Читать книгу I Should Have Been at Work - Des Lynam - Страница 10

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.

Stracey eventually lost the title in London to a fighter from the USA called Carlos Palomino. He had been brought in as a challenger because he was not expected to be too tough an opponent. In fact, a few days before the fight, I asked an American journalist to mark my card about him. ‘How big is he in the States?’ I asked my man. ‘Palomino,’ he said, ‘he’s not even a household name in his own house.’

Phil King was on the trip as my producer. While we were there, I told him that we should enjoy a bit of Mexican culture as well as the hospitality and duly booked for a coach trip to the pyramids. Unfortunately, we had enjoyed a bit of a night out the evening before. At 6 a.m. the phone rang in the room and a voice said, ‘Señor, the coach for the pyramids, she is leaving in ten minutes.’ Phil says my reply down the phone certainly included the word ‘off’. He might be accurate. In those times of budgetary restraint at the BBC, we were sharing a room.

He and I also shared a taxi on our first night in Mexico City. We had asked the concierge for the address of a nightclub where there might be a bit of fun and a few girls. The cab dropped us at this sombre-looking place and when we entered there was no action at all, just a bar with a couple of men sitting at it. Then suddenly a lift came down and out of it stepped a dozen or so girls and paraded in front of us. So much for a nightclub: we were in a brothel. It took some persuasion, and a bit of my Spanish, to get us out of there in one piece.

But, just as in Kuala Lumpur, I did bump into a very sweet girl, and for a short time afterwards I was back in the air-mail business. It’s a wonder I found time to do the broadcasts.

The late Seventies and Eighties usually saw a dozen or so big boxing promotions each year in England, at the Royal Albert Hall or the Wembley Arena. They were either under the banner of Harry Levene or Barrett-Duff Promotions. Mike Barrett was a genial character, Mickey Duff a more rough and ready type who knew boxing inside out and who had once been a professional fighter himself. Levene was an old stager, grumpy as you like, but the man who had planted the thought in my mind about becoming a boxing commentator. They all got on with each other – sometimes. Once when Levene, now in old age, was ill, he telephoned Duff. ‘Mickey,’ he said, ‘I’m leaving it all to you.’ ‘I don’t want your money,’ replied Duff. ‘Not my money, you prick, the promotion,’ came the response. There was not a topline boxer in Britain at the time who didn’t perform on their bills. They worked closely with Terry Lawless, who managed many of the champions of the time, and they had a virtual monopoly; but they put on great shows. In recent years, the sport has been largely lost to the average fight fan, with promotions in small halls and television coverage only on satellite channels. Sitting ringside in close proximity to the weight of the punches, the blood and the sweat constantly underlined the courage of the boxers. Mickey Duff, the old pro himself, with a face to prove it, once told me that if his son ever looked as if he wanted to become a professional boxer, he would be tempted to cut his arm off. He knew precisely how hard a game it was.

I had said on one of our programmes that the first live coverage of a world title fight would be ‘Here, exclusively, on BBC Radio’. This was of course under instruction from the legendary Angus. Arriving back at the office after the show I was told there was a phone call for me. I picked it up and a voice said, ‘Mr Lynam, I have to tell you that you are a liar.’ Who was making this preposterous statement? The voice introduced himself as Jarvis Astaire, of whom I had scarcely heard. It was his rather graceless way of telling me that our forthcoming broadcast would not be exclusive because his company were beaming the fight into a chain of cinemas. Strangely, the conversation ended with us on good terms, despite his inflammatory opening line. Later, on several occasions I hosted his closed-circuit shows. Down the years, whenever I have gone to a major sporting event, almost at any time and anywhere in the world, I have found Jarvis there. Oh, and he’ll definitely have an opinion about it.

Before each big fight I was nearly always allowed in the dressing rooms, where I witnessed the pre-fight nerves of the boxers involved. I began to acquire a useful knack of spotting the winners and losers even before they entered the ring, and I consistently did well when placing a bet on the outcome of fights, in marked contrast to the lack of success I have had over the years when having a flutter on the horses.

I continued to travel round the world when British fighters were involved in major championship bouts abroad. In May 1976 I went to Munich to see another British fighter have a crack at Muhammad Ali. This time it was Richard Dunn, a tough former paratrooper from Yorkshire who had worked his way to the British title after some mediocre years. Dunn was nowhere near world class, but Duff and Barrett had engineered a big pay day and a probable beating for him.

For this fight Richard had acquired an addition to his usual retinue. Now he had a hypnotherapist with him who was boasting that not only would the British fighter enter the ring with absolutely no fear, but that he would actually create one of the all-time great upsets by beating Ali.

