Inside the Cage: My Life in the World’s Deadliest Fight Game - Hardcover

The Cage is a ring enclosed by a steel box where participants are urged to fight to the death – an illegal sport that attracts some of the world's richest and most powerful people as its shadowy patrons. This is the true story of the star of this deadly sport.

In this compelling account of his fight for survival, ‘X’ tells of his twelve-year career in The Cage. Transported to fights like some medieval warlord, he was drugged by opponents against his will and almost murdered by a gang intent on preventing him taking on another fighter, because of his reputation as the most deadly opponent in the world.

‘X’ breaks the sport’s strict code of silence to tell, with Wensley Clarkson’s help, how he started life on the mean streets, and was led into petty crime then – just months before his sixteenth birthday – recruited to become the star of this most deadly of sports. Born into a large family in Canning Town, East London, in the late 1960s and the victim of domestic violence, ‘X’ tells how he learned to punch aged nine by fighting off his father as he attacked his mum. He explains how he was attacked by a vicious hoodlum ruining his chance at a career as a professional boxer and became trapped in a cycle of violence crime and retribution.

Now he is trying to live a normal life with his wife and two children and he wants his story told. Having killed three people himself, ‘X’ has also dealt out justice to local drug dealers and wife beaters in his role as a vigilante on the streets of the East End. This tells the whole story – through to when he fought his last Cage fight in Vegas and gained sweet revenge on the evil men who'd encouraged him to risk life and limb.

'Carl Merritt' comes from a world where no rules apply, where violence has always simmered close to the surface. Still in his teens, he became trapped in a world of illegal fighting in order to survive. The men who owned Carl built him into an awesome opponent, and plunged him into a world of appalling violence, crime and retribution.

Armed with fists, elbows, feet, teeth and forehead, Carl would target his opponents inside the cage, from which there was no escape. Only the strongest survived. Some of Carl's opponents were even slaughtered by their own supporters for losing, as so much money had been gambled and lost on them.

London, Paris, Dublin, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Las Vegas: Carl lost track of the number of times he was smuggled into a deserted underground car park or an empty warehouse, in a strange and often inhospitable land. He wouldn't even know who his opponent was until he was pushed headfirst into the cage.

Carl has been close to death on a number of occasions and has now decided that his wife and children are top priority in his life. He wants to break the cage's strict code of silence and to reveal how it has become the most deadly sport in the world. By doing this he is risking his life once again...