Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 10:17
I believe one of the main scenes in Snatch was based upon this - the one where Brad Pitt ko's the big heavy played by Scott Welsh.
BoxRec
Frank Warren-Underground Boxing
Page 2 of 2
Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 11:37
Shaw is the main guy to debunk the myth of the 'Guvnor', i.e. reveals the defeats, contradicts that 3000 wins business etc. Shaw had a website where he answers qs on the subject among others. i've got shaw's book somewhere, i must give it a good readmercman wrote:I didn't know McClean had fought Ishaq Hussein any more details?
I'm not 100% sure of this but I think I read it in Roy Shaw's autobiography Pretty Boy
I believe one of the main scenes in Snatch was based upon this - the one where Brad Pitt ko's the big heavy played by Scott Welsh.Johnny 'forgot' to follow the script and KO'd big Lenny which nearly caused a riot
Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 13:00
shaw did beat mcclean in their first fight. in the rematches it was the ginseng that ko'd him, lolmercman wrote:Of all those unlicensed fighters I think Shaw is the one that could have made a good professional boxer. Most of the others just seem to be huge, vicious, intimidating brawlers but Shaw is a bit different. I know he was similar in that he was also a real tough, tough guy but he actually had some boxing ability. He did a lot of boxing in the army when he did his national service and in the '50s or early '60s I believe he also had a short pro career - fighting as a welterweight or a middleweight under the name of Roy West.
And thats the difference, Roy Shaw was really only a middleweight that pumped himself up with powerlifting and fought much, much bigger men on the unlicensed circuit. Look of pictures of him and McClean together: Shaw is absolutely dwarfed by his rival. It is also worth noting that, because Shaw had spent much of his life incarcerated, he was a lot older than McClean and the other guys he fought. He was well into his forties when he fought McClean. People say he is still very fit and formidable today and he is about 70 now.
In many ways I think Prettyboy is a more interesting read than The gov'nor. With his time in the army, as an armed robber, his spells in jails and mental hospitals Prettyboy is an entertaining if rather freightening read.
Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 13:15
I've also heard from a few places that the McClean going to the USA and beating their top fighter story never actually happened.
But who knows?
But who knows?
Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 13:38
Ive seen McLean fight years ago, maybe 20 years ago. He was basically a big rough bloke who would jump on the opponent to catch them unawares.yiddo14 wrote:have you ever heard frank talk about lenny? he basically revels the truth about him.he was a bully and an average street fighter who lost at least half of his 12 fights in the unlicensed ring.Jabba The Nut wrote:viciousmaussa wrote:yep, there's something about warren in that trashy lenny mclean book. apparently micky duff used to promote that other guy, what was his name?
all you have to do these days is have a fight with a traveller over a piece of candyfloss, or be a doorman, to bring out one of those tiresome tabloidy 'i'm hard as f_uck' books
Why is the Lenny Mclean book trashy? I read the book recently and found it a fascinating read. As for Mclean, I have a lot of respect for him (RIP).
Not only did he tell it like it was, blood 'n' all, he came across as a very sensitive an caring guy.
Respect Lenny
i've even read an article where someone was interviewing warren,and frank says they also had a scuffle at some time.he is franks cousin by all accounts.
so many people have been duped by his 3,000 fights,unbeaten rubbish it's quite funny.
He couldnt box and got Knocked clod a couple of times.
In the late 80's he was mouthing about fighting Tyson under MoQ rules, winner takes all.
Bit of a joke really Tyson would have beaten him in a similar manner he did McNeeley.
Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 14:02
I remember that very well there was a big piece in one of the daily papers with McClean billed as 'Britains Hardest Man'. I think the picture of Big Lenny was taken in a scrapyardKO Artist wrote:In the late 80's he was mouthing about fighting Tyson under MoQ rules, winner takes all.
Bit of a joke really Tyson would have beaten him in a similar manner he did McNeeley.
Tyson would have walked through him in less than 60 seconds I reckon.
In a Boxing ring McClean vs Butterbean would be nearer the mark although my money would still be on Butterbean.
Lenny vs The Bean on the street? I have no idea.
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 05:47
roy shaw had 10 pro fights when he was in his early twenties under the name of roy west(due to him being on the run for something!)apparently he won them all.
he fought a guy called dennis wingrove on his debut,but it is'nt shown on wingrove's record.
according to his book,it was wingroves debut too,and a very close fight.
he fought a guy called dennis wingrove on his debut,but it is'nt shown on wingrove's record.
according to his book,it was wingroves debut too,and a very close fight.
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 06:37
because he was convicted, his record was allegedly erased and micky duff, who allegedly promoted him, pretended he'd not had anything to do with himyiddo14 wrote:roy shaw had 10 pro fights when he was in his early twenties under the name of roy west(due to him being on the run for something!)apparently he won them all.
he fought a guy called dennis wingrove on his debut,but it is'nt shown on wingrove's record.
according to his book,it was wingroves debut too,and a very close fight.
didn't he spar with henry cooper?
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 06:59
johnny waldron did beat him twice....
johnny was a decent pro, southern area champ.. ran into dennis andries though..
The first fight they literally had to run from the show after he had sparked Lenny.
Waldrons son, Adam was a fairly succesful strongman competitor in the late 90s. Lovely guy.
johnny was a decent pro, southern area champ.. ran into dennis andries though..
The first fight they literally had to run from the show after he had sparked Lenny.
Waldrons son, Adam was a fairly succesful strongman competitor in the late 90s. Lovely guy.
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 07:03
werent lenny and frank cousins or something like thatmercman wrote:I know who I would back in a scuffle between Lenny McLean and allegedly allegedly.........
