IN FEBRUARY of 1995, I arrived in Los Angeles on what was originally intended to be a two-and-a-half week holiday.

I was there eager to hook up with Brad, a friend from Edinburgh who’d decamped to LA a few months prior to progress his professional boxing career under the tutelage of Freddie Roach at his Outlaw Boxing Club in Hollywood.

Brad was an 18-year-old kid who came into the category of “a force of nature.”

A former leading member of the Hibs casuals football firm, he was a well known character and “face” back in Edinburgh. When he wasn’t promoting his own club nights in town, he was shaking down other promoters of same.

He ultimately wound up in prison, which is where he set his sights on returning to the gym to forge a future in boxing — a sport at which he’d already demonstrated serious potential as a young kid.

This he did in spectacular fashion upon his release by training for and winning the 1993 ABA lightweight title at just 22.

Thereafter, he turned pro and quickly amassed an unbeaten record of six fights, all of them in Scotland.

By the time he relocated to Hollywood to progress his career, he was already generating the buzz associated with a prospect with a backstory, the stuff of which films are made.

As a fighter he was a slick southpaw (left-handed), and he boxed as he lived — with the confidence of the Red Army at the gates of Berlin. Brad, a tough kid from the streets, was also incredibly kind to those he cared about, such as his mother, family, and friends.

This was confirmed when I turned up at the gym the for the first time. I’d arrived in LA late the previous night and booked myself into a hotel just up the street.

Brad, I’d learned, trained around eleven in the morning, and when I walked in he was skipping in front of a large mirror at the start of his session. Seeing me enter the mirror, he immediately stopped and came bounding over.

“How’s it going, mate? Brilliant to see you. Kenny [a mutual friend from back home] told me you were coming over.”

Brad asked me where I was staying. I told him about the hotel up the street, to which he quickly replied: “Forget the hotel. Come and stay with me.”

He didn’t have to do this, and I sure wasn’t expecting it, but that was Brad for you. Looking back now, I think he was happy to see a familiar face from home.

I ended up staying with Brad at his apartment for two and a half weeks, after which, enjoying myself so much being around Brad and the gym, I decided to stay for the full three months of my tourist visa and rented my own place on the same street.

I fell in love with boxing during this period. The atmosphere of the gym, stacked full of wildly wonderful characters, was like a narcotic, despite my own halting efforts at the sport back then.

World champions and top contenders trained side by side with Hollywood actors and people just looking to get or stay fit.

Freddie Roach welcomed everyone, and he was impossible not to like. His career then as a trainer was in its infancy, to the point where he literally lived in the gym, in two rooms in the back of the place.

Brad revered Freddie Roach, and Roach in turn was very fond of Brad. They were both similar character-wise, neither of them impressed by Hollywood and all the celebrity bullshit that is so prevalent there.

I recall Christian Slater training at the gym during this period. He was getting ready for a part in some movie and Brad couldn’t have cared less, and neither could Freddie — just so long as Slater’s gym fees were being paid on time by his manager.

A funny incident also occurred between Brad and the former boxer-turned-actor Tony Danza (Joey in the popular ’80s sitcom Taxi).

On this day, Brad was sparring some tough Mexican kid. Brad was handling him comfortably and after six rounds Freddie wrapped things up. I was ringside watching along with a large group, which included Danza.

Brad, covered in sweat, climbed out of the ring and Freddie instructed him to finish off his workout with three rounds on the heavy bag. As he was doing just that, Danza approached, clearly impressed by what he’d just seen in the sparring session.

“Say, Brad, how do you throw your hook like that?” Danza asked.

“Not now, I’m busy,” Brad replied.

It was a great time to be alive. We were young, healthy, and the future was still something to believe in.

We’d go running together, though I could never have hoped to keep up, and we spent hours talking about everything from boxing to life in general.

Brad may only have been 24, but he possessed the wisdom of someone much older.

Hollywood back then was a run down and dangerous part of the world; its streets the provenance of gang members, crackheads, and the human casualties of life fashioned under capitalism.

I recall the street kids who used to hang around outside the gym, and of how they warmed to Brad and he to them. He would take the time to interact with them.

Despite hailing from entirely different parts of the world, they spoke the same language common to those from similar socioeconomic circumstances.

Ultimately, Brad’s boxing career in the US ran out of steam. Just a kid, homesickness eventually got the better of him and after one fight over there, at which I was present, he returned home.

Brad’s life was tragically cut short in 2019 in Edinburgh by an assassin’s bullet. No matter, the memories of those glorious three months that I spent with him in LA back in 1995 will never leave me.