PLEASE DADDY, DON’T DO IT
Aged 54, and after years of anguish, Frank Bruno this week said he wants to return to the ring. In a deeply moving interview, his daughters vow to protect him from himself
RACHEL and Nicola Bruno can remember almost every stomachchurning second of the brutal and bloodied ending of their father Frank’s boxing career. It was 20 years ago, but memories of that night in Las Vegas when Bruno lost his heavyweight world title to Mike Tyson are so vivid it could have been yesterday.
Rachel was nine and Nicola, 13. To deafening chants of ‘Bruno, Bruno, Bruno’ they were giddy with excitement as they led their father from his dressing room to the ring.
Blinded by spotlights, Nicola proudly carried his WBC world title belt, convinced her dad was going to win again. Six foot four inches tall, Bruno towered over Tyson. He looked invincible. The bell rang, but as Tyson landed one punch after the other, Nicola covered her eyes. She was almost sick when she saw blood pouring from a cut over her father’s eye.
Rachel — attending her first and last live fight — was hysterical. Racing into her defeated father’s arms after the fight was stopped, she cried: ‘Daddy, Daddy, I hope he didn’t hurt you too badly.’
‘I hated seeing my father hurt,’ says 29-year-old Rachel today. ‘I never wanted to see him fight again. I just wanted him home with us.’
Bruno retired in 1996 aged 34. Having suffered a detached retina, another fight could blind him. He hung up his gloves with an estimated £8 million fortune, a record to be proud of (only five defeats out of 45 professional fights) and a special place in the nation’s hearts. And that is the way Rachel is determined it must stay.
She’d rather go ten rounds with Mike Tyson herself than let her father risk his health, sanity and hard-won reputation by stepping into the ring again. You can imagine her dismay, therefore, when she switched on the television this week to see her father on ITV’s This Morning, publicly announcing his comeback — at the age of 54.
True, he looked as physically fit as he did in his prime, but, of course, anyone familiar with Frank’s story will know that his biggest, ongoing f i ght, nowadays is against mental illness.
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2003, he has been hospitalised three times and only l ast September voluntarily admitted himself to an NHS psychiatric ward when he started to feel unwell again.
Speaking for the first time since that worrying TV appearance, Rachel says: ‘I felt like I was nine again. I just wanted to protect him.
‘I love my father and I’m so proud of him, but when he retired he’d achieved everything he set out to achieve. He’s had his time. Just leave it to the youngsters. We can see that, but I’m not sure he can.’
‘I didn’t have a clue he was going on, and it should never have been allowed, I’m not angry with This Morning. If anything, I felt sorry for hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield because they looked so uncomfortable.
‘But I’m cross with some of the people around my dad who I don’t feel have his best interests at heart. I’ve told them not to book any more work for him until he’s better. What he needs is rest, peace and quiet with his family and those who do know what’s best for him.’
In the rambling interview, Bruno explained what he wanted to do: ‘I’ve got to get back into boxing, to get this out of my system, because I don’t want to end up in Broadmoor Hospital.’
Asked if it was sensible, he replied: ‘Is that a good idea? I haven’t got no choice. I train every day. I can’t sit down and let these so-called promoters say [ British heavyweight champion] Anthony Joshua can knock me out in two rounds when I’m not even dead.’
OF THE drugs prescribed for his condition, he said: ‘ They made me f eel suicidal. They mess up my head. I can’t sleep. I have so much energy.’ Even after the British Boxing Board of Control dismissed any chance of licensing Bruno to box again, pundits, promoters, boxers — past and present — lined up to give their verdicts on whether he should return to the ring.
World heavyweight champion Tyson Fury was the last to weigh in, saying Bruno should be allowed to fight again.
Rachel feels compelled to speak out because she wants to quash the speculation once and for all. ‘I know my dad is Frank Bruno, but he is still my dad and it’s extra hard when he’s poorly because he’s so famous. I don’t like people to see him when he’s unwell,’ she says.