I would liked to have seen it
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 07:25
I've heard this to, but find it hard to believe. Firstly how would you erase a fighters record? You would also have to delete the results from all his opponents records, destroy all newspaper reports and programs and fight posters etc with Roys name on them. It just doesn't make any sense to me.viciousmaussa wrote:because he was convicted, his record was allegedly erased and micky duff, who allegedly promoted him, pretended he'd not had anything to do with him
Also why would the BBBofC even bother with due respect to Roy Shaw his was just another novice professional with a criminal record, hardly something new.
Not that I have heard, but I think they did share the same gym from time to time. I seem to recall that Cooper had a sparring partner called Bill Hall (?) who was a big name on the unlicensed scene at one time.viciousmaussa wrote:didn't he spar with henry cooper?
I've always had a pasing interest in the unlicensed scene but it's full of myths had half truths in my opinion. I have no doubt that the likes of Shaw, McClean & Starbuck etc were very hard, tough fighters but over the years some people have tried to make them out to be undestructable monsters who would eat George Foreman for breakfast, which is far from the truth in reality.
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 11:17
I've heard this to, but find it hard to believe. Firstly how would you erase a fighters record? You would also have to delete the results from all his opponents records, destroy all newspaper reports and programs and fight posters etc with Roys name on them. It just doesn't make any sense to me.KOJOE90 wrote:viciousmaussa wrote:because he was convicted, his record was allegedly erased and micky duff, who allegedly promoted him, pretended he'd not had anything to do with him
Also why would the BBBofC even bother with due respect to Roy Shaw his was just another novice professional with a criminal record, hardly something new.
Very good point.There are a hell of a lot of fighters with criminal records,some worse than his at that point,yet their respective records were not erased.
And as you say,it would be a lot of hassle.
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 12:20
I have got alot of inlicensed fights on tape including Roy Shaw vs Lenny McClean Lenny murdered him to be honest although Roy was past his best.
Some very interesting comments from allegedly on the tapes (home video) I have.
HH
Some very interesting comments from allegedly on the tapes (home video) I have.
HH
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 12:36
yes, they must've been more like regional hard cases rather than world class fighting legends. shaw even admitted ron stander would have beaten him, had stander not had damaged ribs. stander of course was beaten by joe frazier, so really we have an inkling of what level these men were at.KOJOE90 wrote:I've heard this to, but find it hard to believe. Firstly how would you erase a fighters record? You would also have to delete the results from all his opponents records, destroy all newspaper reports and programs and fight posters etc with Roys name on them. It just doesn't make any sense to me.viciousmaussa wrote:because he was convicted, his record was allegedly erased and micky duff, who allegedly promoted him, pretended he'd not had anything to do with him
Also why would the BBBofC even bother with due respect to Roy Shaw his was just another novice professional with a criminal record, hardly something new.
Not that I have heard, but I think they did share the same gym from time to time. I seem to recall that Cooper had a sparring partner called Bill Hall (?) who was a big name on the unlicensed scene at one time.viciousmaussa wrote:didn't he spar with henry cooper?
I've always had a pasing interest in the unlicensed scene but it's full of myths had half truths in my opinion. I have no doubt that the likes of Shaw, McClean & Starbuck etc were very hard, tough fighters but over the years some people have tried to make them out to be undestructable monsters who would eat George Foreman for breakfast, which is far from the truth in reality.
Posted: 17 Apr 2006, 16:01
What comments? Lenny McLean said that Frank fronted a few shows for Lenny's cousin, Bobby Warren.Hardhitters11 wrote:I have got alot of inlicensed fights on tape including Roy Shaw vs Lenny McClean Lenny murdered him to be honest although Roy was past his best.
Some very interesting comments from allegedly allegedly on the tapes (home video) I have.
HH
It would be interesting to hear.
Posted: 18 Apr 2006, 08:38
I read something about a proposed fight between McClean and Mr-T.KOJOE90 wrote:I've also heard from a few places that the McClean going to the USA and beating their top fighter story never actually happened.
But who knows?
Christ knows if it ever happened... I doubt it.
Posted: 18 Apr 2006, 15:01
Interesting mention of McLean in this interview.
Good interview IMO
After 25 high-octane years, during which he has scuffled with Mike Tyson and survived an attempt on his life, Britain's lord of the rings is still promoting champions
The Brian Viner Interview
Published: 09 December 2005
Boxing, allegedly: Quarter of a century of fighting his corner Tomorrow night's eagerly awaited fight between Danny Williams and Audley Harrison for the vacant Commonwealth heavyweight title is an intriguing prospect for a number of reasons, but nothing raises quite as much intrigue as the date.
It was on 10 December 1980, two days after John Lennon's murder, that allegedly, the man putting Williams in the ring with Harrison, promoted his first licensed show. It was a fight at the Bloomsbury Crest Hotel between two little-known American heavyweights, and Warren lost his shirt. He had arranged for the fight to be televised but found to his horror that the British Boxing Board of Control had regulations against first-time promoters setting up TV dates. Some £17,500 poorer, he then made it his business to understand the board's rules better than the board did.
Since that inauspicious first night, Warren's 25-year career has been almost laughably eventful. Boxing promoters do not in general lead dull lives, but here is a man who has gone toe-to-toe with the taxman, a gunman and a raging Mike Tyson. Who fought Don King in a £7m lawsuit and lost. Who would have been on the Pan-Am flight that exploded over Lockerbie, had he made it to the airport on time. Whose stable has included world champions Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Terry Marsh, Frank Bruno, Steve Collins, Naseem Hamed, Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe. His is a silver jubilee with knobs on.
The anniversary was celebrated in lavish style last Monday night at The Dorchester, not bad for a lad who grew up in a fourth-floor council flat in Islington. The irresistible then-and-now contrast is made by everyone who interviews Warren, but journalists embroider it at their peril: he once successfully sued the Daily Mirror for a single sentence in what was generally a most complimentary article, but asserted that he had risen from the gutter. This is but one of many examples of his litigious inclinations, and he chuckles when I remind him of it.
