By Terence Dooley

British broadcaster and boxing pundit Steve Bunce was part of Setanta’s push to bring British boxing fans the best action, debate and insider information in the world.  Steve’s magazine show, Steve Bunce’s Boxing Hour, attracted a cult following in the UK and the US, the show was downloaded, posted to Youtube and hit the forums, becoming a digital boxing phenomenon.  However, Setanta’s ‘speculate to accumulate’ mentality saw them hit the wall in June, the station owed The FA big bucks and was forced to close trading here in the UK as a consequence of their profligate approach towards football. 

Steve was left out of work but his small army of UK fans mobilised on his behalf, a website, www.bringbackbunce.net, was launched, road shows were embarked upon and the man himself went back to his journalistic roots, ramping up his print work to make up for the shortfall.  In many ways this was an apt, if forced, move as ‘Buncey’ has been amongst the bylines for decades.  Modern fans got to know his as the larger than life anchor of Buncey’s Boxing Hour but a lot of fans remember Steve for his ‘Big Daddy’ Boxing Monthly column, a meditative and often nostalgic look at the sport. 

BoxingScene.com caught up with Steve, the man dubbed ‘The Voice of British Boxing’ took us all the way back to his first days in the sport, starting with the first show that he recalled covering.

“It was a semi finals of what were called the Junior ABAs in Gloucester in 1984,” recalled Bunce.  “It was for Boxing News.  The guy who generally covered it was Terry Baker.  Terry couldn’t go so they asked me to go.  I got a lift down with Tony Burns, who still runs the Repton Club.  It was a good line up, I’ve still got the programme somewhere, one of the fighters was Robert McCracken, who went onto become a good pro.  There were dozens of name fighters who later went onto do things.

“I did five or six years of the amateurs so a lot of the names do blur but it was a good time, some really good fights.  It is quite simple – if you cover kids when they’re eleven and twelve they remember you.  Kids like Naseem, Calzaghe, even Hatton - you see them at baby level.  Even guys like [Nigel] Benn, who I covered in the North-East Divs, and Michael Watson when he was an NABC finalist.”

“Let’s look at what was an upcoming fight,” he continued.  “Michael Jennings and Kell Brook - I covered them early.  Then you have a recent British title winner, Ian Napa, covered him early, and there are about another 20 or 30 guys at British, European and Commonwealth, lets also say world title also, and I saw about 20 of them before they were seventeen, that is invaluable, how many football writers saw Wayne Rooney before the age of seventeen.

“The answer is none.  They are too busy trying not to miss anything to go to the Everton training ground, the Arsenal training ground and the other training grounds.  They pick these guys up when they’re breaking through.  I’m talking seeing Naz aged 12 beating Michael Wright in Derby or seeing Joe Calzaghe at the same age. 

“It is something I keep harping back to and people say, ‘Oh, he’s doing the name dropping thing’.  There are a few ways to name drop.  You can gatecrash a party and bore everyone with, ‘I’ve just seen X, Y and Z’, or you can say, ‘I remember him when he won the schoolboys title’, before the press got to him.  I’m not being a half-the-timer here.  Back in those days the good fighters were leading the news, not just in the Boxing News but also in places like The Daily Telegraph.  They were the lead reports by the mid-nineties.”

A lot of water has flown under Steve’s boxing bridge and the writer could be forgiven for not remembering his very first pro show; Bunce, however, dragged his mind back when asked.

“That’s an interesting one – I can’t absolutely remember,” he said, before having a think.  “I did a Pat Clinton, I think it was Pat, [British] title fight for The Standard at York Hall in about ’87 [versus Joe Kelly], by about ‘88, ‘89 I was doing more leads and I remember doing Paul Hodkinson at Wembley against the Frenchman Guy Bellehigue in ‘90, that was my first bylined piece in The Daily Telegraph, so that is over twenty years of byline reports.”

So, over twenty years of writing experience, a monthly column that, if I may, drops its fair share of names, yet Steve is often described as the man on TV who shouts a lot, Bunce is Ok with this, and talked about the modern perceptive of him amongst boxing fans.

“I think a lot of it is down the Setanta show”, he mused, “a lot of new boxing fans might have seen me on there and not known about me and the suggestion was that I sort of came from nowhere when that is a million miles from the truth. 

“I used to get really angry with some of the comments made about me online.  I wanted people to know that I didn’t start yesterday.  I was bylined in nationals and did three years of Boxing News, way back when, by the way, there was no money.  If you went to Derby for the School Boy semi-finals Harry Mullen just expected you to get there and get back, there was no money.  It didn’t matter where you stayed as long as they got their 800 words on the Monday morning.  My ‘Big Daddy’ column started around 2002, the first ever Boxing Monthlies, in 1989, had four pages of amateurs in the first two issues, that was massive.”

