1960—Cassius Clay won Olympic gold in Rome; the Beatles made their debut in Germany; apartheid was ‘booming’ in South Africa; and Granger Korff was born on the East Rand near Johannesburg to a realtor father and budding-actress mother. “The apartheid system was sewn tight as a Zulu drum and the country moved to a slow beat,” he says of the times. He grew up in the mining town of Benoni, a quiet child initially, before ‘enjoying’ a colorful school career as a musician and quickfisted rebel, attending a string of different schools for a string of different reasons. He graduated in 1979—alone from the public library. In 1985, plagued by his demons from the bush war, he traveled to the USA on a four-month boxing/vacation walkabout where he haunted the mean streets of Los Angeles, scrapping and boxing to survive. Ike Turner and Mickey Rourke were his drinking buddies and he almost became Jake LaMotta’s (‘The Raging Bull’) son-in-law. Twenty-four years later, Granger still lives in LA, where he runs a small plumbing business.
