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Ring leader
Off the ropes and boxing clever, Charles ââ¬ÅThe Pink Pounderââ¬Â Jones is hitting the headlines.
"Theyââ¬â¢ve got a gay boxer on the bill and the press are going to pick up on that so theyââ¬â¢ll get lots of publicity. I donââ¬â¢t have a problem with that"
Looking down the list of bouts upon arrival at Kensington Town Hall for an evening of boxing dubbed “The Brawl in the Hall”, one middleweight contest can’t help but draw the attention.
The fourth fight of the night features Charles “The Pink Pounder” Jones. In the testosterone-overloaded sometimes brutal boxing world, to have a boxer so openly gay is a refreshing, and welcome, change.
The Pink Pounder enters the ring to a few light-hearted wolf whistles, but within seconds of the opening bell he’s silenced the cynics with a flurry of blows to his opponent as his fists do the talking. By the end of the contest everyone gives him a rousing ovation as he’s won over the fight fans by going the distance and earning a creditable draw, taking his record to two wins, two defeats and this stalemate.
“I always command the respect of my opponent. Can you imagine the embarrassment of having to admit you’ve been beaten up by a poof! I’ve not had any bad reaction from anybody. At the end of a fight you shake hands and it’s all perfectly chatty and civilised. Not just the boxers, but the referees, the corner men and the other fighters who are on the show.”
By day, Jones is a 47-year-old architect from Balham, but most of his evenings are spent at the “The Ring” in Southwark.
“People in organisations involved in boxing are all terribly supportive and being brutally commercial about it, they see they’ve got a gay boxer on the bill and the press are going to pick up on that so they’ll get lots of publicity. I don’t have a problem with that.”
But there’s a big difference in taking up boxing as a hobby to get fit and taking it to the next level to be prepared to climb through the ropes and put your body on the line. Let’s be honest, Charles is no spring chicken, so what made him take up the challenge?
“Watching bouts was incredibly exciting and there was a little bit of me thinking: ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get in there and do that, but for goodness sake Charles you’re in your 40s. You’re not going to do that, it’s ridiculous.’ Yet the one thing that did strike me was the guys boxing weren’t that much younger or fitter than me. I thought if I really made an effort I could close that gap.
“Since then it’s gone great. In my second fight I was stopped because my nose got smacked so hard it bled and wouldn’t stop, but it was more hurt pride than anything.”
Charles embraced his new-found mini-celebrity as soon as it came calling – which didn’t take long.
“The one thing that I didn’t take on board until about two weeks before my first fight was just how much it would get picked up by the press,” he explains. “I thought I would get the odd column, but it’s been a lot more than that.
“The Daily Mail piece was just nasty. The day after the documentary was screened their television reviewer wrote: ‘He shouldn’t be called the Pink Pounder, the Pink Flounder more like’. We have five terrestrial channels producing hours of television every evening and they chose to have a go at me.”
As for his views on gay identity – something he is clearly not afraid to highlight - Charles is clear, “There are a lot of young people perhaps in more remote parts of the country who are a bit like Little Britain’s Dafydd, but much shyer, and it terrifies them to see that there’s a phenomenal amount of people out there who are openly gay and look really happy and ordinary. Maybe it will give them the confidence to stand up and say ‘me too’.
Which brings us back to Charles in the ring. Perhaps there will always be members of the audience who arrive poker-faced, waiting to be impressed. But once they see “The Pounder” in action, that’s where the criticism stops.
