I Should Have Been at Work. Des Lynam
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Sonny Liston, Floyd looked at least ten years younger than his age. We filmed him shadow boxing and hitting the heavy bag which he did as a routine every day of his life in his own gymnasium. He still had rhythm and timing and looked spritely but there was an air of sadness about the man. For many great sportsmen, life after the competitive years goes cold. In his mind, Floyd was ‘boxing on’ because everything since paled in comparison.
But at least Patterson had retained a little wealth and was living in some style.
Jimmy Ellis, a contemporary of Muhammad Ali, having begun his boxing in Louisville, Kentucky alongside his young friend, the then Cassius Clay, was not so lucky.
Ellis, a wonderful ring craftsman, had held a version of the heavyweight crown too, but when I went to see him, still living in Louisville, he was wearing the green overalls of a worker in the city’s Parks Department. Ellis had also lost the sight of one eye, from an old ring injury. Wealth had passed him by. Did he have any regrets? Not a bit of it. If he had his youth, he would do it all over again, he told me.
My time as the BBC Radio boxing commentator lasted nearly twenty years and overlapped with my television work. It gave me some great times and I made many friends; but one of the saddest days I ever had while I was covering boxing came in 1980 when, along with a BBC Television producer, Elaine Rose, I attended the funeral in Wales of Johnny Owen.
Johnny was known as the ‘Merthyr Matchstick’ and, together with Elaine, I had been to Merthyr some weeks before to film a television feature on him. He was a painfully shy young man who, despite his slender frame, expressed himself best in the boxing ring. And he was good. Our feature was to preview his challenge to Lupe Pintor for the World bantamweight title in Mexico. Tragically, Owen had been injured in the contest and seven weeks later died from those injuries.
I remember the entire population of Merthyr lining the hills of the town as the funeral cortège passed by. On that day some of the toughest men of British boxing cried their eyes out as they paid homage to a brave young boy whose great ambition had cost him his life.
During my time in boxing, I covered around forty world titles and numerous British and European championship fights. For most of them, the legendary Henry Cooper was my ringside summariser. No finer man to have with you and after a nervy beginning, he became a master at filling the minute between each round with his pearls of boxing wisdom. Once in a while Henry would find himself up a verbal cul-de-sac but always extricated himself. ‘’E’s as big as a brick . . . [pause] . . . building.’
Once, when talking about the British heavyweight Richard Dunn, Henry was praising him after one round when he said: ‘He knew what he had to do and in that round Dunn . . . done it.’ Strange syntax. Wonderful man.
I had met Henry several years before we became ringside colleagues. He used to come into Sports Report on the Saturday before his big fights, along with his manager, Jim Wicks. They considered coming into the programme as a lucky omen. Jim always used to talk in the first person plural. ‘We landed a great punch’; ‘He made our nose bleed’, etc. He spoke as though he was actually in the ring with Henry, which he certainly was in spirit. He protected Cooper too. For example, he would never agree to Henry’s fighting Sonny Liston, who had been considered unbeatable until Muhammad Ali (or Cassius Clay, as he was at the time) shocked him and the world.
Henry did meet Floyd Patterson and I think it was after that contest, in which Henry had been stopped, that he was driving home to south-east London with Wicks and his brother George in the car when he made a slight misjudgement at a traffic light that caused an old boy to stumble off his bike. Henry wound down the window to apologise when the elderly cockney threw him a punch to the face. ‘I’d have you out the car except there are three of you,’ said his elderly aggressor. Two defeats in the one night for ‘our ’Enery’.
After the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ I was off to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to see Britain’s Joe Bugner have a tilt at Muhammad Ali’s crown. I was there for two weeks, sending back interviews with the fighters. Ali was always readily available to pronounce in front of a BBC mike. I even got him to record the opening of Sports Report, and Bugner’s wily manager Andy Smith would always talk, even if Bugner himself was sometimes reluctant to do so. Or I would simply do a straight report down the line on the condition and mood of the fighters and their associates. I did one piece in which I had worked out how many hangers-on there were in the Ali camp. It turned out he, or the promotion, were paying the air tickets and hotel bills for about fifty people, forty-five of whom he could have done without.
My producer in London was Dick Scales, who always called everybody ‘son’. Each day I would go to the Malaysian Broadcasting Centre to send my contribution down the line. Scales would address me from the other end in his usual fashion. After a few days, the female Chinese sound assistant who was helping me remarked how nice it was for me to be working with ‘honourable father’ in London. It suddenly dawned on me what she was talking about. I didn’t try to explain.
This was the life. There were at least a couple of hours each day spent by the pool, and then in the evenings, usually in the company of members of the British boxing writers, it was out to sample a little of the night life of Kuala Lumpur. One evening we were enjoying a few drinks when a group of very glamorous ladies asked to join us. We were very happy for them to do so. After a while we realised that these were no ladies; they looked the part, but they were in fact what they call in the Far East ‘lady-boys’ – and they were looking for business. We enjoyed their company and they stung us for some very expensive drinks, but in the time-honoured way of British journalists in such situations, we made our excuses and left.
I made no excuses when I bumped into an extremely attractive female photographer who was covering the build-up to the fight for a Malaysian magazine. I took her out a couple of times and then she invited me to have dinner at her parents’ home. This was indeed an honour. On the evening in question, I took a taxi from my hotel, the directions to the lady’s family home scribbled on a piece of paper. The taxi driver smiled at me rather strangely, I thought, and then hurtled us about ten miles out of the city until we were finally driving up an unmade track. I had visions of being on the end of a scam. Any minute now, I thought, out from this jungle will come a couple of heavies, and I’ll become the story.
Oh me of little faith. Eventually the cab pulled into a clearing and there, waiting for me on the balcony of this neat timber bungalow, was my friend and her parents all decked out in their finery. I had a magical evening and got the distinct impression I was being looked over as potential marriage material. For some months afterwards I was in regular air-mail correspondence with Kuala Lumpur.
The fight itself lasted the full fifteen rounds, but Bugner was never likely to win it. Later, back at the hotel, he was found doing laps of the swimming pool. Ali, despite winning clearly, had gone to hospital with exhaustion, an indication of their respective approaches to the toughest game of all.
Just three months later, Ali was boxing in the Far East again, this time meeting Joe Frazier in the ‘Thriller in Manila’, perhaps the greatest heavyweight fight of all time, in which both of them experienced ‘near-death’.
Later in the year I found myself in a bull ring in Mexico City watching the British welterweight John H. Stracey create a huge upset by beating the great Mexican José Napoles to become world champion. It was a rarity: a British fighter winning a world crown abroad. On the night, the preliminary bouts had all ended early and the Mexican promotion wanted to get on with the main attraction. Our air time was still an hour and a half away. Mickey Duff, part of Stracey’s promotional team, almost had a heart attack persuading the Mexicans to delay things, and very nearly caused a riot in doing so; but he did the job for us. Terry Lawless, Stracey’s manager, came on the show and insisted I do my ‘Michael Caine’ for the listeners (it was a bit of a party piece at the time) before he answered a single question. The listeners must have wondered what on earth I was doing.
Stracey eventually lost the title in London to a fighter from the USA called Carlos Palomino. He had been brought in as a challenger because he was not expected to be too tough an opponent. In fact, a few days before the fight, I asked an American journalist to mark my card about him. ‘How big is he in the States?’