For 12 years Frank Bruno was the public's favourite, the pantomime star with a stock of one-liners up his sleeve, a big punch and, they say, a frailty in the chin department. Even though Big Frank had been knocked out in two world-title shots, his gallant failures only made him more popular. Then Lennox Lewis. the super-cool kid, came along. Lewis became the first Briton this century to win the world heavyweight championship, the so-called "Greatest Prize in Sport', doing in a few short years what Bruno had been trying to achieve all his adult life. The fight was a natural. But this is more than the story of a fight. It is the story of the rise and decline of one boxing empire and the unlikely founding of another. For 30 years Bruno's backers, Mickey Duff and Jarvis Astaire, had held sway over British boxing. Mickey was the pugnacious match-making genius who lived boxing 24 hours. Jarvis was the suave tycoon who had the contacts and the contracts. And together in the 1980s, along with boxing manager Terry Lawless, their power was sustained because of the fists - and falls of one man: Frank Bruno.
This book tells the real story of the making and marketing of Britain's most popular sportsman, introducing readers to such characters as Johnny "The Gravedigger" Bos, Duff's American agent, who supplied American opponents for Bruno and who is known in the trade as being an expert purveyor of boxers dubbed "stiffs", "bodies " and "dead men ". It also charts the rise of Lewis, the Olympic champion, under the unlikely management of Frank Maloney, a former publican from Crayford who was accused by Duff of "doing a Cecil B Demille in reverse: he took a star and turned him into a nobody ". But Maloney thinks Bruno as a pushover and is more concerned with negotiating an even bigger fight with the eccentric Rock Newman, an apparently blond complexioned man who says he is black and who manages the hulking Riddick "Big Daddy " Bowe.
- ISBN10 1851585508
- ISBN13 9781851585502
- Publish Date 30 November 1993
- Publish Status Unknown
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Transworld Publishers Ltd
- Imprint Mainstream Publishing
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 272
- Language English