By Terence Dooley [Click Here For Part 1]
Frank Maloney is in good cheer after inking a two-year, twenty-plus fight contract with Sky Sports. Still, things have not been easy for Frank over the past nine months, the suicide of Darren Sutherland in early-September of last year was a bitter blow, it was closely followed by Maloney’s heart attack at the first Tyson Fury-John McDermott encounter on September the 14th, the final straw came in December when Frank was criticised by Sky TV for the non-performance of two of his imports, Dmitrijs Basovs and Andrejs Tolstihs, who both fell in a single session to David Price and Tony ‘Jaffa’ Jeffries respectively.
Frank was taken to task on air and in the forums, he was the fall guy for a long-standing trend, these weren’t the first useless foreign boxers seen on these shores and they certainly won’t be the last. Maloney, though, was quick to admit that his quality control had let him down on this occasion.
“No, I hold my hands up,” he said when asked if he’d taken one for the team. “I like to get praised when I do a good show and criticised when I do a bad show, and that was a bad show, one of the worst I’d ever done. I brought in fighters who didn’t stand up to their records [Writer’s note: Basovs was 3-2 going in, one of his defeats was a second-round loss, he has since been bounced out in a round by Newfel Ouatah and hammered in three by Janne Katajisto; Tolstihs was 3-16-1 going into the Jeffries wipeout, his wins coming against fighters with a combined record of 0-1.] You are dealing in the blind sometimes with records you bring down from Boxrec or from talking to agents, sometimes you get letdown.”
Jeffries has since faced two British fighters, Nathan King and Matt Hainey, but was hit with more criticism after the King fight, Jeffries’ crime? Taking a right hand to the chin in a fight that he won handily, the criticism irks Frank. “He got hit, you get in the ring and you expect to get hit. Some people just want to criticise for the sake of it, I want constructive criticism,” he blasted. “As I say, I took it on the chin [Writer’s note: so did Jeffries but he regrouped well] and rolled onto the next show.”
That was the past, Maloney’s promotional products have been boosted by an injection of funds; he received a critical illness insurance policy payout in the wake of his heart attack, money that was pumped into his promotional activities, which he believes will help the development of his young guns and the heavyweight hopefuls, Larry Olubamiwo, Price and Tom Dallas, with John McDermott the senior big man in Frank’s stable.
“I want to push on,” he said when concluding our discussion of the ‘Night of the Latvian Lepus’. “I’ve used the past two years putting my stable into a good position and want to move forward. As long as I’ve got good fighters then I’ll be in the game, and as long as I still enjoy it, the day I don’t enjoy it is the day I’ll walk away from boxing.
“I think you’ll see better fights in the coming years. The sport has to do it (make the big fights), the promoters have to put fighters in against each other, but you should look at the positives: we are going to Saturday nights and the shows will run from nine until eleven, which means we’ll get more media attention – I applaud what Sky are doing.”
Onto the heavyweights, John McDermott was adjudged unlucky to have lost to Tyson Fury in their first fight, which Fury won by a laughable 98-92 margin, but there were no complaints about the rematch, with John falling apart alarmingly en route to a ninth-round stoppage.
“Yeah, I was very surprised,” sighed Maloney when talking about the recent result. “I have my own reasons why I think it happened and I don’t want to get into a public slanging match with anybody. I’ve met with John and had a long conversation with him and his management team, we’ll sit down again after his wedding and make a decision about what he’s going to do with his future.”
McDermott has skills but he is destined to be filed in the ‘enigmatic big man’ drawer, he could conceivably come again but Maloney’s best bet for unearthing a top-class big man will come from his novice heavyweights.
“I like all heavyweights”, enthused Maloney, “there is the boxing business and the heavyweight business – heavyweights are a draw. Big Larry [Olubamiwo] is catching the imagination of the public, so is Price, Tom Dallas is the sleeping giant of the heavyweight division – I think they’ll really make a name for themselves in this coming year and come to the forefront. My job is to keep them apart unless there are titles on the line because they should make big money from fighting one another.”
Developing a heavyweight is frustrating process, the formula, best evidenced by Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton’s handling of a young Mike Tyson, is to create a buzz, grab some scalps and aggressively market the power and USP of the prospect, a plan that was put into place when Lennox Lewis turned over in 1989.
