Jack Bodell: Ringside Report Remembers a Warrior & Gentleman

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

Boxing is filled with drama as winners and losers spread their hopes and fears across the halls and the cards that light up evenings throughout our lands. For a few it is about world titles and glory as they have their careers plotted, their fights organized and their fan base developed.

For the majority, though, glory comes infrequently and their honors get lost and forgotten in an age that values the likes of $300 Million evenings more than true guts and glory and sportsmen and women with genuine rags to riches stories.

Domestic success is, however to be celebrated and in the United Kingdom you start by getting into area titles, then onto British level glory before a route to the Commonwealth titles can be yours or even to Europe. Once at either level you hear your name being mentioned for world honors.

It is still a massive event winning a British title and the belt which comes with it – the Lonsdale Belt – has a massive pull for UK fighters. If you defend it successfully 3 times you get to keep it.

Many want to be honored in that way but so few manage it – the boxer that I am writing to celebrate here got his British title, and the Commonwealth and even the European. He also was featured on a Monty Python sketch for television!

Just last week that former British, European and Commonwealth heavyweight champion died. His passing, at the age of 76, was not accompanied by fanfare as his achievements may have been modest, his post boxing career, equally modest and his unassuming nature did not carve out a career in the media circuit. That modesty followed an amateur career as a light heavyweight where he won the 1961 amateur championships in Britain and a Bronze Medal at the Europeans, also in 1961.

Those in the know, though could recognize a real fighter and boxing purist had left us. That boxer, Jack Bodell fought professionally and had a record of 58-13, 31 KO’s winning those 3 championships and, at the age of 76 lost his biggest fight against the awful illness of dementia.

The height of his career, was over 40 years ago, in 1971. Despite Bodell’s name being one with which most of us are fairly unfamiliar, who he fought and beat allows a claim at least to legendary status. In 1969, he won the British title against Carl Gizzi, before losing it to a certain Henry Cooper. In 1971, he took the Commonwealth and European titles from another well known British boxing name in Joe Bugner.

Whilst most of his fights were on British soil for overseas boxing followers, it is probably his 64 second knockout to Jerry Quarry or his points win over Jose “King” Roman that stand out.

Another massive British scalp he took was Brian London, in 1968, in a British title eliminator. Bodell brought his professional boxing career to an end professionally in 1972 when he was stopped by Danny McAlinden at Villa Park in the 2nd round when they fought for British and Commonwealth titles.

Bodell went on to set up a fish and chip shop – the Knockout Fish Bar in Tile Hill – after retiring in Coventry and welcomed a very famous fellow boxer on a visit in 1983. Muhammad Ali came to see him and as it always happened everywhere he would go in the UK, he brought the crowds to Coventry that August for a man he never fought but clearly wanted to support.

In his later life Bodell suffered with dementia. It is from this appalling illness that a true fighter lost his life, but we would like to recognize the loss of someone dedicated to the sweet science and we shall, recognize celebrate and raise our very own RSR 10 bells to Jack Bodell.

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