Just in

Articles by James Westacott

Avatar photo
About James Westacott

James Westacott, a former City investment banker, acquired his love of the Noble Art as a schoolboy in the 1970s. For many years he attended boxing events in and around London and more recently became a subscriber to the Box Nation satellite/cable channel. His all-time favourite boxer is Carlos Monzon. More Posts

Has Joshua bitten off more than he can chew?

I was recently sat down with my brother, who knows a bit about these things, and introduced to the digital device called a Google Chrome stick – something you shove in the back of your telly via which (wirelessly?) you can play out videos etc. on your computer or smartphone on the full [...]

September 6, 2017 // 0 Comments

Mills uncovered (?)

If you were a sports-mad young kid in the 1950s and early 1960s (as I was) and to some degree or another you followed the sport of boxing, the all-action lifestyle of British boxer Freddie Mills – who occasionally also appeared on kids’ TV programmes as a ‘one size fits all’ [...]

September 4, 2017 // 0 Comments

Getting ready to rumble

Just before lunchtime yesterday I decided to purchase my cable company’s pay-per-view offering of live coverage of the super-fight boxing bill featuring as its main event the world heavyweight championship bout between Britain’s supposed novice but greatly-hyped 27 year old Anthony Joshua and [...]

April 30, 2017 // 0 Comments

A weekend boxing feast

For those of us like to stay up – or more likely at our vintage, go to bed at our normal time and then hope to wake up in the early hours and then rise again – to watch some of the USA’s biggest boxing fight bills on television, Saturday night’s return bout between Belfast’s hero Carl [...]

January 30, 2017 // 0 Comments

In pursuit of the ‘ruby red’ …

My love of the Noble Art goes back a long way, probably to when I was about eight and (contrast this with today’s namby-pamby PC-ridden, ‘elf & safety-obsessed, world) and the year when my brother and I received pairs of boxing gloves for Christmas. I don’t know for sure – they may [...]

January 5, 2017 // 0 Comments

Boxing on the box

The days of yore when I am my pals used to visit the Albert Hall, York Hall and sundry other traditional boxing venues (in the heyday of Tony Sibson, Dave ‘Boy’ Green and the great John L. Gardner) in order to watch the pantomime bills of Mickey Duff, Jarvis Astaire and Frank Warren have long [...]

December 11, 2016 // 0 Comments

The art of coming up smelling of roses

Back in the day when I was a kid at boarding prep school our access to television was restricted to the whim of a bachelor assistant headmaster, who’d previously been in the navy, who used to operate an ‘open house’ on Saturday afternoons in his disorganised study which gave off a ‘twenty [...]

October 25, 2016 // 0 Comments

Still possessing the urge and the protective cup

It wasn’t long after I joined the Rust that I received my first ticking off from the editor during an editorial meeting. He had just delivered a stirring oration upon the principles upon which the website had supposedly been founded, i.e. giving those past the first flush of youth the opportunity [...]

August 26, 2016 // 0 Comments

A NIGHT OF WHITE COLLAR BOXING

Last night Ivan Conway kindly invited me to an evening of white collar boxing at the Hilton Brighton. White collar boxers are amateurs who train with accredited coaches to acquire fitness and learn the skills of the Noble Art. The evening was also to celebrate the 50th birthday of Tony Cottey, the [...]

May 15, 2016 // 0 Comments

Howard Cosell

On the Rust we often nostalgically praise the sporting commentators of the seventies. In boxing we had Harry Carpenter – not perhaps up there with Peter ‘O’Sullivan, Bill MacLaren and John Arlott – he famously called Bugner v Cooper and Ali v Frazier wrong in the same week. [...]

December 18, 2015 // 0 Comments

1 2 3 4 5 6

Copyright © 2026 The National Rust | Design by Premonition