Glub Dub

KICKBOXING CHAMPION AND LAWYER

BEN ROSE

Ben Rose’s life is surely an American TV mini­series waiting to happen (suggested tagline: “He fights injustice by day – and fights people at night!”), if only he could find time to write the script As it is, he juggles a career as a criminal defense lawyer with family life, heading up his own charity (Youth At Risk) and being the reigning British Heavyweight Kickboxing Champion.

“It was quite an achievement” he admits. “Sometimes I have to slap myself round the face because I don’t really believe it’s me.”

Now 38, Ben commits himself to a daunting schedule. He fits in at least three sessions per week at London’s Seymour Martial Arts club and does other exercise (weights, running, yoga or tennis) on top of that. But his full-on career means he hasn’t yet decided whether to attend the forthcoming World Championships.

“I can’t rank the different things in my life ­they’re equally important I wouldn’t like to be without the physical and spiritual discipline that martial arts provide or the intellectual and business discipline that being a lawyer gives me.

‘The World Championships are soon and I have a massive trial coming up. It wouldn’t be professional for me to compromise my client’s chances at trial by short-changing him in any way. But if I can go, I’ll be in phone contact and if my client’s content with it then I’ll get to do both! The fact that it’s my own firm makes it easier but I’ve still got a responsibility to my partners and my clients. And if I couldn’t find the time to be with my wife and family, I wouldn’t do it”

In the meantime, it’s other aspects of his life that have to give. “I’m usually up at 7.30am and by the time I’ve driven back from Bisham Abbey it’s about 11pm and I have some food and go to bed. No, I haven’t got a girlfriend at the moment.. I wonder why!”

Any available Spice Girls know where to go. TIP “If you don’t have time for a long workout shuttle runs are absolutely exhausting, but very, very good for you. I put cones out at zero, five, 10, 15, 20 and 25 meters and then do sets, running to each cone and back Then you have a minute off and do it again. If you do that, flat-out for 20 minutes, once or twice a week you’ll see a significant change very, very quickly. It’s something we did a lot of while preparing for the Sydney Olympics and the whole team improved faster than I’ve ever seen them on one particular exercise.’ The other thing that certainly helps for keeping your bodies in good shape is raspberry ketones. Learn more how do raspberry ketones work.

CONTACT English Hockey Association (01908 544644, www.hockeyonline.co.uk)

Possibly to the disappointment of American TV executives, however; his kickboxing skills have never spilled over into his professional life.

“I would feel I’d failed if I ever had to use them. It’s come close a few times, but I’ve never thrown a punch and I hope I never have to. Although we had a party for my firm’s 10th anniversary just after the National Championships – and there I was wandering around with the great and the good of the legal profession, sporting a huge black eye!” TIP ‘The deal I have with my family is that basically, most mornings they…don’t get because I’ve left for work de fowns up. So I have a very long working, ktay Wing up about 5.30am and doing a session in the dojo after work to get home around 6pm. I get to be with my wife and kids in the early evening, and then I do about an hour’s work at the back end of the evening to make up. It works out as a long day but I manage to get in all the things that matter to me.” CONTACT Raf Nieto, Seymour Martial Arts, Seymour Place, W1 (020 7723 0206).

“You’re shittin’ me!” Those were the first words out of Bob Gerardot’s mouth two years ago when an associate from Xytex, the sperm bank where he made hundreds of donations between 1981 and 1985, called to say one of his offspring – a 17-year-old girl – wanted to reach him. Xytex had promised Gerardot anonymity but, at the request of the girl, contacted him nonetheless. “I felt betrayed,” he says. “They weren’t supposed to do that.”

But they did, and Gerardot, now a married, 50-year-old social worker with a three-year-old son and another on the way, didn’t know what to do. So he did nothing. When two weeks passed and the man from Xytex called again, Gerardot and his wife, Lisa decided they’d ask the girl to write a letter describing her intentions. A couple of weeks later, the letter arrived. It was from a young woman named Katie Whitaker. Gerardot opened the envelope “and saw this picture, and there was just something about her smile, something in her eyes. I cried. This was real. She was mine.”

Before they met, Katie assured Gerardot she wasn’t looking for a father. She just wanted to make sense of who she was. And Gerardot was abundantly clear that he wasn’t looking for a daughter. “But when I laid eyes on her, that was it,” Gerardot says. “The only other time I felt that way was when the doctors handed me my son.”

Gerardot wasn’t, and isn’t, certain that his paternal feelings toward Katie are healthy. “How can you have fatherly feelings simply because you happened to donate sperm to an anonymous recipient?” he asks.

But he did, and does, have those feelings. Apparently, Katie has some similar feelings. Soon after meeting Gerardot, she and her mother (who is separated from her husband, Katie’s father) moved from Florida to Georgia, where Gerardot lives with his family. “Where do I stand?” he asks, still befuddled after two years. “I mean, when Katie walks around dressed like Britney Spears, how do I not tell her to get some clothes on?”

The bigger problem Gerardot now faces is Katie’s intense desire to connect with her half-siblings. Gerardot recently met with representatives from Xytex to review his records; to his horror, he learned he had given 99 acceptable samples – enough to create a likely 100 to 200 additional children, and possibly more. When he imagines those offspring finding him as Katie did, he envisions it like a scene from Night of the Living Dead, with untold numbers of children marching towards him crying, “Daddy, Daddy.”

“I don’t know if I would have donated had I known that one of them would come into my life,” admits Gerardot. “What do I do if these other kids come knocking? Say, ‘Hey, yeah, I’m your dad, but I don’t have any room for you in my life?’ Is that fair to them? Is meeting every last one of them fair to me?”