I Should Have Been at Work. Des Lynam

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?’ I asked my man. ‘Palomino,’ he said, ‘he’s not even a household name in his own house.’

      Phil King was on the trip as my producer. While we were there, I told him that we should enjoy a bit of Mexican culture as well as the hospitality and duly booked for a coach trip to the pyramids. Unfortunately, we had enjoyed a bit of a night out the evening before. At 6 a.m. the phone rang in the room and a voice said, ‘Señor, the coach for the pyramids, she is leaving in ten minutes.’ Phil says my reply down the phone certainly included the word ‘off’. He might be accurate. In those times of budgetary restraint at the BBC, we were sharing a room.

      He and I also shared a taxi on our first night in Mexico City. We had asked the concierge for the address of a nightclub where there might be a bit of fun and a few girls. The cab dropped us at this sombre-looking place and when we entered there was no action at all, just a bar with a couple of men sitting at it. Then suddenly a lift came down and out of it stepped a dozen or so girls and paraded in front of us. So much for a nightclub: we were in a brothel. It took some persuasion, and a bit of my Spanish, to get us out of there in one piece.

      But, just as in Kuala Lumpur, I did bump into a very sweet girl, and for a short time afterwards I was back in the air-mail business. It’s a wonder I found time to do the broadcasts.

      The late Seventies and Eighties usually saw a dozen or so big boxing promotions each year in England, at the Royal Albert Hall or the Wembley Arena. They were either under the banner of Harry Levene or Barrett-Duff Promotions. Mike Barrett was a genial character, Mickey Duff a more rough and ready type who knew boxing inside out and who had once been a professional fighter himself. Levene was an old stager, grumpy as you like, but the man who had planted the thought in my mind about becoming a boxing commentator. They all got on with each other – sometimes. Once when Levene, now in old age, was ill, he telephoned Duff. ‘Mickey,’ he said, ‘I’m leaving it all to you.’ ‘I don’t want your money,’ replied Duff. ‘Not my money, you prick, the promotion,’ came the response. There was not a topline boxer in Britain at the time who didn’t perform on their bills. They worked closely with Terry Lawless, who managed many of the champions of the time, and they had a virtual monopoly; but they put on great shows. In recent years, the sport has been largely lost to the average fight fan, with promotions in small halls and television coverage only on satellite channels. Sitting ringside in close proximity to the weight of the punches, the blood and the sweat constantly underlined the courage of the boxers. Mickey Duff, the old pro himself, with a face to prove it, once told me that if his son ever looked as if he wanted to become a professional boxer, he would be tempted to cut his arm off. He knew precisely how hard a game it was.

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