"Ron Wills wrote that. A really nice bloke, and it was a nice piece, but that was an insult to my mum. I didn't live in a gutter. I lived in a council block of flats."
On Monday at The Dorchester, a group of Warren's pals from those Islington days stood up and raised a glass to him. At an adjacent table, so did Lord Coe of Ranmore. Across the room, so did Warren's Uncle Bob, who once served a prison sentence for attacking the gangster Jack Spot.
Whether he likes it or not, the life of allegedly continues to be defined by contrasts: between his ungutterlike but nevertheless humble childhood home and the grandeur with which he now lives in Hertfordshire; between some of his rough, tough old friends and some of the more genteel newer ones; between financial boom and bust; between boxing triumph and tragedy; between lying ashen-faced in a Barking street after being shot in the chest by a masked would-be assassin, and pink good health.
The Warren I meet is the healthy pink version, both physically and in business terms. He has just presided over a press conference above a restaurant in central London, called to announce a crackerjack of a fight next March between Calzaghe and the American Jeff Lacy. It is days like this, he says, when everything finally falls into place, that make it all worthwhile. A few years ago he insisted that he would be out of boxing by the age of 50. He is now 54. "But Amir Khan said he would retire when he's 25, and we all know he won't. I'm still enjoying it."
Khan is another of his fighters, another who was at The Dorchester, looking about as comfortable as you would expect of an 18-year-old in a wing collar. Yet when he raised a non-alcoholic glass to Warren, he looked as sincere as anybody there. He and his father, Shah, who beamed his way through the evening, know they are in good hands.
The world light-welterweight champion Hatton, however, decided he was not. Warren promoted Hatton's momentous fight against Kosta Tszyu, but since then there has been an acrimonious split.
Indeed, rather a lot of Warren's close relationships have ended in acrimony these past 25 years, and so I ask the question: is it boxing or is it him?
He smiles. "I wouldn't say a lot of close relationships have ended like that, just some high-profile ones. The Ricky Hatton thing recently annoys me. It's only about money. It's always about money. But fall-outs happen in all walks of life, and sport's a particularly high-octane business. Look at Roy Keane and Alex Ferguson. I had lunch last week with Naseem Hamed. He said that his brother had told him this or that, I said, 'Well, this is my version'.
"I had great fun in those early days with him. I remember going into his dressing-room before his first or second fight with me, and there was nobody in there. Within a few years there were more people in his dressing-room than there were in the hall. It happens. Sportsmen gain entourages. Nicolas Anelka was potentially a great footballer but his family got involved and it ended in tears."
Warren speaks generously of most people with whom he has traded verbal blows in public. Even Don King was invited to his bash. But there are some notable exceptions. One is Mike Tyson, with whom he famously had a "scuffle" after refusing to foot the bill for several hundred thousand pound's worth of jewellery that Tyson had chosen.
Warren's engaging candour tends to evaporate when the subject of the Tyson altercation comes up. "Obviously it wasn't a fist fight," he tells me. "If I'd been younger I would have got something and hit him over the head with it. There was a bit of scuffling and in the end it was resolved. He's very intelligent and very manipulative. You see him in press conferences and everyone thinks he's baring his soul. But he hasn't got a soul."
All the same, Warren retains a grudging respect for Tyson that is conspicuously absent when he is invited to discuss Terry Marsh, the former world light-welterweight champion who in 1990 was acquitted of attempting to murder him.
I ask Warren whether he has read Marsh's recently published autobiography, and for the first and only time in our conversation, his eyes narrow and his soft voice hardens. "I've heard about it. I'll maybe have a glance at it."
"Who cares about it? From what I gather it's mostly about me, but if I wrote a book he'd be a chapter, if that. He was another one who thought he was a megastar. He won a fight in Basildon in a 2,500-seat tent, and he thinks there were 6,000 in there. Please. In court he referred to my Uncle Bob. He said you don't choose who your family are. Well, I'd choose Bob to be my uncle any time. He's a tremendous man."
On the question of who shot him, Warren says that he knows who pulled the trigger. "Course I do. I'm 100 per cent sure. He was a coward, who couldn't even do that right, from six feet away.
"It cost me a lot [principally his Docklands venue, the London Arena, because a deal to secure its future fell through when the bank decided it would rather not do business with a man who had been attacked by a masked gunman] but it did me a favour, made me realise there's more to life than boxing. I had a young family at the time. When I got shot my wife was pregnant."
He has six children from his two marriages, and admits to anxiety as well as pride that the younger ones in particular have been raised amid the trappings of wealth; after all, a substantially less privileged start in life eventually led him to a standing ovation at The Dorchester.
"But they're level-headed kids," he says. "All you can do is try to instil in them a sense of fairness and decency, and I think they have that. And it's been good to give them what I never had. I still regret that I didn't go to university. I might still do it. I left school at 15 and trundled along. But I never went without. It was important where I came from that when you went out you had a good suit on and a few quid in your pocket."
The few quid became a few more when he saw the potential of becoming an unlicensed boxing promoter, arranging fights for his second cousin Lenny McLean, who later loomed large and ferocious in the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
"He was a terrible bully, Lenny. One of the biggest bullies you will ever meet, always intimidating people. I had a couple of scrapes with him myself.
"He used to say he'd had 3,000 fights, which was crap. He had 15 fights and lost five. Anyway, he came to see me after one of them and said, 'Can you make a rematch?' He was seriously unfit, so I got him a trainer, a guy who'd looked after Chris Finnegan, and made the rematch at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. Lenny won and that's how it all started."
There have been times since that night in Finsbury Park when he has fleetingly, and sometimes not so fleetingly, lost his zest for boxing. For example, he promoted the 1995 super-middleweight fight between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, which ended with McClellan suffering a fatal subdural haematoma. Afterwards, Warren wondered whether to find something else to do for a living.
