I Should Have Been at Work

4

NOT AS DUMB AS I LOOKED

I was off to the other side of the world, to Christchurch, on the South Island of New Zealand, for the 1974 Commonwealth Games. It was to be my first trip outside Europe.

First stop was Hong Kong. What a culture shock, and what a delight. The BBC had managed to do a special deal on flights, which meant we could stay over for a couple of nights to sample the wonders of this extraordinary outpost of the British Empire, as it then was. I was in the company of Jonesy once again, plus Bob Burrows, Dick Scales and a good all-round broadcaster who to this day can be heard commentating on television football, John Helm.

We had a ball, enjoying the food, the sights and the fantastic harbour. I fell in love with the place and have been lucky enough to revisit it several times down the years. Then it was on to Australia, where we were due to make just a refuelling stop. As it turned out we were there for a little longer than planned.

On the flight I had been sitting next to Dick, who, despite his physical toughness, was a very nervous air passenger. I had been having a little fun at his expense, for instance when the note of the engines changed. Then, as we were slowly taxiing to begin take-off, I looked out of the window and saw the wing-tip of our aircraft hit the wing-tip of another plane. The bit of our wing came off. Oddly, there was no great crash or noise inside the aircraft.

‘Scalesy,’ I said, ‘a bit of our bloody wing has just fallen off.’ At this point Dick had had enough of me.

He grabbed me round the throat.

‘Lynam,’ he said. ‘If you don’t stop taking the piss, I’m going to clock you one.’

But I wasn’t fooling around this time. The plane was now out of service and we were stuck in Brisbane until a replacement aircraft was made available. The incident did nothing to help Dick’s flying phobia.

Christchurch, New Zealand, in the Seventies reminded me of an English town in the early Fifties. Certainly many of the cars were of that vintage. Indeed there were even plenty of people driving around in pre-war British vehicles. Fords and Morrises and Austins of the Thirties were commonplace. It was something to do with a tax penalty the government imposed on imported cars, and so people just kept the old ones going.

I had three roles in Christchurch. Firstly, to present the Saturday editions of the Today programme from there. The first one occurred just a few hours after our arrival, with me full of jet-lag, but I managed to get through it. Michael Aspel was at the London end. Secondly, I had to present some of the Radio 2 sports programmes, and, thirdly, I was the boxing commentator, not just for the UK but also for the BBC’s World Service. I found myself mugging up on boxers from Uganda, Kenya, in fact from all corners of the Commonwealth. I loved every minute of it, and covered as many as fifteen bouts in a day. It was invaluable experience for what was to come.

During our first evening in Christchurch, I’d met a beautiful girl, one of the hotel receptionists. We started seeing a little of each other, on the few occasions I had time away from the microphone. Apart from her lovely looks and kind nature, this young lady had one other marvellous asset. She was the proud owner of a red Sunbeam Alpine sports car, rare in New Zealand at the time. My popularity with the other guys slumped every time they saw me hop into this red sports car with my gorgeous companion.

We got on very well, but of course the few weeks we were together flashed by. I was sorry to leave both New Zealand and my new friend. Of course I told her that, while it was unlikely that I would be returning to New Zealand in the near future, if she ever came to Europe I would be delighted to see her again. Our parting was emotional, and I thought that, in other circumstances, the relationship might have developed into something more meaningful.

While in New Zealand we had a chance to sample the marvellous beaches. One morning we went swimming and John Helm pointed to a lookout tower with a lifeguard perched on top. ‘He’s very high up,’ remarked John. ‘That’s so he can see the sharks,’ I said. Helmy left the water, never to return for the rest of our trip.

We came back from New Zealand via the West Coast of America and spent a couple of days in San Francisco, where I met up with an old school friend of mine, Charles Trinder, who had emigrated to the States.

A month or so after returning home, there was a call for me one morning in Broadcasting House. ‘Hi, Dis. It’s me,’ said the voice from the other end. Unmistakable New Zealand accent. ‘Wow. This is a good line,’ I said to my Christchurch companion. ‘I’m downstairs in reception,’ she said. Shona had set out, as so many New Zealanders do, on her European tour. She had just decided to make it a little earlier than planned. Like about two years.

We saw each other a couple of times, but I think we both decided, without saying anything, that perhaps our blissful short relationship had its beginning and end in Christchurch. Off she went to see Paris and Rome and I never saw or heard from her again. I hope she has had a wonderful life.

It was the start of a busy year. I did my first commentary on a world title fight as John Conteh beat an Argentine boxer, Jorge Ahumada, to become the World light-heavyweight champion at Wembley; then I was off to Kinshasa in Zaire to cover the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ – George Foreman, defending the World heavyweight title he had taken from Joe Frazier, against the former champ, the great Muhammad Ali.

