High Steaks: Legendary boxing trainer Johnny Lewis gets raw and real over lunch
These days legendary boxing trainer Johnny Lewis gets just as much of a rush training regular men and women who make his 5.30am boxing classes as he did working with world champions. He sits down for a High Steaks interview.
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He’s been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, trained six world champions and rubbed shoulders with some of Australia’s most high-profile politicians, businessmen and celebrities.
But spend an hour with Johnny Lewis, over a glass of red, steak and mash, and you’ll quickly see fame means little to this modest, charming, quick-witted “legend” who grew up in Sydney’s inner west and to this very day doesn’t pull his punches.
“What makes a good female boxer?” he says, repeating my question back to me — a “wannabe fighter” who these days manages a few pad rounds a week at best.
“What makes a good female boxer?” he asks again. “Having an arsehole husband,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.
Then on a serious note: “Women have got a lot of things men haven’t got which makes them good at boxing. Men don’t have babies and I don’t know of a guy that would want to take that role, women are tough.”
“I go back to my old nanna, if we had a cut on our foot she’d be straight on it with the metho. It would nearly put us through the ceiling but that’s how it was.
“She was tough.”
It quickly becomes clear the women in Lewis’ life have shaped who he is today.
He’s a man who good mate John Singleton describes as “a freak among men, a gentleman, a true friend … a rare genius. One of the best I have met, perhaps the best. A good and giving man”.
Prominent Sydney lawyer Adam Houda agrees. Once Johnny realises we have some mutual connections, he picks up his mobile phone and invites them into our lunch at Macelleria steakhouse in Newtown.
“Johnny is a legend,” Mr Houda says.
“For more than 30 years he has rung me every couple of months just to check up on me. That’s the kind of man he is.
“He’s the greatest coach to ever come out of Australia, yep he’s a legend.”
Sings sums it up in his own way: “Jonny’s instincts are the best I have ever struck, be it league, boxing or this little thing called life.
“He taught the basics until they were normal in all circumstances so that genius could flourish.”
Lewis speaks just as highly of his dear friends and the several other people that called during the lunch.
Winemaker Billy Calabria, from Calabria Family Wines in Griffith, for example, who told Johnny he’d send a case of vino to his home, just because he’s the “great man he is”.
Then the woman calling to say “thanks for a great session this morning”. She gets put onto speaker phone and happily chats about Johnny and why she loves him.
Every call is filled with warmth and humour, just like the man himself.
As he orders his lamb cutlets — asking the waitress for 20 just to see her reaction then settles for three — Lewis ponders his success over the last 80 something years and puts it down to the people around him.
“The question they ask is what makes a good trainer. I say ‘A good fighter’,” he says.
“If Jeff Fenech couldn’t fight I wouldn’t be where I am today. Through him the doors opened and everyone wanted to be part of it.”
Lewis and Fenech had a father and son-like relationship that saw the Marrickville Mauler become a world champ in three weight divisions and widely regarded as the nation’s greatest ever boxer.
“I had my fair share of success with Jeff and straight after the fight it was always ‘thanks Johnny’.
“That was when I knew I had someone very very special. I wrote Jeff a letter that he’s still got. He took it overseas when he went fighting. He still carries that letter because what I spoke about in the letter happened, him winning those titles, being possibly the greatest featherweight fighter of all time in any era.”
These days Lewis gets just as much of an adrenaline rush rising and shining for the regular men and women who make his 5.30am boxing classes as he does training the elite fighters.
He can’t “fully remember” when he got his OAM, or what he got it for, and he shrugs off knowing “anyone who’s anyone”, and being just a little famous himself.
“Everyone’s famous darl,” he says when asked to elaborate on his time with Harry Garside until they parted ways because the young fighter wanted to focus on reality TV.
“I don’t think I can come up with the most famous person I’ve held pads for.
“To me personally, it’s the mornings down there like today holding the pads at 5.30. Everyone that’s there is the most famous.
“I don’t look for that, I look for someone who when they are finished they come over and say ‘thanks for that, that was a really good session this morning’. That’s all I wanna feel.”
However picking a hero in his life is easy — his mum.
“My dad was good but mum thought she had the best life ever. She was hard as nails,” he said.
“She used to brag about going up to Queensland. That was exciting for her.
“We grew up in housing commission so whenever I speak, do talks, I try to relate to the fact that I’m a product of housing commission.
“We had one room, I was two years old, my brother was four and there was mum and dad and we had one room. Mum never complained about anything.”
She worried about her young lad out on the streets of Newtown though.
His mind wanders back to the naughty things he’d get up to back then.
When asked about what made him first wander into the PCYC and don his first pair of boxing gloves, he makes a surprising admission.
“I don’t think I’ve ever told the truth before about this,” he says.
“So there used to be a bus depot and they used to have this massive big sign up advertising Vincent’s APC powders, they were like Bex,” he said.
“All the ladies took it and they had a picture of a girl on the screen with her legs up in the air and it said “Swing into Vincents”.
“Me and the other boys had a big bag of grapes so we were throwing the grapes at the girl, and I hit her right where I shouldn’t and I said ‘whooshka what a good shot’.
“And then I felt this big whack on the back of my head and this big fat cop grabbed me and my mate, he had us both by the scruff of the neck.
“My mate was giving cheek, saying ‘fatso’ and what not. We would have been about 12 or 13. He kicked my mate up the arse then raced us across the street and locked us in the office and he rang up the police station. I was shitting myself.
“Then the trainer came in and he got the keys to the boxing room off the hook.
“The cop said to him ‘have you got anyone up there who can belt the shit out of these two?’
“And I said yep I wanna come up because I wanted out of there and the trouble I was in.
“I went up and the trainer said ‘come back tomorrow night’ and I said ‘all right’.
“He told me not to worry about the trouble I had found myself in, that he’d fix it up so that’s how it happened.”
The boxing gym became his life and his mum’s words were never far from his mind as he navigated the sport that attracted some colourful characters.
“My mum would always say ‘There’s a little bit of good in a bad man and a little bit of bad in a good man,” Johnny remembers.
“She was right.”
Those words shaped his approach in and out of the ring and made him relatable to people of all walks of life, from prisoners who he gave the chance to box in a makeshift ring, to world celebrities who lined up at his 80th birthday and labelled him one of the “greatest Australians of all time”.
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