‘When he’s well, he is the consummate professional and performer. He knows how to handle himself and talks very well. But when he’s unwell, sometimes he is the one person who can’t see it. Physically he is in the best shape of his life, but his mind is not quite connected yet. That is very painful to watch.
‘The British people love and respect our dad, they listen to what he says and look up to him. He is an ambassador for mental health. He doesn’t need the money, so was that TV appearance worth all the negative headlines? I don’t think so. When you’re ill, you reminisce about the past.
‘I understand he’s never going to lose that urge to box — having had that career for so long he’s never stopped training — but it’s just not happening.
‘He’s been talking about a comeback for a while, but in the past couple of months he’s become fixated. I phoned him after the interview and told him I thought it was a mistake going on TV. But he didn’t agree with me. He laughed and said: “OK, Mum.”
‘Sometimes I do feel I’ve taken on the role of his mother, talking to him like a child.’
Elder daughter Nicola, 34, a carer for the elderly, hasn’t seen the This Morning interview, nor does she intend to. She went to see her father the day of the broadcast, but they did not discuss it.
‘Dad asked me if I’d seen it and I said no and that was it. To me, he’s never been Frank Bruno the boxer, only ever my dad,’ she says.
‘I’m not interested in sport. I used to love watching Dad in pantomime, but I never enjoyed the two live boxing matches I saw. I was always the overly emotional one, the first to cry.’
SHE adds: ‘I am shy. Being in the public eye makes me anxious, but Dad is his own person. We are both very protective of him, but as much as he has bipolar, he is his own man and I have to respect that. ‘If that is the route he wants to go down, I wouldn’t try to stop him. There is nothing he could ever do that I would feel ashamed of.
‘I don’t think anyone would be silly enough to try to arrange a comeback fight, but if they did I could never watch it. I can watch videos of Dad’s old fights and they still stir up some nice memories, but I think this talk of a comeback is j ust one of his lightning ideas.
‘He lives a very regimented life. He trains every day. It is all he has ever known. There is the bipolar and there is the person in general, the difficulty for us is separating the two. It could be a good day or a bad day, or a relapse.’
Perhaps it is no co-incidence that Frank’s desire to fight again — clearly stated on his website — coincides with his 21-year-old son Franklin’s decision to take up amateur boxing last year.
Franklin, an apprentice carpenter, was born six months before Bruno beat Oliver McCall in front of 30,000 fans at Wembley to take the world title and 12 months old when Mike Tyson forced his father’s retirement. Unlike his sisters, he has never seen his father box.
Rachel says: ‘Franklin is very proud of his dad and wants to make Dad proud of him and this is his way of doing it. He says he wants to be as good, if not better. He’s not as tall, and a different weight, but is a lot faster.
Dad’s career was a vocation and seeing Franklin train has re-awakened that. Sometimes they train together and Dad thinks he’s got what it takes, but what he needs to remember is that this is Franklin’s time to shine now. Let Franklin make his dad proud.’
In many ways, the years that followed Bruno’s retirement have been far tougher for his children than anything they witnessed in the ring. At times, they say, it feels as if their father has been ‘lost’ to them.
Bruno has spoken extensively of his battle with bipolar — which he believes he can trace back to childhood — and the terrifying manic episodes in more recent years which have resulted in enforced spells in psychiatric hospital for his own safety.
‘In boxing at least you can see your opponent. You stand toe-to-toe. They hit you, you hit them back.’ he once said. ‘But with mental illness you can’t always see it. It comes from the
shadows and all of a sudden “bang”, you’re down.’
Rachel and Nicola miss the days when they were a happy family and their father was as famous for his comic repartee as for boxing, carving a second career as a TV personality.
It all seems like a long lost dream now. Home was a £1.5 million sixbedroom mansion in Essex with a swimming pool, stables, horses, extensive grounds and luxury cars on the drive.