I had been fortunate enough to have met Ali when he came to London a year or two earlier and he did a marvellous interview for me. Now I found myself in the company of Ali once again in a bungalow provided by President Mobutu, whose government had put up much of the money to bring this extraordinary sporting extravaganza to the heart of Africa. Also there were two or three British boxing writers. Ali was explaining to us how he was going to beat Foreman. None of us believed a word of it. Foreman was hot favourite, a colossus in the ring and one of the hardest-punching heavyweights of all time. I was sitting next to Ali while he was going through his routine because I had my trusty tape-recorder under his nose. Close to my nose was the Ali left fist as he explained how he was going to win the fight with his jab. He kept thrusting it towards my face and at first I flinched a few times. Then I thought, if Ali actually misjudges and makes my nose bleed, what a scoop that would be. So steadfastly I resolved not to move an inch backwards as he continued his tirade. In fact I edged forward ever so slightly. When he finished, he gave me that old Ali sideways glance and that big smile. ‘You’re not as dumb as you look,’ he said. I was hugely complimented. Of course Ali’s timing and judgement was so impeccable, the chances of him actually connecting with my hooter had been extremely slim.

He went on to shock the world by regaining the heavyweight crown, hardly throwing a jab in the process. With extraordinary courage and durability he allowed Foreman to punch himself out, and then went in for the kill.

Recently I spent some time with Big George in London, when he did a splendid interview with me for BBC Radio 5 Live. Just before Ali knocked him out all those years ago, he had whispered in George’s ear, ‘Awful bad time to get tired, isn’t it George?’

Another of the former World heavyweight boxing champions I met was Floyd Patterson. A BBC producer, John Graham, had come up with the idea of a series of programmes on the history of boxing in the Olympic Games. Patterson had won the gold medal in the middleweight division at the 1952 Games in Helsinki, Finland. He had been involved in just twenty-two bouts before being selected for the American Olympic team.

He turned professional straight after his success and campaigned as a heavyweight, one of the smallest of modern times. He became World heavyweight champion at just twenty-one years of age, then lost the title to Ingemar Johannson of Sweden before becoming the first man to regain it when he avenged the defeat.

So John and I found ourselves flying to a little airport in upper New York State to meet the man, now in his early sixties. There was a thin layer of snow on the ground as we drove to the small town of New Paltz and as we approached the Patterson household, there was the old champion himself, waving to us from his front garden.

Patterson was Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission and at the time was a wonderful advert for the sport of boxing. Despite a gruelling career which involved two meetings with the fearsome Sonny Liston, Floyd looked at least ten years younger than his age. We filmed him shadow boxing and hitting the heavy bag which he did as a routine every day of his life in his own gymnasium. He still had rhythm and timing and looked spritely but there was an air of sadness about the man. For many great sportsmen, life after the competitive years goes cold. In his mind, Floyd was ‘boxing on’ because everything since paled in comparison.

But at least Patterson had retained a little wealth and was living in some style.

Jimmy Ellis, a contemporary of Muhammad Ali, having begun his boxing in Louisville, Kentucky alongside his young friend, the then Cassius Clay, was not so lucky.

Ellis, a wonderful ring craftsman, had held a version of the heavyweight crown too, but when I went to see him, still living in Louisville, he was wearing the green overalls of a worker in the city’s Parks Department. Ellis had also lost the sight of one eye, from an old ring injury. Wealth had passed him by. Did he have any regrets? Not a bit of it. If he had his youth, he would do it all over again, he told me.

My time as the BBC Radio boxing commentator lasted nearly twenty years and overlapped with my television work. It gave me some great times and I made many friends; but one of the saddest days I ever had while I was covering boxing came in 1980 when, along with a BBC Television producer, Elaine Rose, I attended the funeral in Wales of Johnny Owen.

Johnny was known as the ‘Merthyr Matchstick’ and, together with Elaine, I had been to Merthyr some weeks before to film a television feature on him. He was a painfully shy young man who, despite his slender frame, expressed himself best in the boxing ring. And he was good. Our feature was to preview his challenge to Lupe Pintor for the World bantamweight title in Mexico. Tragically, Owen had been injured in the contest and seven weeks later died from those injuries.

I remember the entire population of Merthyr lining the hills of the town as the funeral cortège passed by. On that day some of the toughest men of British boxing cried their eyes out as they paid homage to a brave young boy whose great ambition had cost him his life.

During my time in boxing, I covered around forty world titles and numerous British and European championship fights. For most of them, the legendary Henry Cooper was my ringside summariser. No finer man to have with you and after a nervy beginning, he became a master at filling the minute between each round with his pearls of boxing wisdom. Once in a while Henry would find himself up a verbal cul-de-sac but always extricated himself. ‘’E’s as big as a brick . . . [pause] . . . building.’