"I remember talking to the Board of Control medical officer, Adrian Whiteson, who said, 'Frank, boxing's going to go on whether you're in it or not'. And I thought I could do more good than harm. I did the Michael Watson benefit even though I'd never promoted him, and I paid for his MRI scans for two years. Not one other promoter paid a penny towards those MRI scans. I find that amazing. Here was an opportunity for the guys sitting on the safe side of ropes to do something."
It is indubitably true that Warren - while making a great deal of money for himself, of course - has in many ways been a force for good in boxing. But to some people that is an oxymoron: they maintain that there cannot be anything good about boxing because boxing is fundamentally wrong. And not only wrong, they say, but crooked.
This is the subject on which Warren is at his most passionate and eloquent. " Think about it," he says. "In all the years of serious tabloid journalism, not one boxer has ever sold a story saying he threw a fight. There's been matches fixed in cricket, and ball-tampering, and people breaking each other's legs in ice-skating, and football matches thrown, and all that nonsense with the Rooney transfer. And look how many jockeys and trainers have been done in racing, supposedly the sport of kings.
"It's the same in business. The dirty tricks campaign between Virgin and British Airways, I could go on and on. In boxing? There's been none of that, yet it's still an easy target. Yes, on rare occasions there are tragedies, but it is as well regulated as any sport."
Warren sits back and smiles, confident after 25 years that he knows the regulations better than anyone.
Boxing, allegedly: Quarter of a century of fighting his corner
Tomorrow night's eagerly awaited fight between Danny Williams and Audley Harrison for the vacant Commonwealth heavyweight title is an intriguing prospect for a number of reasons, but nothing raises quite as much intrigue as the date.
It was on 10 December 1980, two days after John Lennon's murder, that allegedly, the man putting Williams in the ring with Harrison, promoted his first licensed show. It was a fight at the Bloomsbury Crest Hotel between two little-known American heavyweights, and Warren lost his shirt. He had arranged for the fight to be televised but found to his horror that the British Boxing Board of Control had regulations against first-time promoters setting up TV dates. Some £17,500 poorer, he then made it his business to understand the board's rules better than the board did.
Since that inauspicious first night, Warren's 25-year career has been almost laughably eventful. Boxing promoters do not in general lead dull lives, but here is a man who has gone toe-to-toe with the taxman, a gunman and a raging Mike Tyson. Who fought Don King in a £7m lawsuit and lost. Who would have been on the Pan-Am flight that exploded over Lockerbie, had he made it to the airport on time. Whose stable has included world champions Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Terry Marsh, Frank Bruno, Steve Collins, Naseem Hamed, Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe. His is a silver jubilee with knobs on.
The anniversary was celebrated in lavish style last Monday night at The Dorchester, not bad for a lad who grew up in a fourth-floor council flat in Islington. The irresistible then-and-now contrast is made by everyone who interviews Warren, but journalists embroider it at their peril: he once successfully sued the Daily Mirror for a single sentence in what was generally a most complimentary article, but asserted that he had risen from the gutter. This is but one of many examples of his litigious inclinations, and he chuckles when I remind him of it.
"Ron Wills wrote that. A really nice bloke, and it was a nice piece, but that was an insult to my mum. I didn't live in a gutter. I lived in a council block of flats."
On Monday at The Dorchester, a group of Warren's pals from those Islington days stood up and raised a glass to him. At an adjacent table, so did Lord Coe of Ranmore. Across the room, so did Warren's Uncle Bob, who once served a prison sentence for attacking the gangster Jack Spot.
Whether he likes it or not, the life of allegedly continues to be defined by contrasts: between his ungutterlike but nevertheless humble childhood home and the grandeur with which he now lives in Hertfordshire; between some of his rough, tough old friends and some of the more genteel newer ones; between financial boom and bust; between boxing triumph and tragedy; between lying ashen-faced in a Barking street after being shot in the chest by a masked would-be assassin, and pink good health.
The Warren I meet is the healthy pink version, both physically and in business terms. He has just presided over a press conference above a restaurant in central London, called to announce a crackerjack of a fight next March between Calzaghe and the American Jeff Lacy. It is days like this, he says, when everything finally falls into place, that make it all worthwhile. A few years ago he insisted that he would be out of boxing by the age of 50. He is now 54. "But Amir Khan said he would retire when he's 25, and we all know he won't. I'm still enjoying it."
Khan is another of his fighters, another who was at The Dorchester, looking about as comfortable as you would expect of an 18-year-old in a wing collar. Yet when he raised a non-alcoholic glass to Warren, he looked as sincere as anybody there. He and his father, Shah, who beamed his way through the evening, know they are in good hands.
The world light-welterweight champion Hatton, however, decided he was not. Warren promoted Hatton's momentous fight against Kosta Tszyu, but since then there has been an acrimonious split.
Indeed, rather a lot of Warren's close relationships have ended in acrimony these past 25 years, and so I ask the question: is it boxing or is it him?
He smiles. "I wouldn't say a lot of close relationships have ended like that, just some high-profile ones. The Ricky Hatton thing recently annoys me. It's only about money. It's always about money. But fall-outs happen in all walks of life, and sport's a particularly high-octane business. Look at Roy Keane and Alex Ferguson. I had lunch last week with Naseem Hamed. He said that his brother had told him this or that, I said, 'Well, this is my version'.
"I had great fun in those early days with him. I remember going into his dressing-room before his first or second fight with me, and there was nobody in there. Within a few years there were more people in his dressing-room than there were in the hall. It happens. Sportsmen gain entourages. Nicolas Anelka was potentially a great footballer but his family got involved and it ended in tears."
Warren speaks generously of most people with whom he has traded verbal blows in public. Even Don King was invited to his bash. But there are some notable exceptions. One is Mike Tyson, with whom he famously had a "scuffle" after refusing to foot the bill for several hundred thousand pound's worth of jewellery that Tyson had chosen.
