Bruno v McCall

Saw those fights on ITV, yes, I remember the whole Benn-McClellan-McCall-Bruno saga.
I think McCall was reprimanded by the boxing board for saying he'd out Bruno in a coffin for "revenge".

I think Lennox Lewis had labelled Bruno an "uncle Tom" too, back in 1993, and Bruno put a lawsuit on him, which is fair enough.

 

Bruno always seemed a happy go lucky guy in his younger days, but as he grew older we discovered he was much more complex.The Uncle Tom thing was in the build up to the Lewis fight. Frank was surrounded by white folk, which is were it came from.
Frank deserved the McCall win.
I thought it would give him confidence for the Tyson rematch but he turned up as a nervous wreck. His corner in that fight couldnt understand his lack of fight.
He lost the plot mentally , his marriage broke up and he went to pieces.
He bought the boxing ring, from the McCall fight kept it in his garden and slept in it.
I dont think anybody viewed Frank as the real world champ , but he deserved to pick up a version.

 

The uncle tom thing was pathetic..someone thinking they were Ali with the mouth I feel..I remember after the Rachman rematch Lennox said some unsavoury racial shite that's gone largely unnoticed

 

Lennox is a closet racist imo...

 

To be fair, I think there were a lot of ordinary black British people in the 1980s who thought Bruno was a bit of a buffoon playing a clown for a mainstream white audience. Certainly a lot of the younger black people in the streets didn't think Bruno was particularly representative and played up the big stupid clown image. These were times of changing race relations in Britain. Bruno was a conservative with a white wife and expressed admiration for prime minister Thatcher, and came across as overly polite and self-mocking at times, completely non-threatening to the mainstream at a time when most young black men in Britain were struggling against different types of prejudice. I'm not saying everyone felt this way about Bruno but people do tend to add things together and make judgments, rightly or wrongly.

 

so basically white people loved him and on average the black people of this country thought he was an uncle tom because of it ???

 

The clownish minstrel act that Frank would adopt sometimes did get a bit repetitive but he was quite canny in carrying it out as it made him a lot of money outside the ring.

 

No. That's not really it.
Some black people in Britain thought Bruno was a sell-out because of the way he carried on and presented him or went along with certain things that are/were a little bit cringe-worthy.
I doubt many of those same people had a problem with Daley Thompson, Tessa Sanderson, John Barnes etc. who were all affable and popular and generally came across as more intelligent and dignified than Bruno's hammy act.

 

In the '80s, Bruno was sport's answer to Rusty Lee.
He was largely reckoned to be Lenny Henry's twin brother by the average white British couch potato who lived on a steady diet of Noel Edmonds, Anne Diamond and Jim Davidson.
And I wouldn't be surprised if Frank himself cracked that joke regularly on TV, in-between mentioning his "sun tan".
People who lived in Britain through the '80s will recognize that.

 

I don't think you can entirely blame Bruno really for his image. He became so massive in the uk he ended up having to please everyone, I don't think he had the savvy to maintain a harder edge to his image, he just became mainstream. It was like they were trying to create an Ali for the uk, and in all honesty frank did pretty well with it, he had a bit of charisma so you kind of rooted for him. It became tiresome later though, the multiple cracks at the titles got awkward and it was a sad end unfortunately. I thought he did OK in the buildup with Lewis, thought he made Him look a bit silly but that wasn't hard I guess, not lennox's strong point the war of words. Glad frank beat McCall who was being a prize idiot in that buildup, those last few rounds were tough to watch

 

I agree, Bruno cannot be blamed for his image. He was primarily trying to be himself, under the focus of the limelight that is difficult for an ordinary guy brought to fame by boxing (ask Tyson Fury about it!).

And I don't mean to dwell on the negatives of his image ... but I'm certain some people did, at the time, and many of them were black British people who acutely perceived certain things that white audience would barely register.

And that was my point - when Lennox Lewis called Bruno an "Uncle Tom" (to rile Bruno pre-fight of course) it wasn't just something that originate there and came out of thin air. There was already an undercurrent in the black British community that kind of felt that way about Bruno. I won't attempt to quantify it but it existed, probably to a fairly significant degree.

 

Yeah, Bruno was by then a more mature and seasoned operator, outside and inside the ring, and showed that with Lennox Lewis.
Both of them had something to prove in that fight, and both of them had justified resentments concerning the rewardss the other was getting (ie. Lewis wasn't getting the public adulation, Bruno wasn't getting the respect for his abilities or winning the titles, they both had something the other one wanted)