When Steve began his professional boxing run the likes of Benn, Watson and Eubank were on the rise, shortly to be followed by Naz, Lennox Lewis and Ricky Hatton, great times for fans and journalists alike.  “Some of those early Eubank nights were mad,” recalled Steve. 

“I remember him against Ron Malik at the Festival Hall in Essex when he was booed and it was a real pantomime thing.  Nigel Benn against Lenzie Morgan in 1991.  You can clearly see me on the tape with my big permy hair and I’ve got a telephone in my left hand and a telephone in my right hand.  The newspapers put a landline in for you back then.  Mobiles were only just about in.  So I’m filing a runner for both The Sunday Telegraph and The Sunday Express, in between each round I’d file a minute of copy for the Express and then at the end of the next round I’d file a minute of copy for the Telegraph.  I was probably doing Today and The Daily Telegraph as well.”

So, it was all hustle and bustle in those days?  “It is hustle and bustle now!” exclaimed Bunce.  “When Setanta went tits up I had to increase my stuff in The Independent by two-hundred percent, my stuff in The Sunday Mirror went up by the same, I had to go out and hustle.  It is the same then as it is now, although it was harder to get a start then.  It is easier to get a start as a boxing writer now, well not in the national press, that is impossible, whether or not you get paid for it is a different matter.”

People, this writer included, were flippant when Setanta went under, we were paying our subs for a service and took this service for granted, consequently failing to give Setanta its due for the work it did on boxing’s behalf, especially when you consider Sky’s ‘hostages in the cupboard’ attitude towards its punters.  The human tragedy of redundancies was also brushed under the carpet when Setanta went down, something that rankles with Steve.

“I had to cancel my summer holiday, which wasn’t easy, our first big family holiday in Las Vegas, that went down like a bag of shit,” revealed Bunce.  “Things became tight.  I’ve taken the one man show on the road, which has worked, it is not as big a success as I wanted it to be but we get great crowds in and if I get ninety or a hundred people in then they’re still there drinking at the bar at midnight.  I’m just doing the shows and grafting.  I’ve written more newspaper stuff in the past three months than I did for the last year.”

“Look”, he stated, “Setanta paid top dollar for fights and they were ambitious, they were winning the boxing battle with Sky, and would have won, but the Premier League were owed money and they, rightly, wanted it.  If they’d have worked things out with Setanta my gut feeling is that it would have still been here. 

“They went down over five or ten million, depending on what figures you believe, and in the grand scheme of things, when there are tons of millions being spent, that is peanuts.  It is sad.  That last weekend was very sad.  A lot of people were losing their jobs.  I’m fairly ‘high profile’ if you like but a lot of technicians, soundmen, assistant producers and researchers, who weren’t making great money anyway, were losing their jobs.  It is the reason I still get angry when people make light of it.  It pisses me off unbelievably.  Some people in the newspapers and online said we’re better off without Setanta, well not from a boxing perspective.  Sky were not just being given a run for their money when it came to boxing, we fucking killed them, all they had was Ricky Hatton and Ricky Hatton.

“Boxing was Setanta, we had six Cotto fights.  We were working brilliantly.  Frank [Warren] and Setanta fell out of bed but we soldiered on.  We were moving on with David Haye and his win over Valuev would have been on Setanta.  That is the bottom line.  The kicking Sky was getting in that eighteen months showed that they didn’t have the guts for a fight, so I think we could have ended up with Cotto and Pacquiao.  It is easy for us to forget now how different it was twelve months ago, Sky were battered and bruised, not just by my weekly show, we were killing them every time we went on air, it was embarrassing.

“I think boxing misses that platform.  People as varied as Orville McKenzie and Enzo Maccarinelli told me they loved being on the show and were pissed off to see it go.  We had more people on in a year than Sky had on in five years, and don’t even get me started on that ITV garbage that they run on a Saturday [The Big Fight magazine show].

“It is slick and heavily produced and was started in response to our show, even though they made out it wasn’t.  If you don’t have a magazine show for six years and then suddenly you have one, well how can you explain to those dummies that we didn’t influence it?  You’ve got Amir Khan, a great attraction; you lose him and start a weekly show, duh.  I’m still angry at the passing of the Setanta show and the fact that ITV’s garbage is still on, it rubs salt into the wounds.”

In the next part of our exclusive interview Steve discusses David Haye, Bernard Hopkins, Naseem Hamed and lets his alter ego, ‘Buncey’, out off the cage.

Steve is still on the road.  On Tuesday, the 24th, he appears at the Pullman Lodge in Sunderland, on the 1st of December he is at the Wallington Sports Club in London and his final roadshow of 2009 takes place at the Loughton Academy, London on the 8th.  Further details are available via www.buncelive.com/wordpress/