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 Local, regional and national sports news John Conteh (Former world champion) “Boxing was a quick way out of being poor.” Death where is thy sting! I hadn’t time for a five year apprenticeship and no-one was going to send me to Hollywood. Boxing was never a sport to me. It was a deadly game, it was a path I was forced to follow”.  When I was a youngster after the second World War, I was mad on boxing and a big fan of two of the most popular fighters of the time, Freddie Mills and Randolph Turpin. In all sports, yesterday’s heroes always seem to become bigger and better in the mind, especially in boxing, but these two English battlers will always be recalled with pride when boxing fans reminisce about the fight game. Freddie Mills was born in Bournemouth on 26th June 1919, and during his boxing career he gave the fans thrills galore. Not a classic boxer, he was a fighter who went about his work in the only way he knew, by striving to lay the opposition on the canvas, fighting until he himself was stopped by his opponent, or the final bell. British fight fans loved Mills for his courage and ‘never-say-die’ attitude in the ring, and he finally reached his goal by taking the world light heavyweight title from the American Gus Lesnevitch in 1948. He then took on some of the world’s top heavyweights and giving stones away in weight he took some savage beatings before losing his world light heavyweight crown to the American Joey ‘Machine Gun’ Maxim. Freddie invested his ring earnings into restaurants and a nightclub. Troubled by personal and financial problems, it all ended suddenly and tragically when he was found dead, shot in the heat in his parked car outside his club in London in 1965. His sad demise still remains something of a mystery to this day. Britain’s other post World War II hero, Randolph Turpin, would sadly suffer a similar fate as Mills a year later, when, unable to take the burden of financial and domestic pressures, he went upstairs in the café he was running with his wife at the time in Leamington Spa, and shot himself. He was only 37 years of age. Turpin was born in Leamington on 7th June 1928 and never knew his father, a British Guiana merchant seaman who died when Randolph was only a few months old, leaving his white wife with five children to support on a pension of only £1.7 shillings a week. Randolph and his two brothers Dick and Jackie would all become top-notch British boxers with Randolph reaching the pinnacle of his chosen profession in 1951 when he beat the great Sugar Ray Robinson for the latter’s undisputed world middleweight crown, and taking into consideration that at the time Robinson was the biggest name in world boxing and had only one defeat on his record in 91 fights, it must surely be classed as the greatest win ever by a British boxer, Sadly it was downhill for the Leamington Licker in later years and in 1958 he retired from the boxing game. He dabbled in wrestling for a while at £25 a bout, and at the age of 30 he was driving a scrap metal lorry through the streets of Leamington. He was a tragically depressed man. In 1962 he was unable to pay the £17,126 the Inland Revenue claimed on his boxing earnings and he was declared bankrupt. He took his own life a beaten man. Throughout boxing history there have been many tragic endings for the fighters involved but I can’t recall anything quite like the tragedies which occurred during July of this year. Within a few short weeks three world champions died. The first shocking news came at the beginning of the month upon learning that the former three-weight world champion Alexis Argüello had shot himself through the heart at his home. He was 57 years old. The Nicaraguan was forced to endure poverty and political strife in his younger days and sought to make ends meet with his family whatever way he could. He took up professional boxing at 16 and within a few years he became a huge favourite in the States. He retired from the ring in 1994 after being diagnosed as having a heart problem. The boxing legend had many problems during his life. He lost millions of dollars of assets when the left-wing Sandinista government came to power in his native Nicaragua and confiscated his assets and had problems with cocaine and alcohol abuse. When I met the former champ in 2005 at the International Hall of Fame in Canastota, he told me that the year before he had become deputy mayor of Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, having joined the Sandinistas, and was involved in building health clinics for the needy. In 2008 he was elected mayor, and appeared to have found some new meaning to his life. However apparently there was still a lot of emptiness! Only a few days later news arrived that Arturo Gatti had been found dead in a hotel room in Brazil, having hung himself according to police. A world champion at junior lightweight and light welterweight, Canadian-raised Gatti became a real crowd-puller in America and was involved in a couple of the greatest fights that I’ve ever seen and I’m sure that he will be remembered as the ultimate blood-and-guts warrior of the past 10 years. He certainly packed a hell of a lot of living into his 37 years on this earth. Sadly it wasn’t long enough. At the end of July boxing lost another former champion in a tragic way when Vernon Forrest, who twice beat the current WBA welterweight champion Sugar Shane Mosley a few years ago for the title, was shot in the back at a petrol station after chasing a couple of hoodlums who had stolen his wallet while he sat in his car. A man has subsequently been arrested. It’s hard to believe that all three former world champions would go in the same month and in such circumstances. Surely they deserved much better than that. By George Reed This article appears in the print edition 600 of Island Connections
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