Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Hardest fight starts when you hang up your gloves
BRUNO BATTLED MENTAL HEALTH DEMONS AFTER FINAL BELL RANG AND WANTS TO HELP TYSON AVOID SAME FATE
FRANK BRUNO turns 60 next month and knows, from lacerating experience, that Tyson Fury’s hardest fight may lie ahead of him.
It will not be Saturday night’s best-of-three decider against Deontay Wilder in Las Vegas, nor the heavyweight battle of Britain with Anthony Joshua everyone wants to see but currently booked for the 12th of never.
For national treasure Bruno, the real pain began when the music stopped.
He missed boxing so much he built a ring in his back garden and slept in it.
His mental health, especially the vagaries of bipolar disorder, became a reflection of the skies overhead – some days clear and uncluttered, but occasionally giving way to dark clouds and storms of the mind. Nobody was better qualified to sit down with Fury, whose searing openness about his own depressive illness makes his eminence as WBC heavyweight champion even more remarkable, than Bruno, who wore the same belt 25 years ago.
And we can only hope the Gypsy King heeded his predecessor’s wise words when he warned: “When you finish boxing, that’s when the fight starts.”
Bruno was in good form at the premiere in London of Wow Hydrate’s Tyson Fury X Frank Bruno, a short film in which Britain’s big-bang merchants share their experiences of mental health’s ravages.
First, the obvious: Bruno believes Fury will settle all arguments this weekend. “I think Tyson won’t just beat Wilder again – he’ll school him,” said Bruno. “He’s a much better boxer, and will be going in nearly five stone heavier than his opponent.”
When the pair’s conversation turned to mental health, their brutal honesty was like a punch in the face. Bruno’s career was ended by conclusive defeat in his rematch with Mike Tyson in 1996 (below), and by his own
admission, the fall-out was much harder to take than Iron Mike’s thunderous blows.
He said: “It affected my family life in a big way because I wasn’t the same.
“When I finished with boxing, my trainer George Francis said, ‘That’s when the fight starts’. When you’ve finished with training, you’re not coming down the gym and you’re not keeping up your routine, something flips. You get very vexed or very upset very quickly, and you can be a not very nice person to be around.”
In their interview, Fury (below with Bruno) acknowledges his fellow Briton’s significance as one of the first sportsmen to confront his mental health demons in the public eye. “I didn’t have any choice,” said Bruno.
“When I lived in Essex and got sectioned the first time, I did the 28 days and I would go down the shop for something... you could feel people were looking and thinking, ‘Here comes the local nutter’.
“Years ago, you couldn’t talk to nobody because they would be taking the p*** out of you as soon as I went out of the room.
“But I don’t blame boxing – boxing has saved my life, and other people’s lives. It’s a good sport.
“If I’d listened to my friends years ago, I would have been robbing a bank or whatever.”
Bruno, who beat Oliver Mccall to claim the WBC heavyweight title at Wembley in 1995, is grateful he is no longer a lone voice in discussing mental health.
He said: “Looking back, I probably first realised I had a problem when I was at my boarding school. I thought I was tough, but there was this little ginger guy
– I beat him up boxingwise, but when we got off the bus he said, ‘We’ve done it your way’, then he butted me, kicked me in the balls and said, ‘That’s how we do it in our school’.
“It didn’t affect my career because I was always too busy training for the next fight, but sometimes you cry. You can’t suss it out. That’s why it’s good to chat and get it off your plate.”