“It seems like yesterday,” Frank Bruno says in that familiar low rumble of a voice as a tangled expression crosses his face. “That time has gone. How many years have passed?”
Bruno is remembering his second fight against Mike Tyson, in Las Vegas, in March 1996. I was there and the memory of Bruno looking confused and apprehensive as he made the long and lonely walk to the ring to defend his world heavyweight title is seared into my brain. It was hard to imagine the full extent of the emotion churning through him as he made the sign of the cross every few steps. His anxious genuflecting seemed full of shadows in his mind that stretched beyond boxing. I tell Bruno how long it has been.
“Twenty-five years?” he says quizzically. “It’s scary, isn’t it? Where has the time gone?”
Bruno laughs when I tell him that he is still looking good. “Oh, my God,” he chortles. “I’ll buy you a drink. A big one.”
His laughter sounds the same as it always did. It is deep and resonant and strangely knowing. Bruno is laughing to lighten the mood and to make us both accept the fact that we are nearly old men now, a quarter-of-a-century on.
I have always liked Bruno and thought he was a much more complex and interesting man than the stereotype which clouded his real nature. But he often seemed a solitary figure, even when surrounded by people on television or in pantomime. Bruno was haunted by the cruel slur he was an Uncle Tom and it may have contributed to his subsequent mental breakdown.
He was a brave fighter, and good enough to win the WBC world heavyweight title and 40 of his 45 bouts. The very last of these was that fateful night against Tyson when, for the second time, he was battered into submission. Those encounters with Tyson, another lonely man with an even more complicated character, underpin a new Sky Sports documentary about a pair of contrasting heavyweights who, all these years later, have such affection for each other.
Bruno has suffered in the intervening years. The break-up of his marriage and his enforced retirement after the Tyson rematch left him lost and bereft. He was sectioned in September 2003, and spent some time in Goodmayes, in a hospital for mentally ill people, before he slowly rebuilt his life without boxing.
I remind Bruno he once called himself a loner. Does that description still apply today? “It does,” Bruno says. “I get up about five in the morning every day. I’ve got a gym at home and that is my temple. I enjoy training and it keeps me out of trouble, having something to focus on. At the moment I can’t go to the health farm because it’s shut but I’ve got a tub, a steamer and a sunbed. I’ve got all I need at home.”
Does he get up every morning at five am? “I actually got up this morning about four o’clock, messed around with a cup of tea and then went to the gym. I had a good hour training and I’ll have another hour later with some rowing, the running machine, some weights and on the punch bag in the garden. I try to keep it real because these youngsters think us old men ain’t got anything left in us. When the health farm is open I will go, with the bonus of having a swim and sauna.”
Bruno was relentlessly dedicated throughout his boxing career. Apart from two surprise losses against James “Bonecrusher” Smith and Tim Witherspoon, when he was still relatively inexperienced, Bruno fell short only against the elite champions – but he shook Lennox Lewis and Tyson and might have beaten both men if he could have landed a few more concussive punches when they reeled beneath his undoubted power.
Bruno reveals that he often watches these fights again. “I’m the biggest critic of my old fights. I watch both the Bonecrusher and the Witherspoon fights quite a lot because I was a youngster and I didn’t know how to pace myself. I was a late developer.”
Does he watch the bouts he lost more than those he won? “Yeah. I’m not a perfectionist but I don’t take losing too well and I need to watch those fights to see my mistakes. I still miss boxing quite a lot. Sometimes, when I go to boxing or if it’s on television, I love watching it. Last year I never went to any shows due to lockdown. I’d been doing very well ducking and diving up and down the country but, yeah, I do miss it.”
Bruno smiles shyly when I ask if he has watched the Sky documentary. “I watched it yesterday but I don’t like watching myself because I’m my biggest critic. But I think it’s a good documentary and it brings back tears, like when I’m playing with the kids.”
Tyson stresses in the film how close he came to being knocked out in their first fight in February 1989. He dropped Bruno in the first round and, with his aura at its most intimidating, it looked as if Tyson was on his way to another devastating early stoppage. But Bruno fought back and wobbled Tyson with a shuddering left hook. Tyson said Bruno’s punches felt like electricity – but he survived the jolting shock and won on a fifth‑round TKO.
