BoxRec

Frank looked great at the 02, making eye contact and cracking jokes.
He was surely the greatest-conditioned heavyweight since Marciano.

bennie wrote:Frank looked great at the 02, making eye contact and cracking jokes.
He was surely the greatest-conditioned heavyweight since Marciano.

Is this ironic or are you serious? He may have looked great but he wasn't well conditioned!

Well, to look at yes, he never had anything like Marciano's legendary stamina though. I always wondered how much of that was down to how tense he was in the ring though, as much as all that muscle he was packing.

Good to hear he seemed well, the last few times I'd seen him at events (a while ago now), he seemed very tense and ill at ease.

Never liked Bruno, to watch or to listen to. Lennox criticised him for cultivating a thick black man persona to make himself popular nationwide. basically Bruno tried to sue him as well in the '90s.

To be fair to Frank, he had a pretty shitty time when he was a young man. Got whipped to within an inch of his life by a strict disciplinarian father, got bullied at school, ended up in Borstal, and was obviously someone with a mutable personality who was manipulated by his management to cultivate a cuddly thick fcuckwit image so as not to alieante the punters, who they thought weren't ready for a big threatening black british heavyweight.

I'm sure looking back, Frank probably regrets some of the way he portrayed himself, but truth be told, Frank had it a lot harder than Lewis did, and Lewis' taunts reminded me a little of Ali's taunts of Frazier for not being 'black' enough.