By Thomas Gerbasi
It MAY not be accurate to say that Gary Stretch has unlocked the secrets of the universe, but he certainly figured out how to escape the world of boxing relatively unscathed and then land a rewarding second act as an actor, director, producer and screenwriter.
It’s a magic trick of epic proportions for a 58-year-old former boxer, but Stretch doesn’t necessarily see it that way. In fact, he regrets leaving the sport when he did.
“I think I left too early, which I regret because if you look at my career,
At my weight I always felt very safe with anyone,” Stretch said. “I worked with everyone in the gym and stood firm with everyone on my weight. So I should have gone back to high school after losing the fight in Eubank and built my career so I could retire knowing one way or another how far I could have gone.”
A 1991 fight with Chris Eubank was the one that defined his eight-year professional career, a fight for the WBO middleweight title in which the British super-welterweight champion dared to be great on the world stage. The only downside was that Stretch, whose previous fight (and win) against Eduardo Domingo Contreras was in May 1990, hadn’t been in the gym for the previous year and had less than five weeks to prepare. He called trainer Freddie Roach, who bluntly told him: “Impossible.”
“I went to bed,” Stretch laughed. “So I woke up at five in the morning and said, ‘I’m going to do it.’ I never knew how to lose, so I thought I would find a way to beat him. I got on a flight, knocked on Freddie’s door and said, “I’m fucking doing it.” You want to help me?'”
Roach was inside. Stretch was inside. And they worked harder than ever before. Stretch showed up at the Olympia Grand Hall in Kensington weighed down and ready to win a world title. And after five rounds, he appeared to be on his way to defeating the undefeated champion.
“I had some of the easiest five rounds I’ve ever had,” Stretch said. “I don’t think he touched me for five rounds.”
Eubank did touch him in the sixth and, at 1-56 of the frame, after scoring two knockdowns, he stopped the challenger.
“I just burned out too quickly,” Stretch said. “I trained too hard, too fast. There are no excuses. Eubank won a lot of these fights late, so we might have been equal, I don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t myself for the fight. “He wasn’t giving me the best chance to win, which I really regret.”
At the time of the stoppage, Stretch led on all scorecards, 48-47, 48-47 and 49-47.
“My life changed,” he said. “We tried for about a year to get Eubank to give me another chance, but they weren’t interested.”
He also expected a million-dollar payout, but ended up with $20,000, adding to his disillusionment with the sport.
“I was so angry at the business that I thought, to hell with boxing. And then I retired for all the wrong reasons and should have taken a page from Mayweather’s book. I should have just said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll promote myself,’ or try to get back to my weight. I should have locked myself away for a couple of years and seen where I could have gone. I’m sorry, but I could have been a different person now. He could have hurt me. Who knows? We do not know. So I believe things are meant to be. I had a decent career. I could never say I was the best because I never showed it. But deep down, I say, you could have gone a little further than you did. But, I repeat, you never know. Boxing is a strange profession. One fight can change everything. Then you just don’t know. But my only regret is that I really don’t know how far I could have gone.”
Stretch fought one more time, beating Steve Goodwin in six rounds in July 1993, but that was it. He was 27 years old and had an uncertain future, but a trip to Los Angeles after the Eubank fight gave him some clarity he didn’t know he had until he was in the middle of it all.
“I never wanted to be an actor, I never wanted to be an actor,” Stretch admits. But he had a friend who was an actor and he asked me to visit him in Los Angeles. “I just got hit and I thought, fuck it, I’ll go see him.”
On the way from the airport, Stretch’s friend had to attend an audition, so the soon-to-be ex-boxer had to wait in the car. While he waited, he saw an older woman arguing with two men over a parking spot. Stretch, his fighting instincts still strong, intervened.
“She got out of the car and we had an incredible conversation,” he recalled. “I love old people and children, and she was a fascinating woman from New York. Somehow we started talking about food and that’s a hobby of mine since I was a baby. I love cooking. She said, ‘Have you gone out to eat?’ I said, ‘I’ve been here 10 minutes.’
“Look,” he said to Stretch. “I owe you lunch for what you did; let’s eat.”
The woman gave Stretch her number and the two went their separate ways. When his friend returned, he was shocked, not by the story, but by who it involved. Stretch had just saved Janet Alhanti, one of the most respected acting coaches in the business, and his friend wanted to be involved.
Stretch called Alhanti but didn’t get the response he expected.
“Look Gary, the most valuable thing you have in life is time,” he said. “And as you can see, I’m not a youngster, so I spend mine wisely and don’t take on many students anymore.”
“Do you believe in fate?”
“Sure.”
“Well, you met me to meet my friend.”
Stretch the laughs.
