RIP Tommy Burns

Terrible news....

What a fantastic fighter.

RIP

 

RIP champ.

 

Great innings RIP old timer .

 

10 gongs - RIP champ.

 

great fighter i didnt know he still was alive i wonder if there are more old guys out there that are still around to pay tribute to!

 

Terrible news.

One of the great charactors of our game, and the reason ladies has to pay full price at the Stadium fights... half the audience would be female to see him. Tommy said "make 'em pay".

A sad loss to the game.

RIP LEGEND.

 

RIP - sad news

 

I think he had a brother Max Murphy that was a pretty fair boxer around the same time!

 

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGge2KkVlzY[/ame]

 

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dg7_JTGLQs[/ame]

 

19/09/50 (This article was written before his comeback in '51)



BY A SYDNEY CORRESPONDENT




THE crowd stopped chaffering os the lights in the Sydney suburban theatre dimmed. The men in evening dress stepped to the microphone. "And now, ladies and gentlemen!" he shouted. "We present to you not one but two Australian ex champions!" The five-piece band blared, and out stepped pin-up boxer Tommy Burns, one-time welterweight champion of Australia.
Pushing through the curtains immediately behind him came a big, red faced fellow, dancing a little on his feet, moving his elbows in and out in easy, continuous motion. He must have weighed 14 st.


This was Billy Britt, who took the heavyweight title from Herb Narvo in Newcastle back in 1942. held it long enough to draw a deep breath, and lost it again the way he won it on a foul. It was only an exhibition at this Sydney suburban picture theatre but Burns moved cautiously. Not even in a gym had he found it necessary to swap wallops with a big pug like this, bulky enough to make Burns look like a bantam.


Good-looking boy Burns, now trading punches in a variety show round Sydney's suburbs, is a unique figure of the Australian ring.
Looking at his fresh, young features, you could take him for a beginner in the business. It would seem a shame if a rosy cheeked lad like this should become "punchy"' because his brain tissues were to be battered slugging it out with the tough boys of the fight game. But Tommy Burns, fresh-faced and unmarked, is a veteran of the Australian ring. A retired veteran up to now.


Now he shares vaudeville billing with a violinist playing pizzicato with his teeth, and a comedy quiz where male members of the audience demonstrate on stage how to wear a woman's corset. Sometimes he has a riotous "bout" staged with baggy trousered comic "Dixie Kid," who finally "k.o.s" Burns. Or, in another act he croons "Embraceable You," Sinatra style, into the mike, and scantily clad ladies of the ballet cling round his neck and "swoon" ecstatically at his feet.


Twelve years ago, at 16, Burns began knocking over the best of his weight they could find for him in Brisbane. He didn't lose a fight for three years
until Lisle Law k.o.'d him in 1941, when . he was 19.


That was the last time he was beaten until Vic Patrick laid him low five years later, at Sydney Stadium. A year and a day after the Patricks fight, Burns flattened Hockey Bennell in the fourth round to take the Australian welterweight title.


That period in 1947 was the peak of Tommy's career. A month after he
beat Bennell, he met American Negro O'Neill Bell, and in a bloody encounter, described by boxing fans as his greatest fight, he knocked out Bell in the eleventh round. Six months later he k.o.'d Eddie Marcus, but that was his last year of greatness.


In 1948 Bennie Evans, labelled tersely by US critics as a "fifth-rate bum," inflicted a clear points defeat on Burns at Sydney. Later in the year Burns drew with and then beat Mickey Tollis to retain his title, but the stadium crowd stood on its hind legs and booed the decision for 10 minutes.
Burns had had enough. He refused to meet Freddie Dawson, said he was going overseas "for the good of Australian boxing," but Stadiums Ltd. demanded he defend his title first or surrender it.
Finally, on July 10 last year, he reluctantly entered the ring again, to be
clearly beaten by fellow Brisbaneite Kev Delaney in a dull contest.Burns' title, only once before defended, was gone. "He immediately announced his retirement.
'"I'm going to be an actor," he declared. "I've had fighting. My wife doesn't like it, and I think she's right. I'm starting to have black-outs and that's the time to give it away." He had appeared in the Australian film "Sons of Matthew," had played the lead in Clifford Odets' drama, "Golden Boy" in Brisbane, in which the main character is a boxer who also has the makings of a great violinist. Now he turned his eyes to Hollywood, ,where Paramount had offered him a screen test. The Hollywood trip flopped.


He had a high old time meeting the great-Jack Dempsey took him out, he met Crosby and Van Johnson, and saw the big fights in New York, waiting for the call to the film capital that never came. He was introduced from the ring of Madison Square Garden, and the Yanks marvelled at this smiling young veteran of scores of big-time fights back home, who didn't have a mark to mar his looks.


But nine weeks ago he stepped off the plane at Mascot, gloomily told reporters, "I wasn't wanted in Hollywood."
"My accent was against me and I was unknown."

Burns had a new, carefully modulated voice, and a cigarette in his mouth. He'd gone away a non-smoker. Back in Australia 48 hours, he was in the Celebrity Club, Sydney, watching the floor show when owner Joe Taylor sat down beside him, said: "What are you doing, Tommy? What are your plans?" When they parted Taylor had arranged for Burns to appear in his floor show at the club and star on the variety circuit he was preparing for the suburbs. "And if I decide to come back to the ring, I mean" Tommy gave out, "Joe will be my manager." A ring comeback? This was something new. Ever since he retired after the Delaney fight, Tommy had been adamant he was through with the fight business.


In his dressing room the other night, I tried to probe his mind. Just what were his plans ior the future? Where was he going, this handsome young man of 28? I still don't know he told me: "In these stage exhibitions I'm copping some good punches. If I find I can take them, I may come back. Otherwise. I'd like to buy a pub. "But I'll take a job in one first." He smiled. "I've learnt it doesn't pay to go straight to the top in any business."


It was becoming clearer that anyone who thought Tommy Burns was a dope, a playboy drifting along where life pushed him, would be wide of the mark. Burns has always had the reputation of a "clean liver". He still has it, and he looks it. He's a family man, whose wife never liked the boxing game. And I gathered she doesn't care much for the idea of Tommy as an entertainer either.


But his wife never interferes, he explained. She has complete faith in his ability to work out his own destiny. It's a truism that fight fans, like all sports followers, tend to remember a man as he went out of the game. They forget when he was their idol, when he was at his top, very quickly.


In 51 fights Burns lost five. As you run your finger down the page you find KO, KO, KO recurring monotonously and against the best men promoters could stack up against him. You might take the view, an objective one, that Tommy Burns would be a fool to return to the ring.
A good-looking, sober, unmarked 28 year-old, with 12 years of canvas shuffling behind him, during which he became champion in his division he might be stretching his luck taut if he came back looking for more ring success....

 

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Description
Black and white photograph that depicts Winnie Hannan [nee O'Sullivan] having a chat with boxer Tommy Burns at Clovelly Beach, Sydney, the morning after Burns' bout with Vic Patrick at the Sydney Stadium, on 2 February 1946. "Tommy Burns & Mrs Hannan" is written in pencil on the back.

 

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