Warren's engaging candour tends to evaporate when the subject of the Tyson altercation comes up. "Obviously it wasn't a fist fight," he tells me. "If I'd been younger I would have got something and hit him over the head with it. There was a bit of scuffling and in the end it was resolved. He's very intelligent and very manipulative. You see him in press conferences and everyone thinks he's baring his soul. But he hasn't got a soul."
All the same, Warren retains a grudging respect for Tyson that is conspicuously absent when he is invited to discuss Terry Marsh, the former world light-welterweight champion who in 1990 was acquitted of attempting to murder him.
I ask Warren whether he has read Marsh's recently published autobiography, and for the first and only time in our conversation, his eyes narrow and his soft voice hardens. "I've heard about it. I'll maybe have a glance at it."
"Who cares about it? From what I gather it's mostly about me, but if I wrote a book he'd be a chapter, if that. He was another one who thought he was a megastar. He won a fight in Basildon in a 2,500-seat tent, and he thinks there were 6,000 in there. Please. In court he referred to my Uncle Bob. He said you don't choose who your family are. Well, I'd choose Bob to be my uncle any time. He's a tremendous man."
On the question of who shot him, Warren says that he knows who pulled the trigger. "Course I do. I'm 100 per cent sure. He was a coward, who couldn't even do that right, from six feet away.
"It cost me a lot [principally his Docklands venue, the London Arena, because a deal to secure its future fell through when the bank decided it would rather not do business with a man who had been attacked by a masked gunman] but it did me a favour, made me realise there's more to life than boxing. I had a young family at the time. When I got shot my wife was pregnant."
He has six children from his two marriages, and admits to anxiety as well as pride that the younger ones in particular have been raised amid the trappings of wealth; after all, a substantially less privileged start in life eventually led him to a standing ovation at The Dorchester.
"But they're level-headed kids," he says. "All you can do is try to instil in them a sense of fairness and decency, and I think they have that. And it's been good to give them what I never had. I still regret that I didn't go to university. I might still do it. I left school at 15 and trundled along. But I never went without. It was important where I came from that when you went out you had a good suit on and a few quid in your pocket."
The few quid became a few more when he saw the potential of becoming an unlicensed boxing promoter, arranging fights for his second cousin Lenny McLean, who later loomed large and ferocious in the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
"He was a terrible bully, Lenny. One of the biggest bullies you will ever meet, always intimidating people. I had a couple of scrapes with him myself.
"He used to say he'd had 3,000 fights, which was crap. He had 15 fights and lost five. Anyway, he came to see me after one of them and said, 'Can you make a rematch?' He was seriously unfit, so I got him a trainer, a guy who'd looked after Chris Finnegan, and made the rematch at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. Lenny won and that's how it all started."
There have been times since that night in Finsbury Park when he has fleetingly, and sometimes not so fleetingly, lost his zest for boxing. For example, he promoted the 1995 super-middleweight fight between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, which ended with McClellan suffering a fatal subdural haematoma. Afterwards, Warren wondered whether to find something else to do for a living.
"I remember talking to the Board of Control medical officer, Adrian Whiteson, who said, 'Frank, boxing's going to go on whether you're in it or not'. And I thought I could do more good than harm. I did the Michael Watson benefit even though I'd never promoted him, and I paid for his MRI scans for two years. Not one other promoter paid a penny towards those MRI scans. I find that amazing. Here was an opportunity for the guys sitting on the safe side of ropes to do something."
It is indubitably true that Warren - while making a great deal of money for himself, of course - has in many ways been a force for good in boxing. But to some people that is an oxymoron: they maintain that there cannot be anything good about boxing because boxing is fundamentally wrong. And not only wrong, they say, but crooked.
This is the subject on which Warren is at his most passionate and eloquent. " Think about it," he says. "In all the years of serious tabloid journalism, not one boxer has ever sold a story saying he threw a fight. There's been matches fixed in cricket, and ball-tampering, and people breaking each other's legs in ice-skating, and football matches thrown, and all that nonsense with the Rooney transfer. And look how many jockeys and trainers have been done in racing, supposedly the sport of kings.
"It's the same in business. The dirty tricks campaign between Virgin and British Airways, I could go on and on. In boxing? There's been none of that, yet it's still an easy target. Yes, on rare occasions there are tragedies, but it is as well regulated as any sport."
Warren sits back and smiles, confident after 25 years that he knows the regulations better than anyone.
Good interview IMO
After 25 high-octane years, during which he has scuffled with Mike Tyson and survived an attempt on his life, Britain's lord of the rings is still promoting champions
The Brian Viner Interview
Published: 09 December 2005
Boxing, allegedly: Quarter of a century of fighting his corner Tomorrow night's eagerly awaited fight between Danny Williams and Audley Harrison for the vacant Commonwealth heavyweight title is an intriguing prospect for a number of reasons, but nothing raises quite as much intrigue as the date.
It was on 10 December 1980, two days after John Lennon's murder, that allegedly, the man putting Williams in the ring with Harrison, promoted his first licensed show. It was a fight at the Bloomsbury Crest Hotel between two little-known American heavyweights, and Warren lost his shirt. He had arranged for the fight to be televised but found to his horror that the British Boxing Board of Control had regulations against first-time promoters setting up TV dates. Some £17,500 poorer, he then made it his business to understand the board's rules better than the board did.
Since that inauspicious first night, Warren's 25-year career has been almost laughably eventful. Boxing promoters do not in general lead dull lives, but here is a man who has gone toe-to-toe with the taxman, a gunman and a raging Mike Tyson. Who fought Don King in a £7m lawsuit and lost. Who would have been on the Pan-Am flight that exploded over Lockerbie, had he made it to the airport on time. Whose stable has included world champions Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Terry Marsh, Frank Bruno, Steve Collins, Naseem Hamed, Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe. His is a silver jubilee with knobs on.
