotions.

So it was for Ras Barrington Francis, the Tiga of this tale and a former Canadian, Commonwealth, and World Boxing Federation featherweight champion. (The WBF is one of the alphabet soup of rival sanctioning groups, including the WBA, the WBC, and the WBO.) The book shares his story and promotes belated acclaim for a career he feels was neglected in its heyday and is forgotten now. Wee fighters, like Francis, who weighed 126 pounds, rarely do get much attention. Each of the twelve chapters opens with a present-tense recounting of his Commonwealth title bout, in 1991, against Modest Napunyi, from Kenya. Vignettes from his life, told in the first person, follow thereafter. The biographical material is far more gripping than the extended description of the showdown, which took place in the Imperial Room of the Royal York Hotel, in Toronto.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1965, Francis lived in a walled tenement yard in the notorious Trench Town, where violence was as common as sunshine and where he earned the nickname Tiga’s Tail for following his older brother, Dejai, and their cousins. His hard-working mother, Norma Hayles, took him to church every Sunday and fed him cornmeal porridge. His father, Joseph Francis, left home when Tiga was a baby to study civil engineering in Montreal. Like many men of his generation, Joseph did not take parenting as a full-time responsibility: “He had a proven capacity for producing children but very little experience actually raising them.”

His kids instead basked in the reputation of their uncle Percival Hayles, who became a national hero after winning the Commonwealth lightweight title in 1968. The reflected glory made them targets for gang recruiters, who sought Dejai, at the tender age of eight, for their roster of “rude boys.” He even carried a sharpened spoon as a weapon. His mother decided to send her three eldest sons to sanctuary in far‑off Canada. When it came time to tell them, she could not: “Before the words came, she convulsed in tears, rose quickly with her head in her hands, and sprinted away from the gathering.” A cousin broke the news.

An insular life limited to a few blocks of Trench Town changed within a few hours. At the Kingston airport, the boys noticed the only white person they had ever seen. When their father met them in Montreal, they sat inside a car for the first time. They also learned that they effectively had a stepmother. The revelation had shocked their mother, who was “gutted by the betrayal.”

During a return visit to Kingston, Tiga, now twelve years old, watched his godfather, Roy Lee, a middleweight champion, take on Lionel “Tough Skin” Cameron at the local Guinness Gym. The wide-eyed youngster knew he was in the right place. “The arena was filled with smoke, lively prefight banter, and the primal energy that invariably accompanies blood sports: a strange mixture of growing excitement and mounting dread,” Francis recalls. “Fighters win, fighters lose, and fighters die.” Inspired by his godfather and uncle, he set his sights on becoming a world champion.

Tiga endured many hardships as an amateur. When his first wife told him that she wanted a divorce, he was alone in a Glasgow hotel room preparing for a match, which he lost, suffering a fractured jaw. Add to his woes the casual racism of white judges and referees. Officials disfavoured Black competitors born in Jamaica. “In small-town Canada,” the trainer Russ Anber used to warn him, “a Black fighter needs to knock a White fighter out to earn a draw.”

In April 1985, Tiga had his professional debut in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Six years later, he won the Commonwealth crown by unanimous decision. He then defeated a Cajun fighter from Louisiana, Steve Thibodeaux, to claim the World Boxing Federation championship. That title came with a $10,000 payday — not a lot to show for years of training and travel expenses. Now long retired from prizefighting, Tiga lives in Pickering, Ontario, where he runs a food services business with his wife, Rufina Chombo, a chef.

Interest in boxing has diminished with the rise of mixed martial arts, a sport sometimes compared — not inaccurately — to human cockfighting and one that captures the blood lust of authoritarianism. (On the campaign trail this year, Donald Trump entertained the grotesque fantasy of pitting detained migrants against one another.) Except for interest every four years during the Olympics, boxing seems to be headed in the same direction as the forgotten six-day bicycle races popular during the Great Depression.

The bookshelf for Canadian boxing is a short one, which makes any new volume noteworthy. Tiga’s Tale offers a memorable account of one man’s stubborn pursuit of athletic excellence with enough detail and explanation to please the novice and the aficionado alike. While it lacks a haymaker, it certainly delivers stinging jabs.