‘THE LIVERPOOL DANE’
A Danish resistance member in World War II, Hansen fought for both the Danish and British middleweight titles
IT was July 1954 and Preston’s Johnny Sullivan had just been matched with Gordon Hazell for the British middleweight crown left vacant by Randolph Turpin. In the meantime, Sullivan needed a tune-up fight, nothing dangerous but an opponent who could give him a few good rounds.
Johnny’s manager reckoned he’d found just the man: a durable Dane who as a pro had only once boxed outside Scandinavia. Martin Hansen had a pretty good record but had lost several fights and failed in two Danish title challenges. Even in Denmark he wasn’t the top star. Fellow Danes Jørgen Johansen and Christian Christensen overshadowed him.
On paper Hansen was perfect for Sullivan – but the timing of the fight also suited the Dane. It came just as Danish boxing had hit a fallow spell. Johansen had retired, Christensen was trying his luck in America, and nobody wanted to promote fights in Copenhagen.
Unbeknown to most British fans, Hansen was no stranger to these shores. By birth he was a Liverpudlian, his father, a Danish seaman, having met and married his English mother in Liverpool, where Martin was born in 1925. By age three he’d moved with his parents to Copenhagen, and by his teens started amateur boxing. But at that time Hansen was involved in a much bigger fight. The Nazis occupied Denmark from 1940 until the end of the war, and Martin was a member of the Danish resistance.
In 1948, he was Danish amateur middleweight champion, and boxed for Denmark at that year’s London Olympics. The following year he turned pro and had reached 21-6-4 by the time he faced Sullivan, in July 1954.
“I got £200 but wondered what I was in for when a load of my Liverpool relatives, whom I had never met before, told me I was supposed to be a continental pushover for Sullivan,” Hansen recalled. But the unheralded Dane upset the form book with a wellearned points win. Two months later, Sullivan demolished Hazell in one round to become British and Empire 160lb champion. “Suddenly I found myself a name in Britain,” Martin remembered.
“The Liverpool Dane”, as he became known, came back to Britain that autumn to face Liverpool’s Pat Mcateer and fight a return with new British champ Sullivan. Hansen lost both bouts on debatable decisions.
In 1956, Martin was urged to push for a British title fight. To satisfy a oneyear residence requirement, he moved in with a cousin in Liverpool where he joined the well-known Tony Vairo stable and sparred regularly with future world champ Dick Tiger, who was one of his stablemates.
Under Vairo, Hansen’s career flourished. “The Liverpool Dane” beat some excellent middles, including Lew Lazar, Terence Murphy, Billy Ellaway and Les Allen, to set up a British title showdown with Pat Mcateer, who’d taken the crown from Sullivan. In the event, Martin performed poorly and was well beaten on points by Mcateer.
In 1958, Hansen was commuting between Copenhagen and Liverpool. He met John “Cowboy” Mccormack that October in a title eliminator, but struggled with John’s slippery southpaw style. Mccormack won on points and 11 months later took the British middleweight title from Terry Downes.
Martin retired in 1959, aged 33, with a 42-18-5 record. Boxing News columnist Ron Olver remembered him as “a boxer with a typically British style, good left hand, good mover and his ringcraft could not be faulted.” Hansen was never knocked out or stopped, and the only physical sign of his trade was some gold teeth he acquired when “an amateur opponent buried his head in my mouth.”
After boxing, Martin ran his own asphalt firm in Copenhagen and married Laila, a Danish woman, with whom he had five children. He died in 1999, aged 73.