Alan Minter vs Michael Nunn

What were your feelings on the night with hagler...specifically before the fight started..?...minter had roused the crowd into fervent support...but things were being taken too far..but good men were caught up in it...but only at the climax did the racial aspect totally hijack the whole event so utterly andcdisgracefully......but what im asking is ..did u find yourself getting caught up in the occasion?

As an example i must confess the night of lacey-calzaghe i was in a south london pub....all of us were whipped up in a truculent mood about this yank coming over to publicly execute our guy calzaghe the former aba champ,one of us, with robin reid already having been destroyed.

Our defiance was tinged with real strong suppressed fear...so by the time the fight started we were like frightened dogs...barking hard....joes matador like swashbuckling taming and than annihilation of lacey was the closest ive seen to public encitement to murder...as our man started to dominate we lost our fear... became emboldened...than bloodthirsty.....than dare i say it murderous....i saw old men standing on chairs ripping uppercuts...pint glass in hand screaming for joe to kill the big basxard....a shrill middle aged woman called pattie repeatedly shouting "smash his face in " and "knock his block off"..we were baying for blood....i do beleive in the heat of the moment some otherwise sober fellows in that room wished lacey to be knocked unconscious.....as sickeningly callous and cruel as it sounds.....the crowd was whipped into a frenzy and right and wrong became blurred.

Minter hagler was i may suggest such a night..where the lines got blurred..how did u feel around it all?

 

Nunn wins every minute of every round

 

That is palpably not the case.

 

I cant honestly say I expected there to be trouble there was a lot of drinking going on, a bit more than usual but no rowdy behaviour before the fight.Minter had said ,or it was reported that he'd said that he," wouldn't lose his title to a black man",it was probably exaggerated by the press, but it didn't help.Minter had a nucleus of hardcore supporters that were a bit over the top ,but apart from one small isolated incident when he fought Billy Knight, I can't recall any fisticuffs.The crowd were whipped up into nationalistic mode by flag bearers bringing in the two national flags,Mickey Duff's secretary,Davy Jones from whom we used to get our tickets was carrying the Union Jack I believe,there was a band of the Royal Marines playing both men into the ring so the atmosphere rapidly got fervently patriotic to the point of jingoism.
Minter may have got a bit fired up by the crowd because he started quite quickly,and had one fleeting moment when he seemed to stun Hagler with a shot ,but once Marvin got rolling it became one-way traffic.
When Minter got cut the crowd up in the God's may have thought it was from a butt,[it wasn't,]and reacted accordingly ,they may also have felt disappointed that what had promised to be a great scrap ended so quickly.
I was sitting along from the referee Harry Gibbs and when the plastic half pint bottles began to rain down he left his seat and went to stand in front of Sylvie Lawless Terry Lawless' Wife to protect her.
I seem to remember Henry Cooper who was doing radio commentary disappearing rather quickly too!
I was with a friend and his Dad ,who had a formal connection to Davy Jones,I remember him saying," this isn't good", but because we were," down the front"we were removed from the action, all we had to watch for was the bottles coming down like hand grenades, true they were plastic, but full up, coming from that height they would knock you out ,or blind you.I never saw any fights just the beer throwing protest .
Fact is I've seen much worse punch-ups at other fights,Kaylor v Christie for one.
I think Vito Antuofermo was doing colour commentary for US TV I was told later that some one took a swing at him and he clocked them but I didn't see it.Howard Cosell was there for US TV too, wearing his distinctive canary yellow blazer, he made himself scarce, but not before informing the US audience what a bunch of unsportsmanlike savages we were,can't blame him really! It was a long time ago and that's about all I can recollect.