Remembering ROUND ONE

I too served my journo apprenticeship with Round One along with Jimmy Westacott and retain the happiest memories.

Walter Schlumbermayer contributed a column he wired over in those pre internet days called `Stateside with Schlumbermayer’.

He took us into the Garden, steaks at Jack Dempsey’s diner in Broadway and training camps in upstate Catskills.

When he came over, another legend of that organ dear old Morris Lazar took him and the whole of us staffers for lunch at Blooms in Whitechapel.

Over his salt beef sandwich and pickle and bottle of Chateau Palmer 1961 Morris – a prosperous textile importer who seemed to know everyone in the fight game – uttered his now famous line of Randolph Turpin from Leamington Spa who bested Sugar Ray Robinson:

“Randolph Turpin never knew his father. Nor did I.”

He found the latter more surprising.

Morris served as a Desert Rat and at Eighth Army reunions at the Albert Hall would often chat with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, a keen fight fan.

At Monty’s suggestion a meeting was arranged with the architect of Coventry cathedral Sir Basil Spence commissioned to rebuild it.  This took place at Sheekeys and to the consterantion of the architect Morris produced a bundle of twenty pound notes  from his money clip and threw them on the table linen

“Plenty more of that …” he said over his Diver sole meunière, “… provided you put up a plaque to Coventry’s finest sporting son.”

He also set up another Coventry pug Jack Bodell in business.

Years later I took Errol Christie, another Coventry fighter  and his nephew Cyrus, who plays for Fulham, to see the Turpin plaque and recounted the story, one of the few about himself that Morris never told.

 

Christopher Seale-Hayes