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This is an old article but i thought it was pretty good read so
Frank Warren, Hall of Famer
By Ron Borges
Micky Duff, Harry Levene and Jarvis Astaire never stood a chance. If a .22 bullet from a Luger pistol wasn’t going to stop an upstart British promoter named Frank Warren from rising to the top on his side of the ropes what were they going to do about it?
Sunday the 56-year-old bookmaker’s son, who today is the most powerful promoter in British boxing after years of battling his peers for that supremacy, will receive a well-deserved but unexpected honor when he is inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y. alongside one of his favorite fighters, Larry Holmes, as well as Eddie Perkins, rival Danish promoter Mogens Palle and two award-winning journalists, Dave Anderson and Joe Koizumi. It is something Warren never thought a moment about 33 years ago, when he first began promoting unlicensed tough man contests for his second cousin in tiny halls that were dark, dank and no place for a dandy. In those days the only hall he thought about was the one he was in and the only plan he had was the hustle to survive.
Lenny McLean is perhaps the best known unlicensed “boxer’’ ever to fight in the UK, a reputation he won with his fists but also with the aid of his then 23-year-old cousin, who managed his career. As is so often the case in this sport of raging egos however the two soon fell out and Warren eventually broke with his cousin but never could shake free from boxing, a sport whose addictive quality can be ravenous and often ruinous. While the former proved true for Warren, the latter did not despite the best efforts of Astaire, Duff and even the British Boxing Board of Control.
“I didn’t know anything about managing or promoting,’’ Warren said from London. “I did it for nothing but I got bitten by the bug. You get the bug and you can’t shake it.
“Certainly it’s a commercial thing but it’s also competitive pride involved when you guide somebody through the most dangerous of sports and succeed. It’s quite a good feeling, really.
“After a few years promoting unlicensed fights in places with low ceilings the British Boxing Board asked me why didn’t I take out a license. I decided I would. I felt like I was finally being invited inside the tent.’’
As he would soon learn, not really.
In those days boxing in Britain was a near monopoly with four promoters controlling most of the dates, the country’s two television channels, London’s only two boxing venues and, for all intents and purposes, the Boxing Board itself. Warren, being a fighter as well as a promoter, was undaunted by the circumstances he found however.
“Jarvis, Micky and two others were really a cartel,’’ Warren recalled almost fondly. “They had the Boxing Board tied up. The rules said you could only run every 28 days so they divided all the dates and had the two arenas locked up. They had a monopoly on the BBC broadcasts, ITV wasn’t interested in boxing and the Boxing Board didn’t allow live boxing on television. There had to be a 24-hour delay because they said live boxing on TV hurt the gate. That was rubbish but it made it difficult for anyone new to compete. They were really trying to shut me down.’’
Being 28, chipper and a guy with a gambler’s constitution, Warren tried any way, running his first show on Dec. 1, 1980 in a ballroom at the Bloomsbury hotel in London. His choice of opponents spoke to his promotional nature when he imported two American light heavyweights, Otis Gordon and Jerry Martin, in an attempt to rekindle the memory among British fight fans of a bloody match between Americans Leotis Martin and Thad Spencer at the Royal Albert Hall 12 years earlier that had been the kind of knockdown, drag out brawl fans don’t soon forget.
In this case, they did.
“I couldn’t get TV and on the night the place was half empty,’’ Warren recalled. “I lost about $25,000. That was a lot of money at the time. I’d gotten bogged down by the Boxing Board’s rules. After that, I became an expert on their rules and regulations. It was an expensive lesson but I didn’t do what a lot of guys do. I didn’t walk away and I’ve done fairly well since.’’
Fairly well? So well that he’s handled many of the biggest names to come out of the UK – Nigel Benn, Frank Bruno, Steve Collins, Colin McMillian, Steve Robinson, Prince Naseem Hamed, Ricky Hatton and at the moment Joe Calzaghe and today’s hottest British prospect, Olympic silver medalist Amir Khan. He’s also promoted or co-promoted some of the sports biggest attractions with George Foreman, Mike Tyson, Marco Antonio Barrera, Kostya Tszyu and Azumah Nelson among them, along the way amassing a fleet of luxury cars, homes in Hertfordshire, Belgravia and Portugal and a consistent stable of fighters that have made him the major name in British boxing and given him a reputation for uncanny and often risk-averse matchmaking.
In a sense, Warren has become his own boxing cartel after beating back and slipping around the man who preceded him at the top, the legendary Micky Duff. Warren not only battled his promotional rivals but also the Boxing Board, who he successfully sued not long after he’d gotten his promoter’s license.
Warren claimed their policies were effectively a form of restraint of trade, creating a fistic monopoly that would have made Don King proud. Warren won but didn’t stop there. He went after the Board again over the ruling that prevented live TV broadcasts of fights and won again. Soon after he introduced live televised boxing to Britain, convincing ITV to partner with him.
At one point Warren did 42 TV dates in one year on ITV and later would do the country’s first pay-per-view fight on SKY television. With those shows a new era was born in British boxing and Frank Warren was on the cutting edge of it.
He’s rightly proud of having survived for so long because it hasn’t been easy. Rival promoters (including his one-time partner Don King, who he lost $9 million trying to sue when their dealings went sour), the Boxing Board’s arcane rules, near bankruptcy and the shifting tide of television’s interest in boxing were not his only obstacles. Once there was even a serious case of lead poisoning…of a sort.
On Nov. 30, 1989, as Warren came out of a car on his way to the theatre, he was shot in the chest at point blank range by a still unknown masked gunman. The bullet barely missed his heart and while the surgeons were saving his life they also discovered a small tumor and removed it as well. Frank Warren got lucky even when he got shot.
