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Showing posts with the label Miami Beach

The Beauty of the Beach

Photograph  copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. One of my all-time favorite shots of our family on the beach at Santa Cruz at high tide.  The beach in winter is fascinating to listen to and observe. The waves pound the sand with a force you can hear streets away.  They would entirely block the harbor mouth with sand if not for constant dredging by the harbor authorities throughout the winter - which redistributes sand onto the beach, where an earthmover works pretty much constantly to shore up the road side of the beach against natural erosion.  It's strange how we take our California beaches for granted, yet most of them (the ones people use, anyway) require management in some way.  I remember in Miami Beach, after Hurricane Andrew, when the lifeguard huts were swept 100-300 metres across the sand and the seaweed piled high in mounds you could climb, I realized how much work daily went into keeping the beaches manicured, evenly leveled and seaweed-

Mayweather vs Pacquiao? Nope. It's Nigel Benn vs me, a long time ago!

Nigel Benn and me in the ring at the 5th Street Gym, Miami Beach. Mayweather vs Pacquiao? Nope. It's Nigel Benn vs me, a long time ago! This was actually why/how I moved to America from Britain. After my book The War Zone was published, GQ ran a profile on me and said I could write anything I wanted, so I chose to profile Nigel Benn, whom I knew was training in Miami, because I was writing a novel about violence and tenderness. GQ sent me there for a month and threw in a trip to Havana for me to write about that, too.  I loved South Beach so much, I rented an Art Deco apartment (for $500 a month!) the second week I was there. I was ready to change my life - I had just lost my first son to cancer - and Miami Beach in the 1990s was like a dream! I never looked back. So huge thanks to Nigel Benn, whom I liked a lot.  For our fun training bout in the ring, he threw one punch at my forehead and had such control that it literally just grazed me. I was out of the ring