The night Bruno won the world title was one of the happiest of their lives — celebrated with Asti Spumante and sausage rolls.
Rachel says: ‘I was too young to go to the fight, so I was shouting at the telly, l eaping around so much I set the burglar alarm off. There were crowds and police outside waiting for Dad to come back and someone had painted his picture on the road.
‘ We hardly ever saw our dad because he was away for months at a time training, but we loved it when he was home. We thought it would be brilliant when he retired because we’d have him all the time.’
Even Frank talked about the ‘paradise’ of going home to his family and spending time with them.
Announcing his retirement at a press conference, he said: ‘I am going to be happy — get a suntan here and there, use my Black & Decker here and there, just chill out with my family.’
The late boxing commentator Harry Carpenter and Frank’s verbal sparring partner — ‘ Know what I mean, ’Arry?’ — agreed: ‘The only right thing to do now is call it a day. Go safely through the rest of your life.’
Out of respect to their father, Rachel and Nicola don’t want to upset him by dredging up the past, but his struggle to adapt to life post retirement has often made headlines.
He became a DJ and his behav- iour grew increasingly erratic, as he became a magnet to spongers and hangers-on intent on helping him spend his money. His 13-year marriage to teenage sweetheart Laura collapsed and they divorced in 2001, with his wife citing his ‘unreasonable behaviour’.
In 2003, he was detained in hospital for the first time.
There have been long periods of estrangement from his children and tentative reconciliations, but recently they have been closer than ever.
Frank is now single and lives alone near Milton Keynes, an hour-and-ahalf away, helped by a PA. His children speak to him almost daily on the phone and visit regularly.
Last June, drama school graduate Rachel hosted a Father’s Day dinner for Frank at the home she shares with her fiance Bobby Hardy, the director of a maintenance firm. Nicola cooked lamb chops and banana cake and they presented Frank with a ‘pamper hamper’ filled with all his favourite things.
He was thrilled when Bobby rang to ask for Rachel’s hand in marriage and is looking forward to walking his younger daughter down the aisle at Brentwood Cathedral next year.
‘We keep begging him to move back to Essex, so he can be closer to his family and we can keep an eye on him, but he moved there after the divorce and l i kes l i ving near Champneys Health Club, which he sees as his base.
‘When he was first diagnosed, the doctors told us there was no cure for bipolar. It is a condition he’ll have to manage for life with a combination of medication, therapy and exercise. And there will be blips. Sometimes stress or even the weather can trigger an episode. At least he has a brilliant after-care mental health team.
‘It is a huge worry, not knowing when Dad is going to have a major episode, because it throws all our lives into turmoil.’
It was deeply upsetting when the girls got a call in September to say Frank had been admitted to a psychiatric ward at a London NHS hospital as a voluntary patient.
‘I’m proud Dad was able to recognise he wasn’t well and seek help. That’s the first time he’s done that,’ says Rachel. She adds: ‘None of us likes it when he is in hospital, but sometimes it is relief to know that at least he is safe.
‘We were really upset when the doctors said it was best if we didn’t see him, that he needed peace and quiet on his own to recover. So we went to his house and made sure it was clean and the fridge was stocked up.
‘He’d arrived at the hospital without a bag or spare clothes, so I rushed round a sports shop and bought him a load of track suits. Nicola and Franklin brought him home from the hospital after a couple of weeks, and I was waiting there for him.
‘It was so lovely to have him back. We chilled out and had a takeaway. I had to go back to Essex to work, but Nicola and Franklin took it in turns to stay with him for a few days at a time and make sure he was all right.
‘ With each episode of illness, depending on how bad it is, it takes longer for him to recover and get back on an even keel. You need to find a balance of the right medication to let you live a normal life.’
As far as Frank Bruno’s daughters are concerned, he’s not found that balance yet. He is still recovering. He has a way to go and the This Morning sofa is no place for him when he is unwell.
‘He may say he’s making a comeback,’ says Rachel, ‘but he’s not.’