At the weigh-in for the fight, there was a near disaster when the ring collapsed with Ali in it. He could have been killed. As it was, he clambered out of the wreckage, unmoved by the untypical German inefficiency, and got on with the formalities.

In the fight, Dunn was indeed fearless and even caught the great man with a few decent punches; but you can’t hypnotise someone to be more talented than they truly are, and the inevitable end came in round five with an Ali knock-out.

After the fight something strange occurred. Dunn, who had always had a stutter, did an absolutely fluent interview with me, speech impediment missing for the first time in his life. A couple of hours later, the old stutter was back. A punch to the jaw is obviously only a temporary cure.

I had travelled to Germany with a heavy heart. Just before I left home, I learned that my father had been diagnosed with colon cancer. A couple of months later he died, after a major operation. This warm, generous and humorous man, full of common sense and decency, would no longer be there to advise me and make me laugh with his wit and wisdom. I was devastated. He had spent his life caring for others but when he needed care, it seemed to me that the doctors showed less concern than they should have done. Despite many requests at the time, the surgeon who operated on my Dad was always ‘too busy’ to give me the benefit of his advice or expertise about my father’s exact condition and I was continually palmed off with his juniors. I bitterly regret that I did not demand his attention more.

I felt alone and in despair. I needed a friend. I telephoned Jill, who had taken a job at a hospital in Holland. Jill had known and liked my father very much; so she came and held my hand and made arrangements, looked after my relatives from Ireland, and got me through. I took a few weeks off work and we spent some lazy days on Brighton beach as I tried to get over my loss. Then, once again, I let her go.

I now immersed myself into work even more and was glad of the boxing trips abroad. And of course, like millions of other people, I was still intrigued by Muhammad Ali. But he was now getting well past his prime. Many people thought he should have retired with his faculties intact after the ‘Thriller in Manila’. Certainly his doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, who had always been in his corner, strongly advised him to do so. By 1978, Ali was still very much active, but his speed of reflexes had deserted him and the wonderful footwork was a thing of the past. Now he was defending his title against Leon Spinks, a blown-up light heavyweight whom I had seen win the Olympic gold medal two years before in Montreal, the very title that Ali had won sixteen years earlier.

The fight was taking place in Las Vegas and, as usual, I got there about a week before to cover the build-up. On the day I arrived, my producer Phil King and I were having a bit of a disaster. Not only had the airline managed to send our luggage somewhere else, including all my pre-fight preparation, but the hotel in which we were supposed to be staying had no record of the booking. We were standing in the foyer bagless and roomless, and wondering what our next move was going to be, when the receptionist called my name. ‘Ah, a room,’ I thought. On the contrary, she just had a telephone call for me, on the other end of which was a BBC producer in London. ‘Des,’ he said, ‘I’ve been trying to find you for ages. You’re on live in thirty seconds.’ On came the familiar voice of Tony Lewis, the Sport on Four presenter. ‘Joining me now live from Las Vegas where he’s been watching Ali train is Des Lynam. How is Ali looking, Des?’ There are lies, damned lies, and reports from correspondents in difficult situations.

Eventually we got our hotel sorted out but now we had another problem. With his usual flair for publicity, Ali had a new gimmick. He reckoned that he had been talking too much and was going round with sticking plaster over his mouth. Well, this was jolly fun for the film and television crews and the newspapers, who would all have their pictures of the now wordless Ali; but for this radio commentator it was a total nuisance. Eventually, I managed to persuade him to remove the plaster for a radio interview and he made a big play of ripping it off, so that the microphone could pick up the sound. He always knew precisely what the media needed from him in any given situation.

Then the unthinkable happened. Ali fought his most lethargic contest to date and was on the losing end of a points decision over fifteen rounds. The new heavyweight champion of the world was Leon Spinks, who had only a few professional fights to his credit. Extraordinarily, his brother Michael, who also won an Olympic gold medal in Montreal, at middleweight, went on to win a version of the heavyweight title some years later too.

I always loved going to America for big fight occasions. I felt perfectly at home in the States. All those American movies of my boyhood had set the stage perfectly for me. The first time I went to New York, it seemed so familiar, as though I had been there all my life.

On that first trip there, I came out of my hotel and hailed one of the famous yellow cabs. ‘I wonder if it would be possible to take me to the BBC offices on Fifth Avenue,’ I said to the driver. ‘What is possibility, you want to go there, get in the cab,’ he replied. It taught me an early lesson to cut out the P. G. Wodehouse stuff.