Bruno knows he missed his best chance to shatter the myth of Iron Mike and laments the fact that the fight had been postponed multiple times. “It cost me a lot. I went into training camp four months before the first cancellation and put so much into it. But it became so confusing when he was crashing his car and saying he wanted to commit suicide. The fight was cancelled five times. When he finally got in the ring I tried to finish him but he’s very short and he survived by bobbing and weaving. He recovered very quick.”
Tyson was in trouble emotionally and, just under a year later, he was beaten for the first time by Buster Douglas. Did it hurt Bruno that Douglas completed the shock victory which he had craved? “I can’t really go into hurt, because it’s too deep and sometimes you never get out of the hurt. So you put the hurt to one side.”
Bruno admits that, in facing Tyson again in his final fight, with an already damaged eye, he jeopardised his sight. “I took a big risk but I’ve got family to provide for and I couldn’t rob a bank. Sometimes in boxing you think if you’ve lost one eye, you’ve still got the other eye. If you damage one hand, you’ve got the other hand. In the ring you go mind over matter.”
The enormity of all he faced seemed to suddenly hit Bruno in the last minutes before he made his ringwalk. “When your eye is not right your mind is there 80% but the other 20% is worried about your sight. The reality hits you in your dressing room so I just went out there and winged it. The fight only went three rounds before he stopped me. You could say it’s brave but it’s very stupid. One of the most crazy things I’ve ever done. It would have been wise to retire after I won the world title against Oliver McCall [in his previous fight in September 1995] but I’ve got kids who go to private school. Private school for each kid costs £1m. I’ve got four kids and all four have been to private school – one of them is still there.”
In the immediate aftermath of becoming world champion, at Wembley Stadium, Bruno had cried at ringside. “It was tough,” he said, the tears rolling from his swollen eyes, “but I love my brother. I’m not an Uncle Tom. I love my people. I’m not a sellout. I’m not an Uncle Tom.”
Bruno is still cut to the core by that jibe which was used against him by both Lewis and McCall. “I’m not racist, you know,” he tells me as hurt thickens his voice. “Whether it’s white, yellow, Pakistani, Indian, Nigerian, whatever, who am I to call someone Uncle Tom? That is a lowlife thing to do, because my mum is the same age as [Lewis’s] mum and our mums are both Jamaican. My dad’s a Dominican so where does he get that logic of me wanting to be an Uncle Tom? A lot of people said I paved the way for black British boxers to do very well. Lennox Lewis said some gross things and McCall tried to get on that bandwagon. He fell flat on his face.”
Muhammad Ali deployed the same tactic when, during their simmering rivalry, he demeaned the great Joe Frazier who had suffered far more racism than he had ever done. “That is below the belt,” Bruno says of Ali. “When I heard him say that, I lost a lot of respect for him because that was a low blow. Like you said Joe came from a place [in South Carolina] where there had been slaves and black people were insulted. Why would Ali need to say that to him?”
The most poignant segment of the documentary comes near the end when Bruno flies to Miami to meet Tyson. “Once you get Mike on his own, he’s very, very clever,” Bruno says. “He is more clued up than a lot of people give him credit for so it was good to see him by himself without all the hangers-on. He’s a very knowledgeable guy.”
Tyson speaks of his mind being like “a torture chamber” when he was at his most distressed. Did Bruno feel something similar with his own mental health? “It was a challenge in a different way. When you’ve been boxing for years and then all of a sudden they say you’ve got to retire, it’s a very lonely and confusing place. My trainer George Francis used to tell me: ‘Your biggest fight is when you retire.’ He was right because what are you going to do? If you’re 75 you can retire and be grateful. When you retire at 35 it’s very confusing.”
Were the weeks in Goodmayes hospital the hardest of his life? “I don’t think it helped me going there. I didn’t like the medication because it knocked me for six. But I done what I had to do.”
Is he still on medication? “I take some tablets here and there. I don’t believe in the tablets but I take them to keep people happy.”
Bruno smiles when I say Tyson made a telling point. He highlighted how Bruno is still loved in Britain – with a warmth that Tyson himself never really experienced. “It’s nice. I never went after fame or anything like that. I don’t believe in fame at all. I just take people as they are and they’re on the same page as me. I’m on a level with everybody. I’m not a legend. I’m just a human being trying to do well for my family and myself. So I feel honoured.”
Bruno v Tyson is available on-demand on Sky Documentaries and NOW TV
