BOXING NEWS recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of Frank Bruno’s win over Oliver McCall, so it seems a good time to look at how British heavyweight boxing has changed over history.
Britain doesn’t currently have a heavyweight champion, but it does have a rising star in Moses Itauma. The important thing here, though, is that British heavyweights have, over the years, earned respect on the world stage.
When, for instance, was the last time you heard the word “horizontal heavyweight” applied to a British big man?
The low point for British heavyweight boxing surely came in the years from 1913 to 1919, when British heavyweight champions Bombardier Billy Wells and Joe Beckett were each embarrassingly knocked out in the first round by the smaller French boxer Georges Carpentier, who later won the light-heavy title and famously challenged Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship.
But there came another low point when Phil Scott – or ‘Fainting Phil’, as the Americans called him – featured in big-fight fiascos, notably against future champ Jack Sharkey, in Miami in February 1930.
Scott actually had decent boxing skills, but he was known for his penchant for claiming to have been hit low. He won several fights by DQ, including an unpopular win over Swedish heavyweight Otto von Porat in 1929.
In the fight with Sharkey, sure enough, Scott did his now-familiar “hit low” routine.
“The end came after two minutes and 34 seconds of the third, which does not include a lot of time spent arguing during which the action was suspended,” United Press reported.
Scott was down in the second round and three times in the third and was a thoroughly beaten man when the referee stopped the fight.
I fear that the Wells and Beckett defeats and then Scott’s performances in big fights left British heavyweight boxing with a tarnished reputation.
Tommy Farr’s game fight against Joe Louis in 1937, however, showed that not all British heavyweights were lacking in durability. But Farr was unable to score a win in five fights in the US, although his loss to James J Braddock was by split decision.
Bruce Woodcock lost by KO against Tami Mauriello at Madison Square Garden in 1946, with the Associated Press reporter noting that the British champion lost his American debut in “the accepted fashion — which is somewhat horizontal”.
However, Woodcock had fought well for four rounds, “touching Tami up quite liberally” and he almost beat the count in the fifth.
Moving on, no one was calling Don Cockell horizontal after the British champion’s courageous fight against Rocky Marciano in San Francisco in 1955.
Cockell stood up to heavy punishment, including rough and borderline dirty tactics, before the fight was waved off in the ninth round.
“Cockell was belted long and loud, early and late. Yet Cockell stayed, and he stayed to fight,” Dick Beddoes reported in the Vancouver Sun.
“Even when most grievously hurt, in the eighth round, the Empire contender for the title lashed out fiercely, if ineffectively.
“In that round there seemed no bottom to the reservoir of resolution which many doubted Cockell possessed.”
The Times reporter also extolled Cockell’s bravery, noting that the “abiding wonder” of the fight was that Cockell “could endure so long under as murderous a hail of blows as any champion, perhaps, has ever inflicted”.
Marciano could, The Times noted, have lost by disqualification “under any rigid concept of the rules.
“He opened Cockell’s forehead with his head in the fourth round and in the sixth there were two wicked, low blows after the bell had sounded — all of a part with the butting and ducking below the belt, indiscriminate use of the elbows and wrists, that belong to the innate fury of Marciano’s attack.
“Only an adversary as game and strong as Cockell could have stood for so long before this vicious rain of blows to the head and body, both reddened as with a scourge”.
And Joseph C Nichols reported in the New York Times that “those who sat in on the affair witnessed one of the most inspiring exhibitions of gameness in the history of heavyweight championship competition”.
Cockell’s determined stand against Marciano perhaps didn’t entirely put to bed jibes about British heavyweights having glass jaws, but it probably went a long way towards doing so.
Later in the 1950s, British heavyweights Brian London and Henry Cooper scored big wins in the space of two weeks against highly ranked US contenders.
London halted speedy stylist Willie Pastrano in the fifth round when Pastrano suffered a cut over the eye on September 30, 1958, while two weeks later, Cooper got off the floor to outscore the skilled boxer-puncher Zora Folley.
