He weighed 210kg and has lost 86 of them. He was wearing the sponsor's gear. The sponsor is Burger King. It was 10.30am and we were in a burger joint. Would I like anything to eat? he asked. Would he? He said he ate before coming, so that he wasn't tempted. He does still eat burgers, to which he is partial, although presumably not at 10.30am. Now, though, he'll have one burger instead of three, or maybe four. He allows himself one "cheat meal" a week. "Otherwise it's too hard."
He has a website, buttabeanmotivation.co.nz, on which he posts before and after pictures, because people don't believe how fat he was. He also posts pictures of meals he cooks. He can't cook and his girlfriend says his cooking looks like "jail food".
A lot of people seem to believe that he is the Bean. He is the Brown Buttabean, by the way, because there's a boxer called the Butterbean, "who is a fat white guy and I was a fat brown guy. So that's where the name came from". But butter beans are yellow. "Yeah. It's a strange name. I've often asked Dave, 'Can we change it?' But he said, 'Now we've got brand equity. So we can't.'" Brand equity? This boxing business is a funny game.
Nobody knows that better than him. He's having a very funny old time being the Bean. He's an unlikely star in his own unlikely sitcom in which the central character is widely loathed and derided as a fake and a fool and the sort of guy who goes swaggering about cracking his knuckles and telling people he'll knock their heads off. He's a side-show, a circus act. These are supposed to be criticisms. He loves being a circus act.
At a weigh-in in March, he leapt on his opponent, Finau Maka, and wrestled him to the floor. Even in the boxing world, where weigh-ins might as well be called sledge-ins, this sort of carry on is frowned upon. If you take it seriously.
He does take it seriously — it is his most unlikely lifeline — but his way of taking it seriously is to play-act to the max. It's all good for his profile: "I've worked hard to get the following up; doing all this outlandish stuff, ha, ha, to get the publicity." Laying into an opponent at a weigh-in would seem beyond outlandish. That's rather the point. "I actually told him I was going to do it!"
It is completely contrived, then, which is no huge surprise — it's the admitting to it which might be.
"I'm not [Joseph] Parker so I'm not going to get the publicity. So I do stuff. It's funny to get all these reactions. When we came up with the whole Buttabean concept ... it was to come out and be the baddest of the bad. He walks around doing whatever he wants and is a bit arrogant." He's a character. "Yeah, I consider it a character. So I turn it on. But there's a bit of Buttabean in me, otherwise it wouldn't be so easy to play."
So not completely contrived then, and the danger is that he starts believing he is the Bean. He did, for a bit, and was a bit of a pain. But "I've got a missus now and she keeps me in line." You can see that he might require a bit of keeping in line. He likes the attention. "Umm. I'm enjoying it!"
It is an odd sort of attention to seek, and to enjoy. But he is like a soap character, really, and people send him all sorts of abuse, and the odd death threat, on social media. You'd think that might have worried him but the Bean is tough. He just tells his parents not to read that stuff, because it does worry his mum.
The real question is why, at 35, he's ended up playing a character people love to hate and who he loves them to hate. But it's no crazier than any of the other things that have happened to him, which is probably why he's developed the sense of the ridiculous that enables him to play such a character for a living.
He said: "Dave saved my life." He means Higgins and they have been friends since Selwyn College where they were both geeks (he used to eat his lunch outside the computer room). They were both from poor families and hated being poor and had big dreams. His was to go to Australia to play in the NRL, an ambition thwarted by injury. He ended up playing small town league and working as a storeman in a supermarket. He was told that if he worked hard, he might have his own supermarket in 20 years. Stuff that, he thought, so he worked harder and ended up with two supermarkets. He had a fiancee and three boys and money and he was stuffing his face with chocolate and energy drinks and burgers and got fat and in over his head and in debt and in denial.
Then he had a really stupid idea: he'd become a gangster. That was his first character, really. He got tatts and decked himself in bling. "And then I thought, 'Hang on! I'm just attracting attention to myself.'" He did "dodgy things". I wanted, of course, to know what the dodgy things were. He said: "I can't really say because they haven't caught me for anything. I was a go-between guy. And I'm not proud of those things."
He had wanted to be successful and to not do dodgy things, more than anything in the world and probably more than most people because he didn't want to be like his father. His father, raised strictly, in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, joined the Mongrel Mob, became the head of the Auckland chapter, went to jail (when his son was 5) for armed robbery, went straight, went crooked again and went to jail for a large-scale dope-growing scheme.
He is now straight as a die and works, with his wife and daughter, for the Grace Foundation which provides social housing. When his son returned to New Zealand, fat and broke and his relationship over — "She'd just had enough. And I was fat, so I wasn't much to look at" — he put him up in a small, spartan room in one of the foundation's houses. (When he started on this Being The Bean caper, he had groupies, who thought he must be rich and then ran for the hills when he took them home to that room — about the size, you imagine, of his father's prison cell.)
That's one of the strange twists of his life. As is that his father sent him to Australia (to be raised by his strict Samoan Seventh Day Adventist grandparents) to get him away from the criminal life, and later paid him to guard the dope crop. And now his own sons live in Australia while he is back here, starting over, trying to be a good person while playing at being a bad bugger.
Another is that his father didn't much like the idea of him boxing. "Yeah, it's a bit of a contradiction. Ha, ha." A bit of a contradiction! He has, unlike the Bean, a talent for understatement.
I wondered whether he resented his father for his childhood which was, to put it mildly, precarious. Sometimes they were rich — his uncle, also in the gang, would give him and his sister big bags of coins and tell them to go and play spacies. The coins were the dregs of bank robberies. "They were still in ASB bags. Ha, ha!" And then, mostly, they were poor. Another, legitimately successful uncle, gave them his posh house in Mission Bay to live in but they didn't have any furniture and slept in the lounge on manky couches.
He went a bit haywire in his early 20s and used to get drunk and get into fights. He was banned from a Mongrel Mob nightclub in Mangere. "And you have to be pretty loose to get banned from a Mongrel Mob nightclub." He got drunk at a Mongrel Mob party and stabbed himself in the chest with a steak knife. He doesn't know why he stabbed himself. "I was just drunk and stupid and angry."
His father was brought from prison, in handcuffs, to visit him.
"The doctor said I was very lucky."
He still thinks he's lucky; lucky not to be dead from a heart attack or from driving into a lamppost, which he says he contemplated. I asked if he'd ever seen a therapist and he said he didn't need to because he has David Higgins. He began his weight loss in earnest when Higgins said he'd fly him to Germany to watch Parker fight.
"He said: 'There's no way in the world I'm paying for business class. So if you can't fit in economy, you're not going to go.' I really wanted to go to Germany."
Higgins paid for him to come back to New Zealand and gave him a job and he has promised him he'll never do anything "dodgy" ever again.
He said: "My brief from Duco is to be the most violent person I can be — in those eight minutes of the fight." All of which rather does your head in, but after the complications of his previous lives, it just looks like another chance. And he's not silly. He knows the Bean has a limited lifespan. He said: "This stuff's going to wear thin soon." Boom, boom. That's a pretty good joke from a former fat guy. I'd suggest somebody give him his own show, but of course he's already starring in it.
• The Brown Buttabean fights tonight on Joseph Parker's Burger King Road to the Title, live on Sky Arena at 7.30pm.
David Letele has a pretty smile and is a perfect gentleman. Photo / Dean Purcell