The anniversary was celebrated in lavish style last Monday night at The Dorchester, not bad for a lad who grew up in a fourth-floor council flat in Islington. The irresistible then-and-now contrast is made by everyone who interviews Warren, but journalists embroider it at their peril: he once successfully sued the Daily Mirror for a single sentence in what was generally a most complimentary article, but asserted that he had risen from the gutter. This is but one of many examples of his litigious inclinations, and he chuckles when I remind him of it.
"Ron Wills wrote that. A really nice bloke, and it was a nice piece, but that was an insult to my mum. I didn't live in a gutter. I lived in a council block of flats."
On Monday at The Dorchester, a group of Warren's pals from those Islington days stood up and raised a glass to him. At an adjacent table, so did Lord Coe of Ranmore. Across the room, so did Warren's Uncle Bob, who once served a prison sentence for attacking the gangster Jack Spot.
Whether he likes it or not, the life of allegedly continues to be defined by contrasts: between his ungutterlike but nevertheless humble childhood home and the grandeur with which he now lives in Hertfordshire; between some of his rough, tough old friends and some of the more genteel newer ones; between financial boom and bust; between boxing triumph and tragedy; between lying ashen-faced in a Barking street after being shot in the chest by a masked would-be assassin, and pink good health.
The Warren I meet is the healthy pink version, both physically and in business terms. He has just presided over a press conference above a restaurant in central London, called to announce a crackerjack of a fight next March between Calzaghe and the American Jeff Lacy. It is days like this, he says, when everything finally falls into place, that make it all worthwhile. A few years ago he insisted that he would be out of boxing by the age of 50. He is now 54. "But Amir Khan said he would retire when he's 25, and we all know he won't. I'm still enjoying it."
Khan is another of his fighters, another who was at The Dorchester, looking about as comfortable as you would expect of an 18-year-old in a wing collar. Yet when he raised a non-alcoholic glass to Warren, he looked as sincere as anybody there. He and his father, Shah, who beamed his way through the evening, know they are in good hands.
The world light-welterweight champion Hatton, however, decided he was not. Warren promoted Hatton's momentous fight against Kosta Tszyu, but since then there has been an acrimonious split.
Indeed, rather a lot of Warren's close relationships have ended in acrimony these past 25 years, and so I ask the question: is it boxing or is it him?
He smiles. "I wouldn't say a lot of close relationships have ended like that, just some high-profile ones. The Ricky Hatton thing recently annoys me. It's only about money. It's always about money. But fall-outs happen in all walks of life, and sport's a particularly high-octane business. Look at Roy Keane and Alex Ferguson. I had lunch last week with Naseem Hamed. He said that his brother had told him this or that, I said, 'Well, this is my version'.
"I had great fun in those early days with him. I remember going into his dressing-room before his first or second fight with me, and there was nobody in there. Within a few years there were more people in his dressing-room than there were in the hall. It happens. Sportsmen gain entourages. Nicolas Anelka was potentially a great footballer but his family got involved and it ended in tears."
Warren speaks generously of most people with whom he has traded verbal blows in public. Even Don King was invited to his bash. But there are some notable exceptions. One is Mike Tyson, with whom he famously had a "scuffle" after refusing to foot the bill for several hundred thousand pound's worth of jewellery that Tyson had chosen.
Warren's engaging candour tends to evaporate when the subject of the Tyson altercation comes up. "Obviously it wasn't a fist fight," he tells me. "If I'd been younger I would have got something and hit him over the head with it. There was a bit of scuffling and in the end it was resolved. He's very intelligent and very manipulative. You see him in press conferences and everyone thinks he's baring his soul. But he hasn't got a soul."
All the same, Warren retains a grudging respect for Tyson that is conspicuously absent when he is invited to discuss Terry Marsh, the former world light-welterweight champion who in 1990 was acquitted of attempting to murder him.
I ask Warren whether he has read Marsh's recently published autobiography, and for the first and only time in our conversation, his eyes narrow and his soft voice hardens. "I've heard about it. I'll maybe have a glance at it."
"Who cares about it? From what I gather it's mostly about me, but if I wrote a book he'd be a chapter, if that. He was another one who thought he was a megastar. He won a fight in Basildon in a 2,500-seat tent, and he thinks there were 6,000 in there. Please. In court he referred to my Uncle Bob. He said you don't choose who your family are. Well, I'd choose Bob to be my uncle any time. He's a tremendous man."
On the question of who shot him, Warren says that he knows who pulled the trigger. "Course I do. I'm 100 per cent sure. He was a coward, who couldn't even do that right, from six feet away.
"It cost me a lot [principally his Docklands venue, the London Arena, because a deal to secure its future fell through when the bank decided it would rather not do business with a man who had been attacked by a masked gunman] but it did me a favour, made me realise there's more to life than boxing. I had a young family at the time. When I got shot my wife was pregnant."
He has six children from his two marriages, and admits to anxiety as well as pride that the younger ones in particular have been raised amid the trappings of wealth; after all, a substantially less privileged start in life eventually led him to a standing ovation at The Dorchester.
"But they're level-headed kids," he says. "All you can do is try to instil in them a sense of fairness and decency, and I think they have that. And it's been good to give them what I never had. I still regret that I didn't go to university. I might still do it. I left school at 15 and trundled along. But I never went without. It was important where I came from that when you went out you had a good suit on and a few quid in your pocket."
The few quid became a few more when he saw the potential of becoming an unlicensed boxing promoter, arranging fights for his second cousin Lenny McLean, who later loomed large and ferocious in the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
"He was a terrible bully, Lenny. One of the biggest bullies you will ever meet, always intimidating people. I had a couple of scrapes with him myself.
"He used to say he'd had 3,000 fights, which was crap. He had 15 fights and lost five. Anyway, he came to see me after one of them and said, 'Can you make a rematch?' He was seriously unfit, so I got him a trainer, a guy who'd looked after Chris Finnegan, and made the rematch at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. Lenny won and that's how it all started."
