If I can get into a good brawl, I’m happy.
BERNIE GUINDON
Guindon was on parole in April 1971 when things exploded inside Kingston Penitentiary. Prisoners gawked from the upper tiers as inmates dragged pedophiles and men who had done violence to children into the central dome and tied them to chairs.
“The fun is about to begin!” someone shouted.
“You’ve got a real nice nose there, but it’s kind of twisted, so I think I’ll reset it for you,” a prisoner announced to one of the bound men.
He smashed the prisoner’s face with an iron bar.
“Kill the child molesters!” prisoners screamed down from high above.
And so it went during four days of madness, as six guards were held hostage and two inmates were executed. Blaring rock music could do only so much to muffle the screams of the tortured child molesters. One of the doomed men was repeatedly burned with a lit cigarette before he was finally put out of his misery. Prisoners particularly hated the sex criminals because they couldn’t protect their own wives and children from men like this while inside, so they took out their worst fears on the predators available to them. “Guys have got a wife at home, a mother, daughter, sisters,” Paul Gravelle said.
The damage to the prison from the rioting was hard to fathom. “They bent the cell door right back, with their hands,” said Gravelle. “It was something else. Incredible.”
Among the prisoners charged with murder following the riot was twenty-three-year-old Brian Leslie Beaucage of London, Ontario, who eventually pleaded guilty to assault. Beaucage was a veteran of the prison system despite his young age and carried the emotional scars of sexual abuse from older inmates when he was a teenager. When he finally got out, he became a member of the Satan’s Choice.
Guindon wasn’t surprised when he heard of the murderous anger and sustained violence of the riot. “Nobody listens to you when you’re a prisoner. Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
Now that he was on the outside, Guindon decided to make up for lost time by rededicating himself to boxing. The clock was ticking if he wanted to make it as a big-time fighter. He was so close, but it would take a big push to get over the hump. It was tough to find fighters his size who could challenge him, so he sparred with light-heavyweights and heavyweights.
His hard work paid off. Between January and November 1971, Guindon won the Ontario Golden Gloves, Eastern Canadian Golden Gloves and Canadian Golden Gloves tournaments, and he was chosen to be part of the Canadian team in the Pan Am Games in Cali, Colombia. He was selected as a light-middleweight in the 156.5-pound weight class, even though he was naturally one weight division lighter than the welterweight class. Guindon was convinced he was put in the ring with the larger fighters because a key boxing official didn’t want him to advance. “He didn’t like me because I was a biker. He didn’t like all that.”
The tight security during the Colombia games jolted Guindon. “I’ve never seen so many guns. They even shot people down there while we were there. You’d say, ‘Holy fuck, what kind of a country is this?’ It’s crazy down there.”
Guindon brightened when a Cali cop let him try out his Harley in the downtown. Most of the time, coaches escorted them everywhere, but he did manage to slip away and spy on the Cuban team as they trained. He was impressed at the lengths they went to work their core areas, which meant plenty of sit-ups. He decided he would incorporate more of that into his own training. When the Cubans noticed him, “They told me to leave. ‘Get out! Go!’ I knew they were going to get pissed off. I was sort of hiding.”
International amateur boxing is meant for technicians, not brawlers, which played away from Guindon’s natural strengths. “That boxing is on points. How many times you hit a person, how you keep your hands, your balance. They watch that. How you move in. How you accept a punch. Sometimes it’s a bitch. I like fighting. I like the toe-to-toe. If I can get into a good brawl, I’m happy.”
The Games were a limited success. Guindon had always found southpaws tricky, and he drew Mexican left-hander Emetorio Villanueva in the semi-finals. He lost by a technical knockout and left the Games with a bronze medal. For this, he got his smiling image wearing a white shirt and string tie published in The Daily Times-Journal in Thunder Bay.
He kept up the hard training and was made captain of a Canadian boxing team that toured Europe, fighting five matches over twenty-one days in Stockholm, Helsinki and The Hague. Guindon won three of five fights against Olympic-level fighters, including Swedish light-middleweight champion Christer Ottosson.
It felt special to wear a maple leaf on his chest, even though he had recently served hard time in Her Majesty’s prisons. “It gives you a better feeling. It also shows that you’ve done something that’s beneficial to you that you can always remember that at least you were on the team.”
Along the way, he made a couple of connections with people overseas who were interested in setting up their own Choice chapters. It was exciting to think of expanding across the ocean but also daunting. “It’s time-consuming. Nobody was paying me any fucking money. At the time, it was kinda hard, keeping it together.”
The highlight of his first year back on the streets came when he was selected as Thunder Bay’s Athlete of the Week and given a key to the city. Among those honouring him at a dinner was his old friend George Chuvalo, who famously was never knocked off his feet in bouts with top heavyweights like Floyd Patterson, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. Chuvalo said he was happy to attend and honour Guindon. “It was richly deserved, so it was easy to do,” Chuvalo said.
“Everybody in town was there,” Verg Erslavas said. That included Guindon’s father, who was now off the bottle, bespectacled and looking smaller and frailer than when he had ruled the Simcoe Street South household by fear. “They went up on the stage together,” Erslavas recalled. “Bernie introduced him. It was a great night all around.”
But things got a little tense later in the evening, when Chuvalo asked Guindon when he was going to stop hanging around with the biker crowd, and Guindon replied that being a biker was better than being a punching bag for the whole world. At that point, they both jumped to their feet. Fortunately, others intervened and the celebration continued.
The magic of 1971 lasted until December, when Guindon was finally busted for breaching his parole by associating with bikers. It had been no secret that he was back with his old friends; the only question was why authorities waited so long. His fresh arrest meant spending Christmas 1971 behind bars in Thunder Bay. “Every Christmas was rough inside. Everybody sending you cards. You sat there and you looked at your Christmas cards and you think it would be nice to be out with your family and friends. You didn’t do much in there.”
Guindon’s father dropped by the jail for a visit, but he didn’t bring much warmth or good cheer and it felt a bit late for a stern fatherly lecture. “What are you going to do?” Guindon later said. “He can get mad at you but he can’t do anything.”
His father was a calmer man now. “He had seen the light, I guess.” Lucienne Guindon’s changed demeanour didn’t do much to impress his oldest son, though, because he couldn’t recall his father ever showing remorse. “I can’t remember my old man saying he was sorry for kicking the shit out of me.”
Guindon would have appreciated an apology, but he didn’t kick his old man out of his life, either. Whether he suspected it at the time, he’d be grateful one day for that kind of unspoken forgiveness and the second chances it allows a father who wasn’t often there.