Randolph’s Castle

British boxing legend Randolph Turpin chose picturesque Gwrych Castle as his training base ahead of his historic world-title win over Sugar Ray Robinson

The great Sugar Ray Robinson was renowned for his lavish lifestyle. In his heyday, he splashed cash freely and was used to the best of everything. Luxury hotels, stylish clothes, fast cars and an entourage to rival Floyd Mayweather’s.

When he arrived in England to train for his maiden world middleweight title defence against Leamington’s Randolph Turpin in 1951, the quarters that had been arranged for him shocked Robinson. He trained and boarded at the Star & Garter pub in Windsor, which he later called ‘a dump’ in his autobiography.

‘The stairway creaked. The door handle was loose. There were plaster cracks in the walls. The two beds were like cots,’ he recalled. ‘Downstairs, the jukebox was blaring. And the customers were yelling and pounding their glasses on the bar. I never got to sleep until long after midnight.’

Cauliflower Famine

Jack ‘Cast Iron’ Casey

 

The sight of UFC star Conor McGregor’s deformed left ear on the cover of the 20 July issue of Boxing News got me thinking about cauliflower ears in boxing. There was a time when a cauliflower ear was the hallmark of a seasoned pro boxer. But today, you’re far more likely to see one on an MMA fighter or rugby player.

So why this modern lack of cauliflowers among the boxing brigade? I was once told by a London Ex-Boxers Association founder-member — now in his 90s — that it’s because ‘they don’t have enough fights now and they aren’t taught how to slip punches’, the theory being that cauliflowers were often caused by slipped shots cuffing the ear.

No doubt a fair few modern trainers would dispute the last part of his statement. The first part, though, is hard to deny. Today, a prospect will fight, say, five or six times a year, an established top-liner perhaps two or three times. But in the inter-war years, particularly in Britain, it wasn’t unusual for a pro to make 20 to 30 ring appearances a year. Career records of 200-plus pro bouts were common and these were not just journeymen; many were star performers.

Mystery Man Sam

Sam Minto

Boxing has its share of mystery men: fighters who captivate and intrigue us, though the details of their lives are obscure. One such man is Sam Minto of the West Indies, who boxed in Britain for 28-plus years with an eye-watering tally of 345 recorded pro fights.

It’s thought Sam was from Barbados and arrived in the UK at Hull in 1908. His birth year, according to different sources, may have been 1883 or 1888, but no one — perhaps not even Sam himself — was certain.

It is believed Minto had boxed before he came to Britain, but no prior fight record exists. According to boxing historians Miles Templeton and Richard Ireland (boxinghistory.org.uk), Sam’s first traceable bout was in Withernsea, Yorkshire, on 18 March 1909.

Throughout his career, Minto drifted from place to place, travelling all over Britain and sometimes abroad for fights. In October 1912, he took on the reigning European bantamweight champion and world title claimant Charles Leduox in Paris. Boxing News had Sam winning the first few rounds and acquitting himself well, but he was knocked out in the eighth. 

'Terrible Terence's' TV milestone

Terence Murphy

How Canning Town middle and light-heavyweight Terence Murphy became the first sportsman to appear on UK commercial TV.

Long before terrestrial broadcasts made TV stars of British fighters, attending a live show was how most fans saw their boxing.

In the immediate post-war years, live boxing was widespread and fight followers were happy to venture out to shows. But as TV’s popularity exploded (licence take-up rose from 763,000 in 1951 to 3.2 million in 1954), boxing promoters capitalised on the new medium.

In the early 1950s, there was just one (BBC-run) British TV channel, with haphazard coverage of boxing and little thought given to what fights were shown. That all changed on 22 September 1955 as Britain’s first commercial TV station, ITV, made its maiden transmission.

Annie - the KO Queen

Pictured (1925): Annie poses in the ring with 12-year-old sparring partner Nipper Pat Daly as trainer Professor Newton looks on

Pioneering female boxer Annie Newton is one of the many colourful characters featured in Alex Daley's book, Born to Box: The Extraordinary Story of Nipper Pat Daly (Pitch Publishing)

Today, women’s boxing is thriving. There’s never been a better time for females to take up the noble art. But what if the likes of Nicola Adams and Katie Taylor had been around in the 1920s?

Back then, their hardest fight would have been outside the ring, contending with a largely hostile society. Not only was the idea of women boxing frowned upon, it was deemed an abomination. Even leading boxing figures like the great Jimmy Wilde felt it was freakish and unseemly.

For one female boxer trying to make it in the Roaring Twenties, this ideology proved an unbeatable foe. Her name was Annie Newton and she’d been steeped in boxing from an early age. Born in Highgate, north London in 1893, she was mostly raised by her uncle, ‘Professor’ Andrew Newton, one of Britain’s top boxing trainers of the time.

Digger's Sad Tale

By any standards, his short life was unspeakably hard. The story goes that when George ‘Digger’ Stanley was a boy, his father sold him to a boxing-booth owner for a gold sovereign and a pint of beer. He was aged somewhere between 12 and 15. But no one, not even Digger himself, knew his exact age or for that matter where he was born. His birthplace was sometimes given as Kingston-on-Thames but other times as Norwich, Lincoln or Reading. Stanley was a traveller (or ‘gypsy’) and could not read or write. At the height of his fame, he wore a magnificent gold watch but he had to ask others to tell him the time. His boxing literacy, though, was never in doubt.

He learnt his trade on a travelling boxing booth under Billy Le Neve, the booth owner his father supposedly sold him to. Tackling men of all weights and sizes, Digger not only learnt how to box but how to employ the game’s darker arts. ‘He could break more rules, more artfully, than almost any other boxer of the past few decades,’ said his Boxing News obituary, but he was also ‘a superlatively clever boxer and ring strategist’.

Ali in Ireland

Photo by Ira Rosenberg

Muhammad Ali's lesser-known Irish roots and his fight in the Emerald Isle.

When you think of the great Irish-American fighters, Muhammad Ali probably isn’t the first name that springs to mind. Nevertheless, the Emerald Isle can at least stake a claim to the heavyweight great as one of its own. Ali’s maternal great-grandfather, Abe Grady, was born in County Clare, in the west of Ireland. Later, he moved to America, married an African-American woman and ultimately became a grandfather to Ali’s mother, Odessa Lee Grady.

Despite his one-time connection with black Islamist group the Nation of Islam, Ali did not try to hide his Irish roots. In fact, in 2009, he visited his great-grandfather’s County Clare town of Ennis, meeting distant cousins and becoming the first person in 600 years to be given the freedom of Ennis. But it wasn’t Ali’s first time in Ireland. The by-then frail ex-champ had actually boxed there in 1972.

Forty-five years ago this week, Dublin’s Croke Park was the stage for if not a classic Ali performance, then at least an Ali promotion like no other.