Once, when talking about the British heavyweight Richard Dunn, Henry was praising him after one round when he said: ‘He knew what he had to do and in that round Dunn . . . done it.’ Strange syntax. Wonderful man.

I had met Henry several years before we became ringside colleagues. He used to come into Sports Report on the Saturday before his big fights, along with his manager, Jim Wicks. They considered coming into the programme as a lucky omen. Jim always used to talk in the first person plural. ‘We landed a great punch’; ‘He made our nose bleed’, etc. He spoke as though he was actually in the ring with Henry, which he certainly was in spirit. He protected Cooper too. For example, he would never agree to Henry’s fighting Sonny Liston, who had been considered unbeatable until Muhammad Ali (or Cassius Clay, as he was at the time) shocked him and the world.

Henry did meet Floyd Patterson and I think it was after that contest, in which Henry had been stopped, that he was driving home to south-east London with Wicks and his brother George in the car when he made a slight misjudgement at a traffic light that caused an old boy to stumble off his bike. Henry wound down the window to apologise when the elderly cockney threw him a punch to the face. ‘I’d have you out the car except there are three of you,’ said his elderly aggressor. Two defeats in the one night for ‘our ’Enery’.

After the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ I was off to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to see Britain’s Joe Bugner have a tilt at Muhammad Ali’s crown. I was there for two weeks, sending back interviews with the fighters. Ali was always readily available to pronounce in front of a BBC mike. I even got him to record the opening of Sports Report, and Bugner’s wily manager Andy Smith would always talk, even if Bugner himself was sometimes reluctant to do so. Or I would simply do a straight report down the line on the condition and mood of the fighters and their associates. I did one piece in which I had worked out how many hangers-on there were in the Ali camp. It turned out he, or the promotion, were paying the air tickets and hotel bills for about fifty people, forty-five of whom he could have done without.

My producer in London was Dick Scales, who always called everybody ‘son’. Each day I would go to the Malaysian Broadcasting Centre to send my contribution down the line. Scales would address me from the other end in his usual fashion. After a few days, the female Chinese sound assistant who was helping me remarked how nice it was for me to be working with ‘honourable father’ in London. It suddenly dawned on me what she was talking about. I didn’t try to explain.

This was the life. There were at least a couple of hours each day spent by the pool, and then in the evenings, usually in the company of members of the British boxing writers, it was out to sample a little of the night life of Kuala Lumpur. One evening we were enjoying a few drinks when a group of very glamorous ladies asked to join us. We were very happy for them to do so. After a while we realised that these were no ladies; they looked the part, but they were in fact what they call in the Far East ‘lady-boys’ – and they were looking for business. We enjoyed their company and they stung us for some very expensive drinks, but in the time-honoured way of British journalists in such situations, we made our excuses and left.

I made no excuses when I bumped into an extremely attractive female photographer who was covering the build-up to the fight for a Malaysian magazine. I took her out a couple of times and then she invited me to have dinner at her parents’ home. This was indeed an honour. On the evening in question, I took a taxi from my hotel, the directions to the lady’s family home scribbled on a piece of paper. The taxi driver smiled at me rather strangely, I thought, and then hurtled us about ten miles out of the city until we were finally driving up an unmade track. I had visions of being on the end of a scam. Any minute now, I thought, out from this jungle will come a couple of heavies, and I’ll become the story.

Oh me of little faith. Eventually the cab pulled into a clearing and there, waiting for me on the balcony of this neat timber bungalow, was my friend and her parents all decked out in their finery. I had a magical evening and got the distinct impression I was being looked over as potential marriage material. For some months afterwards I was in regular air-mail correspondence with Kuala Lumpur.

The fight itself lasted the full fifteen rounds, but Bugner was never likely to win it. Later, back at the hotel, he was found doing laps of the swimming pool. Ali, despite winning clearly, had gone to hospital with exhaustion, an indication of their respective approaches to the toughest game of all.

Just three months later, Ali was boxing in the Far East again, this time meeting Joe Frazier in the ‘Thriller in Manila’, perhaps the greatest heavyweight fight of all time, in which both of them experienced ‘near-death’.

Later in the year I found myself in a bull ring in Mexico City watching the British welterweight John H. Stracey create a huge upset by beating the great Mexican José Napoles to become world champion. It was a rarity: a British fighter winning a world crown abroad. On the night, the preliminary bouts had all ended early and the Mexican promotion wanted to get on with the main attraction. Our air time was still an hour and a half away. Mickey Duff, part of Stracey’s promotional team, almost had a heart attack persuading the Mexicans to delay things, and very nearly caused a riot in doing so; but he did the job for us. Terry Lawless, Stracey’s manager, came on the show and insisted I do my ‘Michael Caine’ for the listeners (it was a bit of a party piece at the time) before he answered a single question. The listeners must have wondered what on earth I was doing.