Fans, however, judge the big men by different standards, if they win in a single stanza the opponent is derided, a win on points and the prospect is derided, with the middle ground of a mid-rounds win a tough one to reach, heavies either go out early or cling onto the end. Maloney, though, believes that his chief responsibility is to shoulder the burden of expectation when it comes to the big boys.
“I say to them, ‘You go and do the fighting and I’ll take the criticism’, because I had the same with Lennox Lewis, people said he was matched wrong, but I know how to build a heavyweight’s career. No one will make me alter the way I do things. I’m the man putting up the money and I’m the man who will make the decisions. But we sit down as a team and work out the next move,” stated Maloney.
“I don’t have to tell them what I’ve done, people know what I did with Lennox Lewis. I tell them about the pitfalls that come when you reach the top and decide you want your own team around you and to do it your own way. If someone wants to work with you then they’ll work with you. I worked with Lennox for over twelve years but, unfortunately, outside influences got in the way, it was twelve fantastic years of learning at the top and living a fantastic lifestyle. I have a good relationship with every fighter I’ve ever worked with, what is in the past is in the past and the future is the future.
“As long as I can pay my bills, continue to work and provide for my family then I’m happy, I don’t want to be the richest promoter in the world, I want everyone I work with to have their share of the cake.”
T’other Frank, Warren, recently announced his ‘Magnificent Seven’ promotion, a show that will energise the sport should the bill actually make it to the 18th of September intact, always a worry in boxing. Maloney and Warren have both been given the chance to provide Sky with top-notch boxing content, they may have to work together at some point, along with Matchroom and other promoters, in order to bring boxing back into the spotlight. The two Franks have worked together before; there is a rapport and mutual respect there, good news for British boxing.
“Frank is someone I have a lot of respect for, he’s a very good promoter, I’ve worked with him twice in my career, once as a trainer and once as a consultant – I know how Frank works and have the utmost respect for him,” said Maloney when asked about his relationship with Warren.
Promoting is a stressful endeavour at the best of times, Maloney likes to get it away from it intermittently and partake in the relaxing act of training fighters, he returned to the gym for Carl Johanneson’s British super-featherweight title fight with Kevin Mitchell in 2008; though not a regular sight in the corner, Maloney does like to put the mitts on and have a dabble; he did not write out a return to that arena should the right set of circumstances arise.
“I enjoy training but because I’ve gone away from it the role I do now makes it hard to get into the gym with the fighters. I enjoy training certain fighters, I couldn’t train a gym of them but I do like to do it,” he answered.
Boxing is a tough, gruelling sport, Frank’s worshiped at the fistic altar for the majority of his adult life, though he almost went down a different road entirely, with the promoter’s CV including a period as a trainee priest and a stint in politics.
“Yes, I did,” said Maloney when asked if he had tried to train as a priest. “As a fourteen-year-old I went away to do that but only lasted three weeks. It was too hard; the education was very hard, especially when you suffer from dyslexia, which wasn’t understood at the time. I struggled with the Latin, English and doing the maths, it was a very intense education.
“I would have liked to have been able to go to school, do well and go to university but I learned in the university of the street – I think those sort of characters are a saying breed so I encourage my children to work hard at school and get good results.”
Maloney’s attempt to nab a seat in Barking saw him dismissed as a fringe figure with alleged racist and homophobic views – Frank is against same sex marriage and same-sex parenting – whilst taking childish glee in ridiculing the dyslexic son of Irish émigré parents for a spelling mistake on his UKIP campaign posters, they read ‘Frank Maloney - Fighting for Barking and Fighting for Britian’ – Maloney used the ridicule to his advantage, arguing that the spelling mistake was a deliberate, and successful, attempt to generate interest in his political message.
“Politics is a sideline that gives me a break from boxing, something I get involved in because I’m passionate about some issues,” opined Maloney. “If the opportunity comes to do the politics again then I’ll do it but boxing is my love, it is completely different. Most people go to work to make a living but I go to work to do something I love doing, as long as I feel like that I’ll carry on doing what I’m doing.”
Maloney can count himself extremely lucky, a man who hankered after a career in religion and, later, politics only to find himself in boxing, which is a surreal mixture of both.
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