WHERE is Dennis Andries now? Good question.
Steve Bunce promised viewers of ‘Bunce’s Boxing Hour’ on BoxNation around a decade ago: “I will get Dennis Andries in here.”
He never did.
Andries did meet his public as part of some ‘Forgotten Champions’ dinner evenings put together by Mark ‘Mo’ Prior, the good-hearted manager and promoter who has tried to befriend the three-time world light-heavyweight champion.
‘The Hackney Rock’ was joined by Terry Marsh and Herol ‘Bomber’ Graham and were quizzed by ex-fighter Bob Williams.
“Who was your toughest opponent?” Andries was asked.
“None of them.”
Williams tried again.
“Who were you most worried about?”
“No one.”
Andries was as truculent in retirement as he was during his 18-year, 65-fight career that included three gruelling fights with the similarly granite-chinned Jeff Harding and a brave showing against Thomas ‘The Hitman’ Hearns.
He was equally prickly when, on the insistence of close friend and former British light-middleweight champion Prince Rodney, he turned up at a London Ex-Boxers meeting in 2012.
Despite the warmth he was shown, Andries was uncooperative.
He was quick to point out he could “still look after myself” and initially refused to have his photograph taken.
Andries did soften eventually and made some unrepeatable claims.
Told by Prior I intended to write a book about him, the message was Andries wouldn’t contribute, but wanted to read it before it was published. Andries famously took exception to just about everything that was said or written about him including a press release issued before he challenged WBC champion J B Williamson in 1986.
This was when the confusion over Andries’ date of birth started. He was 32 years old – and the press release said he was 34.
For the rest of his career, he would add and subtract years to his age as he fancied.
“Some are born lucky,” he said in one interview, “and then there’s the rest of us.”
The British Boxing Yearbook, patronised by the British Boxing Board of Control, always gave his date of birth as November 5, 1953, in Guyana.
He followed his parents and sister to the Hoxton Estate in Hackney around 1966, as part of the ‘Windrush Generation’ who headed to Britain from the Caribbean to help rebuild the workforce after the War.
Ambrose Mendy made a similar trip and went to the same school as Andries, Upton House.
“Dennis would always confront people,” remembered Mendy, who managed Nigel Benn, Lloyd Honeyghan and more.
“He wasn’t afraid to ask: ‘Why is this happening?’
“Nobody took liberties with Dennis. He never started an argument, but he knew how to finish it. How he was in boxing was how he always was. He was always playing on his own.”
Except when his school needed him.
Once a year, Upton House School would meet Brook House School for a fight and Mendy said: “Dennis will be right in the thick of it.
“He was like a human battering ram. They would push him up the front and everyone would go behind him.”
Andries would say he started to box after seeing a friend’s trophies, while his late manager, Greg Steene, told a different story.
He told me: “Dennis said he got talking to some lads who were going to the gym. They said they were boxers and told him how much they were earning. Dennis was sure he could fight and wanted the money.”
Either way, he turned professional with Ernie Fossey as his manager and trainer after 16 amateur bouts.
“I was told: ‘You’ll win the Southern Area title, forget about the British title,’” said Andries. “But I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t listen too well. The more they say: ‘You can’t do it,’ the more I say: ‘Okay, I’ll show you.’ Don’t ever tell me that I cannot.”
Fossey found that Andries did things his way.
The trainer would tell him to skip rope and he would start pummelling a punch bag instead. Nobody could tell Andries what to do or where his place was.
“What am I going to do with him?” Fossey would sigh.
At 5ft 10ins tall, Andries was short for a light-heavyweight, had limited amateur experience and given, his mistrusting nature, wasn’t going to sell tickets.
His debut was at a nightclub in Newport in May, 1976, where Andries picked up £75 for chinning Ray Pearce in two rounds, and 16 days later, he was 2-0 after another knockout.
Andries would later sack Fossey as his head coach during a fight!
Don Davis remembered Fossey pulling himself up onto the ring apron and Andries telling him: “You stay outside. I don’t want you here. Don tells me what to do.”
Andries, said Davis, was “a funny fella.”
He came to that conclusion after visiting Andries at his home and then being driven home in his plush convertible.
“Dennis always went to the gym on the bus,” said Davis. “He even went to fights on the bus. I never even knew he had a car. I had never seen a car like it.”
Davis also discovered that, during fights, Andries never wanted to hear he was ahead and that whatever Andries did, he gave it everything.
“You couldn’t ask him to move around with a novice,” Steene said. “Dennis would bash them up.”
One of his first sparring partners became a friend.
The first gym Andries went to was Lion Amateur Boxing Club in Shoreditch where he sparred someone he called “the skinny guy.”
Domenico Bergonzi stayed in touch with Andries after he left to box for Colvestone and then turned pro and somehow or other, he found his way into Andries’s changing room before he defended the British title against Devon Bailey in October 1984.
Andries was fighting a Frank Warren fighter on a Frank Warren promotion and at the venue he bumped into Fossey, who had told him after he flopped against Bunny Johnson in an unwatchable British-title challenge: “If you win the British title, the game’s gone.”
Beating Bailey would secure the Lonsdale belt outright in only 258 days, a record for the light-heavyweight division at the time, and also a colour television, the reward offered to the winners of the top-of-the-bill fights.
Andries and Bailey had shared a ring before, in what referee Richie Davies called “the worst amateur fight I ever refereed at top level.”
Bailey won that London ABA final and then had to pull out of the championship. Andries broke his jaw and damaged his ribs.
Andries flattened him in the 12th to win the Lonsdale belt and more than a decade later, he became the oldest to become British champion, aged 41 years, two months and 16 days.
Jim Watt, the former WBC lightweight champion, had sympathy for Denzel Browne during their fight for the vacant cruiserweight belt.
He told ITV viewers: “It must be demoralising when you catch a man with your best shots, but he comes right through them and you know he’s going to continue to do that.”
Browne remembered: “He was talking to me while he was beating me up. He was saying: ‘I got you now Browne, you’re gonna feel this one!’”
The battering continued until the referee pulled Andries off Browne in the 11th round.
Andries celebrated what would prove to be his last win with a somersault and then retired after Johnny Nelson beat him in his first defence.
Months later, Andries, awarded the MBE in 1991, was declared bankrupt.
He was described in the HMRC’s paperwork as “a professional boxer, landlord and company director,” but never boxed again after Nelson gave him what Harry Mullan called an, “embarrassingly one-sided beating.”
There was no press conference to announce Andries’ fighting days were over. As the late John Morris, General Secretary of the British Boxing Board of Control, remembered it: “Dennis came to the offices and told me he was retiring.”
That was in 1997 and in the years since Andries, described as “shy and decent” by Morris, has been spotted working in security at a building site in Canary Wharf.
He is now 71 years old – or thereabouts – and according to an acquaintance: “I’ve heard he doesn’t want anything to do with boxing.”