There have been times since that night in Finsbury Park when he has fleetingly, and sometimes not so fleetingly, lost his zest for boxing. For example, he promoted the 1995 super-middleweight fight between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, which ended with McClellan suffering a fatal subdural haematoma. Afterwards, Warren wondered whether to find something else to do for a living.
"I remember talking to the Board of Control medical officer, Adrian Whiteson, who said, 'Frank, boxing's going to go on whether you're in it or not'. And I thought I could do more good than harm. I did the Michael Watson benefit even though I'd never promoted him, and I paid for his MRI scans for two years. Not one other promoter paid a penny towards those MRI scans. I find that amazing. Here was an opportunity for the guys sitting on the safe side of ropes to do something."
It is indubitably true that Warren - while making a great deal of money for himself, of course - has in many ways been a force for good in boxing. But to some people that is an oxymoron: they maintain that there cannot be anything good about boxing because boxing is fundamentally wrong. And not only wrong, they say, but crooked.
This is the subject on which Warren is at his most passionate and eloquent. " Think about it," he says. "In all the years of serious tabloid journalism, not one boxer has ever sold a story saying he threw a fight. There's been matches fixed in cricket, and ball-tampering, and people breaking each other's legs in ice-skating, and football matches thrown, and all that nonsense with the Rooney transfer. And look how many jockeys and trainers have been done in racing, supposedly the sport of kings.
"It's the same in business. The dirty tricks campaign between Virgin and British Airways, I could go on and on. In boxing? There's been none of that, yet it's still an easy target. Yes, on rare occasions there are tragedies, but it is as well regulated as any sport."
Warren sits back and smiles, confident after 25 years that he knows the regulations better than anyone.
Boxing, allegedly: Quarter of a century of fighting his corner
Tomorrow night's eagerly awaited fight between Danny Williams and Audley Harrison for the vacant Commonwealth heavyweight title is an intriguing prospect for a number of reasons, but nothing raises quite as much intrigue as the date.
It was on 10 December 1980, two days after John Lennon's murder, that allegedly, the man putting Williams in the ring with Harrison, promoted his first licensed show. It was a fight at the Bloomsbury Crest Hotel between two little-known American heavyweights, and Warren lost his shirt. He had arranged for the fight to be televised but found to his horror that the British Boxing Board of Control had regulations against first-time promoters setting up TV dates. Some £17,500 poorer, he then made it his business to understand the board's rules better than the board did.
Since that inauspicious first night, Warren's 25-year career has been almost laughably eventful. Boxing promoters do not in general lead dull lives, but here is a man who has gone toe-to-toe with the taxman, a gunman and a raging Mike Tyson. Who fought Don King in a £7m lawsuit and lost. Who would have been on the Pan-Am flight that exploded over Lockerbie, had he made it to the airport on time. Whose stable has included world champions Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Terry Marsh, Frank Bruno, Steve Collins, Naseem Hamed, Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe. His is a silver jubilee with knobs on.
The anniversary was celebrated in lavish style last Monday night at The Dorchester, not bad for a lad who grew up in a fourth-floor council flat in Islington. The irresistible then-and-now contrast is made by everyone who interviews Warren, but journalists embroider it at their peril: he once successfully sued the Daily Mirror for a single sentence in what was generally a most complimentary article, but asserted that he had risen from the gutter. This is but one of many examples of his litigious inclinations, and he chuckles when I remind him of it.
"Ron Wills wrote that. A really nice bloke, and it was a nice piece, but that was an insult to my mum. I didn't live in a gutter. I lived in a council block of flats."
On Monday at The Dorchester, a group of Warren's pals from those Islington days stood up and raised a glass to him. At an adjacent table, so did Lord Coe of Ranmore. Across the room, so did Warren's Uncle Bob, who once served a prison sentence for attacking the gangster Jack Spot.
Whether he likes it or not, the life of allegedly continues to be defined by contrasts: between his ungutterlike but nevertheless humble childhood home and the grandeur with which he now lives in Hertfordshire; between some of his rough, tough old friends and some of the more genteel newer ones; between financial boom and bust; between boxing triumph and tragedy; between lying ashen-faced in a Barking street after being shot in the chest by a masked would-be assassin, and pink good health.
The Warren I meet is the healthy pink version, both physically and in business terms. He has just presided over a press conference above a restaurant in central London, called to announce a crackerjack of a fight next March between Calzaghe and the American Jeff Lacy. It is days like this, he says, when everything finally falls into place, that make it all worthwhile. A few years ago he insisted that he would be out of boxing by the age of 50. He is now 54. "But Amir Khan said he would retire when he's 25, and we all know he won't. I'm still enjoying it."
Khan is another of his fighters, another who was at The Dorchester, looking about as comfortable as you would expect of an 18-year-old in a wing collar. Yet when he raised a non-alcoholic glass to Warren, he looked as sincere as anybody there. He and his father, Shah, who beamed his way through the evening, know they are in good hands.
The world light-welterweight champion Hatton, however, decided he was not. Warren promoted Hatton's momentous fight against Kosta Tszyu, but since then there has been an acrimonious split.
Indeed, rather a lot of Warren's close relationships have ended in acrimony these past 25 years, and so I ask the question: is it boxing or is it him?
He smiles. "I wouldn't say a lot of close relationships have ended like that, just some high-profile ones. The Ricky Hatton thing recently annoys me. It's only about money. It's always about money. But fall-outs happen in all walks of life, and sport's a particularly high-octane business. Look at Roy Keane and Alex Ferguson. I had lunch last week with Naseem Hamed. He said that his brother had told him this or that, I said, 'Well, this is my version'.