This might have been the first time ever that Britain had two heavyweights ranked in the world top 10.
Cooper knocking down the then-Cassius Clay in 1963 was a great moment for British heavyweight boxing, although Our ’Enery lost the fight.
But it wasn’t until 1992 that Britain had its first heavyweight champion since Cornish-born Bob Fitzsimmons in the 1880s, when Lennox Lewis was proclaimed WBC titleholder after knocking out Razor Ruddock in an eliminator; champion Riddick Bowe gave up the title rather than fulfil a mandatory title defence against Lewis, who was then awarded the belt.
But while Lewis was born in London, he was raised in Canada from a young age and won his 1988 Olympic gold medal under the Maple Leaf flag. Frank Bruno was quoted, prior to their 1993 bout, as saying that, in effect, he was more “British” than Lewis.
To me, Lennox was always a kind of citizen of the world with ties to Britain and Canada, but possibly considering Jamaica (land of his mother’s birth) to be his spiritual home.
That’s not meant to knock Lennox; nothing wrong with any of that. Being British by birth makes him a British world champion, just as it did Bob Fitzsimmons all those years ago.
However, I think it is fair to say that British boxing fans never embraced Lewis in the manner they did Bruno. Lennox could give the impression of being a little aloof, while Bruno was deemed lovable.
And it took a long time for the US fight fraternity to appreciate Lewis as the exceptionally good fighter that he was.
As late as 1999, Lewis’ manager, Frank (now Kellie) Maloney, told reporter Owen Slot, prior to the first Lewis vs Evander Holyfield fight: “America’s hardly ever lost the heavyweight championship.
“They believe it’s in their heritage to produce super-heavyweights. That’s why the American press are saying Lennox is just another English bum.”
A headline in the New York Daily News proclaimed: “All Lewis Needs Is Some Heart”.
My Lord, those headline writers can be cruel!
Lewis’ chin was doubted, too, after Oliver McCall dropped him and stopped him, albeit controversially.
But Lewis had the last laugh with big wins in mega fights. And as for digs in the American media concerning his heart and chin, Lewis, for me, answered all questions with his bitterly hard-fought 10-round decision win over a rugged and relentless Ray Mercer.
That was a fight where Lennox showed he could take it as well as give it and that he could grit it out when things got rough.
‘Dancing Destroyer’ Herbie Hide, born in Norwich of Nigerian ancestry, won the WBO title by knocking out Michael Bentt in March 1994, couldn’t hold off the much bigger Riddick Bowe but later regained the title.
But the WBO belt was at the time considered the least regarded of the four major sanctioning-body championships.
Henry Akinwande, born in South London and also of Nigerian ancestry, also won the WBO title. I was ringside for several of Akinwande’s fights, including the one at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, when he was disqualified for persistent holding against Lennox Lewis.
But as capable as Akinwande was, he didn’t have the most exciting style you could wish to see and he didn’t have what you could call an electric personality.
Still, Britain was now producing heavyweight champions, with Bruno the most beloved of them all after his fourth-attempt championship victory over McCall.
David Haye then used speed and mobility to outscore the huge Nikolai Valuev in Germany in 2009, and Britain had another. But as good as Haye was, he couldn’t call himself the actual world’s best heavyweight as long as Wladimir Klitschko was a titleholder.
And Haye was a disappointment when their unification bout eventually took place. Tyson Fury gave Britain a heavyweight who could truly be called the world’s No.1 big man, and Anthony Joshua captured the imagination as a flawed but powerful British world heavyweight champion.
And I believe that with Fury and AJ winning and defending the title, Britain’s heavyweight evolution became complete (not forgetting that Daniel Dubois, too, had his moment).
OK, so Oleksandr Usyk has beaten them all – twice over, no less – and in consequence, the good times aren’t rolling quite the way they were, but at least Britain’s “horizontal heavyweight” days are now far behind us.
