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guy.
    When I gathered myself, I looked behind and saw a maniacal grinning face in the car behind me.
    Going to be like that is it, bro?
    We were racing now. I took off down the street and when Johnno pulled his Datsun alongside, both engines over-revving, I yanked the steering wheel towards him and smashed my ride into his. When he caught up he smashed back, and there we were, barging the shit out of those cars, crashing into each other all the way to Otahuhu, as though it was the end point of some hyper-realistic driving game.
    As the cars were hitting each other, I could see sparks in the darkness and heard the scream of side panels colliding. For anyone walking the quiet, dark streets of South Auckland that night, it would have been quite the spectacle seeing us fly past.
    When I saw the slip road to the clubrooms I slowed down, but before I could turn in, Johnno’s Datsun careened into the back of me, smashing me through a fence and into the front yard of a house.
    Shortly another link was added to the chain of smashed-up vehicles, when a civilian, surprised by Johnno’s abrupt stop, banged into the back of his Datsun. I ditched my car and ran off to the rugby pitch. From the darkness, I watched the foot race between Johnno and the guys who had smashed into the back of his car.
    ‘Good luck fella,’ I laughed quietly.
    He did have good luck, managing to boost another car that was parked at the clubrooms – a VW Beetle – and race off into the night. Later on the fella who owned the VW figured out that it was my crew who had taken his car. Johnno sent out the word that it was me who’d boosted it. If the guy caught up with me, it’d be on, and Johnno knew that. Better me in a scrap than Johnno, I guess.
    I didn’t mind. It was always better to have me in a scrap than any of the other boys. Things were like that inSouth Auckland then, a patchwork of beefs and resentments which, when the alignment was right, resulted in bursts of violence. It was hard to keep up with it all sometimes. There was more than one occasion when I’d see a bloke and have to go through the old mental Rolodex to see how likely it’d be that he’d be coming over with something swinging towards my head – fists usually, but sometimes a bat or a chain. Grudges could stretch out through generations where I came from, but they could also be happily quashed once the fists flew.
    In those early teenage years I first rubbed up against a group of fellas who would keep crossing my path for years. It was supposed to be a pre-arranged fight: because of some long-forgotten slight, Simi would be scrapping against a kid from another school named Siaosi. The agreed terms were that this was going to be a one-on-one affair, with Eti and me there for moral support. When we got to the scrap, though, we found a mob that looked like one of the gangs from the movie
The Warriors
– literally dozens of fellas, with all kinds of blunt instruments.
    Those guys were sick of our shit. We’d put hands on too many of the guys from their school and they weren’t there for a fight, they were there for a lynching. Seeing their numbers and anger, we ran. I would get to put fists on acouple of them many years later, but by then I no longer fought with malice.
    That lynch mob had included Samoan brothers Clay and Auckland Auimatagi, who lived nearby and trained at a kickboxing gym run by trainer Lolo Heimuli. The gym boasted a group of Islander kids who would become world-class fighters, with the best of them being another pair of Samoan brothers, Ray and Rony Sefo. Clay, Auckland and Rony would become opponents, rivals and friends; Lolo is one of my current trainers and Ray, well, Ray would make me famous.
    At that time, though, I still only fought for fun. While they were training, I was stealing, robbing, mugging and generally running wild. I wasn’t scared of the police and the courts – when they grabbed me, I’d be back out on the streets in no time – and I