The fractured life of a boxing champ

JOHN WIGHT finds himself engrossed in David Tossell’s biography of the remarkable boxer Joe Bugner 

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This is the feat achieved by David Tossell with his recently published biography of iconic British heavyweight, Joe Bugner. Titled The Bugner Identity, the book unpacks Bugner’s legacy as one of the best heavyweights to ever represent Britain on the world stage, and this during a period when glorious failure rather than sweet victory was more in keeping with the nation’s dominant sporting values.

As Tossell writes: “He [Bugner] had the misfortune to emerge as one of British sport’s great champions at a time when there was far greater comfort and familiarity with, and seemingly warmth for, the plucky loser.”

Joe Bugner grew up in the 1950s in a decade dominated by cold war nostrums, when any lingering affection for the Grand Alliance between the West and Soviet Union that had overcome Hitlerism was superseded by a struggle for the future between two competing economic and value systems.

The story of how Bugner arrived on these shores from his native Hungary in 1956, the author delineates in great detail, while capturing the high drama involved. His mother, Margit, was clearly a woman of remarkable tenacity and fortitude in the way she struggled to care for and raise Joe and his three siblings on her own.

The Soviet-armed intervention in Hungary that seminal year catalysed her determination to relocate to the West. In later years, looking back on his childhood, Bugner himself had no doubt of it: “My mother had more balls than anyone I have met in the boxing ring … I admired her until the day she died.”

Bugner’s mother and her kids arrived in Britain at what was, for people like them, a fortuitious moment in the country’s social history.

Tossell: “The 1950s was the height of the British welfare state, and its concept was further stabilised under the influence of the 1951 UN Convention, which gave refugees essentially the same social security and welfare rights as the native population.”

The boxing ring came calling to Bugner at age 13. From there, he soon began to stand out with his blond looks and impressive physique and size for the time. After a brief amateur career consisting of just 16 bouts, Bugner turned professional at the ridiculously young age of 17 in late 1967.

From there he was carefully matched in the accumstomed manner when it comes to building a young prospect. The author here adopts a forensic approach, mapping out Bugner’s early career with an impressive eye for detail, however small.

Bugner’s pro career was marked by tragedy in the person of Ulric Regis, whom he faced on March 11 1969 at London’s Shoreditch Town Hall. The fight itself was over in four rounds, which was all it took for Bugner to stop the Trinidadian.

The following morning, Regis was found dead in his hotel room due to a blood clot on the brain. At just 19 years old, the weight of this fatality clearly had a significant impact on Bugner going forward.

Tossell: “While no blame had been attached to Bugner, there can be no doubt about the trauma that the event caused.”

Though Bugner’s ring career lasted from 1967 all the way up to the 1999, he will always be a man of the ’70s. This was a decade of transformative change in Britain — politically, economically and culturally — to which the name Joe Bugner will always be associated, along with other British ring legends of the time in the shape of John Conteh, Dave Boy Green, John H Stracey, Chris Finnegan, and Scotland’s Ken Buchanan.

In what stands as cruel irony, Bugner’s most notable victory of the decade also proved his most enduring defeat. The date was March 16 1971, the venue was London’s Empire Pool, and the opponent was English sporting and by then cultural icon, Henry Cooper.

Like Bobby Charlton from the world of football, Cooper for many embodied what it meant to be English. A family man who fought his heart out whenever he boxed, “Our ’Enry” was fan favourite and media darling combined. His courage in the ring was matched by his endearing personality outside it.

It was in this context that Bugner, the young pretender, you would think committed a crime by daring to get the nod from referee Harry Gibbs after a close 15-round fight in which Cooper’s British, Commonwealth and European titles were on the line.

Tossell: “The sight of of Alexander Elliot, steward of the BBBoC, placing the Lonsdale Belt around Bugner’s waist caused the fans to snarl.” Tossell also reveals that the morning after the fight the Daily Telegraph carried the headline: “UPROAR AS BUGNER STEALS COOPER’S TRIPLE CROWN.”

Joe Bugner never succeeded in winning the affection of British fights or media after the Cooper fight. Viewed as an interloper, his Britishness was itself deemed questionable. And this despite him going on to fly the flag against an array of the best heavyweights to ever occupy the ring — fighters of the calibre of Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Jimmy Ellis, Ron Lyle and Earnie Shavers.

So intense was the disdain in which Bugner was held post-Cooper that during one of his classic BBC interviews with Muhammad Ali, Michael Parkinson described Bugner as a “bum” to Ali and through him to the millions watching at home. Moreover, Scotland’s legendary sports writer Hugh McIlvanney once described him as a man who “looks like a Greek statue, but with less moves.”

Bugner died last year aged 75, in his second adopted home of Australia. Tossell’s book captures the essence of a man who began life in Britain as a refugee in fact, and ended it being made to feel like one in truth.

The Bugner Identity (Pitch Publishing) is currently available from all major booksellers.

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