WE NEVER hear from Britain’s referees before or after a fight and that is fine with me.
Over the years I have seen and watched and got to know a lot of the referees. I always had a soft spot for Roy Francis and defended him after the second Michael Watson and Chris Eubank fight. In the Eighties, when I was starting, some of the referees were men I knew from the amateur circuit, but still I was never close.
To this day, I have only one or two numbers in my phone for the third man in most British rings. I never call them on business. That suits me perfectly and gives me room to disagree with a stoppage or a scorecard when they are sat at ringside. And that happens, obviously.
I saw the legend Harry Gibbs referee fights; I have his autograph somewhere from a lost night at the Royal Albert Hall or Wembley. I do remember that he was not big on smiling. He was a force in the ring, a big lump and he used his big lumpery.
Gibbs got his licence back in 1957 and he always seemed old, a leftover from boxing’s three-roped smokey history. The big man with the starched shirt and Brylcreemed hair where there was hair, silent and firm. And he was from Bermondsey in south London – yep, he could have fight, make no mistake.
Gibbs was a prisoner of war for five years in Camp XXB in Poland, having been captured at Dunkirk. He shadowboxed with other boxers to keep sane. He continued to box after the war and then he found coaching. He was put in charge of the ABA team in Fifties, working with Brian London, Nicky Gargano, Henry Cooper and Dave Charnley.
Nice ingredients for a man who would become Britain’s most famous referee and an unsmiling fixture in big fights overseas in the Seventies and Eighties. Harry was, it seems, often the first name on the team sheet when there was a big fight. I mean, the very biggest fights.
By 1976, Gibbs was the third man in world title fights in Ghana, Venezuela and Japan. He took charge of a heavyweight title fight with Ali and in 1978 reffed the Wilfredo Gomez and Carlos Zarate showdown in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He would do a Carlos Monzon world title fight one week in Copenhagen and then a Southern Area clash at York Hall two weeks later. He was exotic by Bethnal Green standards.
As a judge he took his seat for classics, epic encounters. He was there for Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran the first fight, Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn at Old Trafford. The list is long, the names incredible: Ken Buchanan, Wilfred Benitez, John Conteh, Mike Tyson, Matthew Saad Muhammad, Lennox Lewis, Pernell Whitaker, Azumah Nelson, Julio Cesar Chavez. And Sid Smith against Chris Sanigar at the Elephant in 1981. I remember him there that night, a giant in that wayward leisure centre where the smell of chlorine from the wave pool was overwhelming.
Gibbs was a force, not everybody loved him, but most respected him. He threw Alan Minter out, disqualified him for not trying. He faced down threats at ringside on a regular basis. “I get that kind of thing all the time,” he told Harry Mullan, formerly the captain of this vessel, who had seen Gibbs confronted by a fan after giving Joe Frazier a slender win over Joe Bugner in 1974. It was slim, by the way. “Those characters are all bluster and no “bottle” anyway, and as soon as you call their bluff they’re off.” On that night, Gibbs did call the geezer’s bluff, and he left.
“Total honesty is the thing,” Gibbs once told Mullan, “Let them boo if they want to, but so long as you know you’ve given an honest verdict you can sleep at nights.” Harry Gibbs never lost a second of beauty sleep.
Inside the ring, his philosophy was simple and explains, in many ways, why he remained an enigma. “I can never allow myself to get caught up in the excitement,” he said. “A good referee must always be cool, self-possessed and ready to handle anything that might come up. Next to honesty, aloofness is the quality a good ref needs most.”
I must agree, I don’t want our refs to join the “he said/she said” carnival of interviews after fights. There are a few, not in Britain, with an urge to be a star; I like my referees to be invisible and not part of the storyline of a fight. Gibbs was in the middle of dozens of infamous filthy fights with bites and butts and threats. He handled those occasions with class and ease.
Gibbs also had, it seems, a long-lasting influence over the men in white who followed him. In 1999, Larry O’Connell was being hounded by the press and the public to explain his drawn verdict in the first Lewis and Evander Holyfield fight. It was very nasty at the time. In New York, there was bold talk of an FBI investigation and prison time for the crooked. There was a lot of noise. Lewis should have won, but it was not crooked, and it was not a disgrace.
Larry was at home, curtains pulled, when the phone went. He dreaded picking it up, but he did, and it was Gibbs. “I told him you have to call it how you see it and that is that,” Gibbs later said. The words helped O’Connell. No doubt Gibbs would have been waiting at ringside for somebody to come up and tell him how to do his job. That would have been a mistake.