Frank Warren, Hall of Famer
By Ron Borges
Micky Duff, Harry Levene and Jarvis Astaire never stood a chance. If a .22 bullet from a Luger pistol wasn’t going to stop an upstart British promoter named Frank Warren from rising to the top on his side of the ropes what were they going to do about it?
Sunday the 56-year-old bookmaker’s son, who today is the most powerful promoter in British boxing after years of battling his peers for that supremacy, will receive a well-deserved but unexpected honor when he is inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y. alongside one of his favorite fighters, Larry Holmes, as well as Eddie Perkins, rival Danish promoter Mogens Palle and two award-winning journalists, Dave Anderson and Joe Koizumi. It is something Warren never thought a moment about 33 years ago, when he first began promoting unlicensed tough man contests for his second cousin in tiny halls that were dark, dank and no place for a dandy. In those days the only hall he thought about was the one he was in and the only plan he had was the hustle to survive.
Lenny McLean is perhaps the best known unlicensed “boxer’’ ever to fight in the UK, a reputation he won with his fists but also with the aid of his then 23-year-old cousin, who managed his career. As is so often the case in this sport of raging egos however the two soon fell out and Warren eventually broke with his cousin but never could shake free from boxing, a sport whose addictive quality can be ravenous and often ruinous. While the former proved true for Warren, the latter did not despite the best efforts of Astaire, Duff and even the British Boxing Board of Control.
“I didn’t know anything about managing or promoting,’’ Warren said from London. “I did it for nothing but I got bitten by the bug. You get the bug and you can’t shake it.
“Certainly it’s a commercial thing but it’s also competitive pride involved when you guide somebody through the most dangerous of sports and succeed. It’s quite a good feeling, really.
“After a few years promoting unlicensed fights in places with low ceilings the British Boxing Board asked me why didn’t I take out a license. I decided I would. I felt like I was finally being invited inside the tent.’’
As he would soon learn, not really.
In those days boxing in Britain was a near monopoly with four promoters controlling most of the dates, the country’s two television channels, London’s only two boxing venues and, for all intents and purposes, the Boxing Board itself. Warren, being a fighter as well as a promoter, was undaunted by the circumstances he found however.
“Jarvis, Micky and two others were really a cartel,’’ Warren recalled almost fondly. “They had the Boxing Board tied up. The rules said you could only run every 28 days so they divided all the dates and had the two arenas locked up. They had a monopoly on the BBC broadcasts, ITV wasn’t interested in boxing and the Boxing Board didn’t allow live boxing on television. There had to be a 24-hour delay because they said live boxing on TV hurt the gate. That was rubbish but it made it difficult for anyone new to compete. They were really trying to shut me down.’’
Being 28, chipper and a guy with a gambler’s constitution, Warren tried any way, running his first show on Dec. 1, 1980 in a ballroom at the Bloomsbury hotel in London. His choice of opponents spoke to his promotional nature when he imported two American light heavyweights, Otis Gordon and Jerry Martin, in an attempt to rekindle the memory among British fight fans of a bloody match between Americans Leotis Martin and Thad Spencer at the Royal Albert Hall 12 years earlier that had been the kind of knockdown, drag out brawl fans don’t soon forget.
In this case, they did.
“I couldn’t get TV and on the night the place was half empty,’’ Warren recalled. “I lost about $25,000. That was a lot of money at the time. I’d gotten bogged down by the Boxing Board’s rules. After that, I became an expert on their rules and regulations. It was an expensive lesson but I didn’t do what a lot of guys do. I didn’t walk away and I’ve done fairly well since.’’
Fairly well? So well that he’s handled many of the biggest names to come out of the UK – Nigel Benn, Frank Bruno, Steve Collins, Colin McMillian, Steve Robinson, Prince Naseem Hamed, Ricky Hatton and at the moment Joe Calzaghe and today’s hottest British prospect, Olympic silver medalist Amir Khan. He’s also promoted or co-promoted some of the sports biggest attractions with George Foreman, Mike Tyson, Marco Antonio Barrera, Kostya Tszyu and Azumah Nelson among them, along the way amassing a fleet of luxury cars, homes in Hertfordshire, Belgravia and Portugal and a consistent stable of fighters that have made him the major name in British boxing and given him a reputation for uncanny and often risk-averse matchmaking.
In a sense, Warren has become his own boxing cartel after beating back and slipping around the man who preceded him at the top, the legendary Micky Duff. Warren not only battled his promotional rivals but also the Boxing Board, who he successfully sued not long after he’d gotten his promoter’s license.
Warren claimed their policies were effectively a form of restraint of trade, creating a fistic monopoly that would have made Don King proud. Warren won but didn’t stop there. He went after the Board again over the ruling that prevented live TV broadcasts of fights and won again. Soon after he introduced live televised boxing to Britain, convincing ITV to partner with him.
At one point Warren did 42 TV dates in one year on ITV and later would do the country’s first pay-per-view fight on SKY television. With those shows a new era was born in British boxing and Frank Warren was on the cutting edge of it.
He’s rightly proud of having survived for so long because it hasn’t been easy. Rival promoters (including his one-time partner Don King, who he lost $9 million trying to sue when their dealings went sour), the Boxing Board’s arcane rules, near bankruptcy and the shifting tide of television’s interest in boxing were not his only obstacles. Once there was even a serious case of lead poisoning…of a sort.
On Nov. 30, 1989, as Warren came out of a car on his way to the theatre, he was shot in the chest at point blank range by a still unknown masked gunman. The bullet barely missed his heart and while the surgeons were saving his life they also discovered a small tumor and removed it as well. Frank Warren got lucky even when he got shot.
Uk>USA 
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