“I thought he was a good actor. He used to do a monologue, he used to cry, he used to think he was amazing. He could cry. He kept doing the same damn monologue. He’s still crying, he can’t act like shit.”
Stretch’s friend got the interview and the St. Helens native attended. In the end, Alhanti asked both of them a question.
“There is no right or wrong answer, but I often take my students based on the answer they have given me,” he said. “What is the difference between love and lust? Tell me in one sentence.”
“He went on talking for half an hour,” Stretch laughs. “She kept talking about all this rubbish. He wanted to throw it up and she stopped him after about 20 minutes. She said, ‘Okay, thank you.'”
As the couple began to leave, Alhanti asked Stretch for an answer to the question. He was not interested and insisted that he did not want to be an actor. She pressed him and he responded.
“With love you give, with lust you take.”
Alhanti called Stretch that night.
“I still owe you lunch and I can’t take your friend, but you’re very interesting. You can’t learn to be interesting, Gary. “Either you are or you are not.”
Gary Stretch soon had clarity about his future and it had nothing to do with boxing. And after attending a class where Sidney Poitier read poetry, he was hooked.
“I sat there for two hours,” he said. “I laughed, I cried, it was the most incredible thing I have ever seen in my life. He was simply fascinated. And I never forgot it. We finished the class and I became physically excited and had a strange feeling. We had lunch and at the end of lunch she said, ‘It’s okay, I won’t see you again.’ I said: ‘I can and I want to be an actor.’ She said, “It starts on Monday.” And I studied with her for 20 years.”
Since then, Stretch has poured into his craft with the same intensity and dedication that he put into his boxing career. And just like in boxing, there are victories in big-budget films like Alexander and Savages, as well as low-key independent films. Perhaps his most notable role was as Sonny in the 2004 cult classic Dead Man’s Shoes, which was nominated for eight British Independent Film Awards. One of those nominations was for Stretch for Best Supporting Actor.
Gary Stretch with Paddy Considine in Dead Man’s Shoes
“The funny thing is that I just finished Alexander – Oliver Stone, a $200 million movie,” Stretch recalls. “I worked on it for nine months. I had had ups and downs as an actor until then and it was my big break. Oliver hired me, a great role, a great movie and it did well. I just came out of this movie and in acting you are only as good as your last movie, that is, the price they pay you and then you try to keep going up and up. So they paid me a lot of money to do ‘Alexander’. It was a great movie. And then this movie came out, Dead Man’s Shoes, and they had no money.”
Stretch’s agent didn’t mince words and told his client he couldn’t do the movie. Stretch loved the script, he wanted to work with director Shane Meadows and subsequently left that agent. He was in.
“It was funny, the role was written for an eight-foot skinhead, and I was the complete opposite,” he laughs. “It wasn’t what they expected, but I gave it a different color and he (Meadows) liked it and gave me the film. So we went and did it. It was three weeks of shooting, running and gunning. It was like a damn war making the movie. And a great group of guys, Shane is amazing, Paddy (Considine) is amazing. Toby Kebbell was great. It was his first film. And we basically got a bunch of guys together and made a movie.”
One that still resonates with viewers to this day, almost 20 years after its release.
“I’ve only seen him once,” Stretch said.
Boxing News tells him he should watch him more. He laughs.
“I may not like looking at myself, but once I’ve done it, I’m done,” he explains. “As long as she feels like I did the best I could. And I don’t look at them often, but I looked at it. I love what everyone did. And yes, it’s one of the films where I keep seeing things like “the best British film of all time”. “I’m thinking, wow, it somehow struck a chord with the British.”
Stretch didn’t win Best Supporting Actor, but his career continued to advance. Whether acting, directing, writing or producing, he is a visible figure in a difficult business, just as he was in the ring. Not bad for a plumber’s son.
“If I hadn’t been a wrestler and I hadn’t been an actor, I probably would have been a plumber, which I’m not joking about,” Stretch said. “My dad was a plumber and I admired him. He was my hero. My mother left when I was a child and my father raised three children. He was an amazing guy, motorcycle racer. And he raised us like a man.”
Ronnie Stretch did well. And his son is doing the same thing in a second chapter that most fighters don’t understand.
“The fascination wasn’t so much with being an actor because, to be honest, I didn’t like the little fame I had,” Stretch said. “The only good thing about being famous is getting a table at a restaurant. That’s the best I can get for myself. The rest is nonsense. And so I wasn’t looking for that. I was just looking to grow. And if he could make a few dollars, great. I just got into this for the love of it. It took me a while, I made some bad movies, some good ones and it goes on. But I worked a lot. Most fighters retire and that’s all they know. And they don’t really invest in something; They’re just trying to get by. But I’ve always said when people ask me, ‘What’s your favorite performance?’ I say, my next.”
Gary Stretching