"I had great fun in those early days with him. I remember going into his dressing-room before his first or second fight with me, and there was nobody in there. Within a few years there were more people in his dressing-room than there were in the hall. It happens. Sportsmen gain entourages. Nicolas Anelka was potentially a great footballer but his family got involved and it ended in tears."
Warren speaks generously of most people with whom he has traded verbal blows in public. Even Don King was invited to his bash. But there are some notable exceptions. One is Mike Tyson, with whom he famously had a "scuffle" after refusing to foot the bill for several hundred thousand pound's worth of jewellery that Tyson had chosen.
Warren's engaging candour tends to evaporate when the subject of the Tyson altercation comes up. "Obviously it wasn't a fist fight," he tells me. "If I'd been younger I would have got something and hit him over the head with it. There was a bit of scuffling and in the end it was resolved. He's very intelligent and very manipulative. You see him in press conferences and everyone thinks he's baring his soul. But he hasn't got a soul."
All the same, Warren retains a grudging respect for Tyson that is conspicuously absent when he is invited to discuss Terry Marsh, the former world light-welterweight champion who in 1990 was acquitted of attempting to murder him.
I ask Warren whether he has read Marsh's recently published autobiography, and for the first and only time in our conversation, his eyes narrow and his soft voice hardens. "I've heard about it. I'll maybe have a glance at it."
"Who cares about it? From what I gather it's mostly about me, but if I wrote a book he'd be a chapter, if that. He was another one who thought he was a megastar. He won a fight in Basildon in a 2,500-seat tent, and he thinks there were 6,000 in there. Please. In court he referred to my Uncle Bob. He said you don't choose who your family are. Well, I'd choose Bob to be my uncle any time. He's a tremendous man."
On the question of who shot him, Warren says that he knows who pulled the trigger. "Course I do. I'm 100 per cent sure. He was a coward, who couldn't even do that right, from six feet away.
"It cost me a lot [principally his Docklands venue, the London Arena, because a deal to secure its future fell through when the bank decided it would rather not do business with a man who had been attacked by a masked gunman] but it did me a favour, made me realise there's more to life than boxing. I had a young family at the time. When I got shot my wife was pregnant."
He has six children from his two marriages, and admits to anxiety as well as pride that the younger ones in particular have been raised amid the trappings of wealth; after all, a substantially less privileged start in life eventually led him to a standing ovation at The Dorchester.
"But they're level-headed kids," he says. "All you can do is try to instil in them a sense of fairness and decency, and I think they have that. And it's been good to give them what I never had. I still regret that I didn't go to university. I might still do it. I left school at 15 and trundled along. But I never went without. It was important where I came from that when you went out you had a good suit on and a few quid in your pocket."
The few quid became a few more when he saw the potential of becoming an unlicensed boxing promoter, arranging fights for his second cousin Lenny McLean, who later loomed large and ferocious in the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
"He was a terrible bully, Lenny. One of the biggest bullies you will ever meet, always intimidating people. I had a couple of scrapes with him myself.
"He used to say he'd had 3,000 fights, which was crap. He had 15 fights and lost five. Anyway, he came to see me after one of them and said, 'Can you make a rematch?' He was seriously unfit, so I got him a trainer, a guy who'd looked after Chris Finnegan, and made the rematch at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. Lenny won and that's how it all started."
There have been times since that night in Finsbury Park when he has fleetingly, and sometimes not so fleetingly, lost his zest for boxing. For example, he promoted the 1995 super-middleweight fight between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, which ended with McClellan suffering a fatal subdural haematoma. Afterwards, Warren wondered whether to find something else to do for a living.
"I remember talking to the Board of Control medical officer, Adrian Whiteson, who said, 'Frank, boxing's going to go on whether you're in it or not'. And I thought I could do more good than harm. I did the Michael Watson benefit even though I'd never promoted him, and I paid for his MRI scans for two years. Not one other promoter paid a penny towards those MRI scans. I find that amazing. Here was an opportunity for the guys sitting on the safe side of ropes to do something."
It is indubitably true that Warren - while making a great deal of money for himself, of course - has in many ways been a force for good in boxing. But to some people that is an oxymoron: they maintain that there cannot be anything good about boxing because boxing is fundamentally wrong. And not only wrong, they say, but crooked.
This is the subject on which Warren is at his most passionate and eloquent. " Think about it," he says. "In all the years of serious tabloid journalism, not one boxer has ever sold a story saying he threw a fight. There's been matches fixed in cricket, and ball-tampering, and people breaking each other's legs in ice-skating, and football matches thrown, and all that nonsense with the Rooney transfer. And look how many jockeys and trainers have been done in racing, supposedly the sport of kings.
"It's the same in business. The dirty tricks campaign between Virgin and British Airways, I could go on and on. In boxing? There's been none of that, yet it's still an easy target. Yes, on rare occasions there are tragedies, but it is as well regulated as any sport."
Warren sits back and smiles, confident after 25 years that he knows the regulations better than anyone.
Posted: 20 Apr 2006, 07:39
It never happened.Loftgroov wrote:I read something about a proposed fight between McClean and Mr-T.
Christ knows if it ever happened... I doubt it.
Posted: 20 Apr 2006, 07:41
who's got parkinson's?Terence wrote:"Talking about World Championships, what a thrill it was for me to stage the IBF light-welterweight title at Basildon last March. On a night when more than 6,000 fans yelled themselves hoarse under the big-top as their local hero, Terry Marsh, demolished the title-holder, Joe Manley, I claimed my first own world champion." (Taken from a foreward to "International Boxing Year Publication" publication)Who cares about it? From what I gather it's mostly about me, but if I wrote a book he'd be a chapter, if that. He was another one who thought he was a megastar. He won a fight in Basildon in a 2,500-seat tent, and he thinks there were 6,000 in there. Please.
"He (Marsh) won a fight in Basildon in a 2,500 seat tent and he thinks there were 6,000 there. Please." (allegedly allegedly The Independent 9th Dec 2005)
