Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн

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I did not see Hagler again that night, maybe a knee on canvas or the shining glint of his beer-stained bald head. But his corner men, some officials in suits and the police scraped him through the bottom rope. ‘He had to be smuggled away like a criminal from the scene of his triumph,’ said the Daily Mirror’s Frank McGhee. They dragged him through the hostile crowd to his changing room as remnants of blood and beer sizzled in the ring.

‘Disgusting!’ was the headline on the front cover of the 3 October issue of Boxing News. Mullan opened his report by stating: ‘The long-dead myth of British sportsmanship was finally buried at Wembley as a cascade of beer bottles and cans showered the ring and a racist mob howled obscenities at the black fighter who had taken Alan Minter’s world middleweight title and at the black referee who had stopped the fight after one minute 45 seconds of the third round.’

In the same edition of Boxing News, American promoter Bob Arum, who staged the Minter–Hagler fight, had stronger words. ‘This was a disgrace … It was ridiculous the way this nationalism was built up before the fight.’