The Polish-born boxing manager, who has died, was held in the sort of affection a jailer would reserve for a favourite inmate
Mickey Duff had a fighter's face and an accountant's heart. He also had a wicked sense of humour, so the fixed grin he carried into a thousand deals surely would have widened had he read any of the fine eulogies the boxing fraternity has conferred on him since his death at 84 on Saturday.
No stranger to deception, Duff was never less than ruthlessly direct in his professional relationships – with fighters, rivals, journalists and friends – and authored one of the enduring truths of his business: "If you want loyalty, buy a dog."
The notion that Monek Prager would one day become a rabbi seemed reasonable to his religious father when the family fled Nazi-threatened Poland in 1938 for a new life in London's East End. But a life of devout preaching was as foreign to the young man as it was to any of the rascals with whom one of the great deal-makers in the history of boxing subsequently did business.
He was born in Tarnow, Poland, in 1929 and was still learning how to speak English when lured into the excitement of the boxing ring as a young teenager. He left school at 13 and changed his name to Mickey Duff to conceal his new enthusiasm from his rabbi father.
Mystery still surrounds his nom de guerre. He took it either from a Jazz Age Philadelphia bootlegger called Mickey Duffy or, according to the version he gave, a boxer from a 1930s movie, called Jackie Boy Duffy – and played either by James Cagney or Arthur Kennedy. However, there is no corroboration of such a character. He told one reporter the movie was Cash And Carry – which was a 1937 Marx brothers comedy. Either way, he must have revelled in the joke.
Duff's fighting career was brief and furious: variously chronicled as 69 or 44 bouts as a lightweight and welterweight, mostly eight-rounders down the bill, between September, 1945 (illegally as a 15-year-old minor) and December 1948. I was told he boxed in red shorts, to reflect his radical credentials, embroidered with the Star of David. While he suffered only a handful of defeats, employing a decent jab and nimble footwork, he was never stopped, but nor was he a ticket-selling attraction.
"Put it this way," he told me once. "I wouldn't have paid two bob to watch me." Indeed Duff wanted to throw his last fight but ringside gamblers declined his offer, pointing out that his opponent, Neil McCearn, was going to win anyway. (He did – then was knocked out twice and retired).
Duff had seen enough ring action. "I decided there was a better living to be made on the other side of the ropes," he said, and into a world of matchmaking plunged the keen-eyed kid from Aldgate, going on to manage or promote 19 world champions, and secure after 55 years what he liked to call "fuck-off money".
While Duff often gave the impression that sentiment was an alien concept to him (he did not speak to his father after an argument when he was 21), those close to this last-century behemoth of the fight business regarded him with the sort of affection a jailer would reserve for a favourite inmate.
Alan Hubbard, who knew Duff better than most boxing writers over a long period, accurately described him as, "abrasive, but always pugnaciously engaging".
At his peak – which stretched from the last days of Harry Levene in the 60s until the rise of Frank Warren in the 80s – he was as formidable an enemy as he was an ally, and few navigated the shark-filled waters of the fight game more adroitly. He was associated with a string of fine British fighters in various capacities, including world champions Jim Watt, Howard Winstone, Barry McGuigan, Lloyd Honeyghan, Alan Minter, John H Stracey and Frank Bruno. Duff was the heartbeat of The Cartel, a combination that included Mike Barrett, who died at 85 in 2011, and Terry Lawless, who was 76 when he died in 2009, and Jarvis Astaire, who is 90.
Jack Solomons, whom Harry Levene edged out, called them "the syndicate".
But Duff maintained it was one "benevolent" monopoly replacing another.
After Warren was shot and wounded in 1989, Duff observed: "It couldn't have been anyone in boxing. They wouldn't have missed."
"From the moment he got up in the morning until he went to sleep at night, Mickey Duff knew a hundred different ways to make money," Bruno wrote in his autobiography. "He was one serious cat." They fell out, the promoter and the fighter, but that's hardly a novelty in boxing, nor was it rare in Duff's life.
In November 1987, after three days in the high court, he was awarded £10,000 in libel damages for a story in the Sunday Times in 1983 that alleged he had done business with the convicted American embezzler, Harold Smith. A jury of seven women and five men took just under two hours to find his favour, unanimously. It was the sort of decision he craved for his fighters. In court papers, he gave his name as Morris Prager, and sometimes it seemed as if we never properly knew who Mickey Duff was.
In later years, separated from his wife of 50 years, Marie, he lived alone in a stylish apartment overlooking Marble Arch, not far from where he and Jarvis Astaire founded the Anglo Sporting Club at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane in 1964. On opening night, he famously refused entry to the Kray twins, whom he used to promote ("They were bloody useless"). When they sent Marie a gift box containing four dead rats, Duff informed they guys he called, "my bouncers in blue", the police. "After four months they were both in prison for life," he recalled.
When his last fighter, the Luton lightweight Billy Schwer, lost a world title challenge in 2001, Duff quit his lifetime obsession. "I could have retired years ago," he said shortly before the fight, "but the main reason I hung on was because too many people wanted to see me go."
Although he was a prudent matchmaker, he was never afraid to gamble, on a fight or at the tables. He once had a winning bet of $200,000 on Sugar Ray Leonard to beat Marvin Hagler, but he lost big as well, taking hits of $20,000 or $30,000 like a good sparring partner.
He says he never knew of a fixed fight involving fighters paid more than £500. But there is a story, unverified and possibly true, that he got wind of "an arranged bout" in Las Vegas once and was torn between cashing in or telling the owner of the casino that was staging the fight. It is said he did both – and stayed at the hotel for nothing every time he came back to town.
Mickey Duff always knew where the bodies were buried. Now he has joined them, after the most interesting life any fighting man could wish for. Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.
Mickey Duff had a fighter's face and an accountant's heart. He also had a wicked sense of humour, so the fixed grin he carried into a thousand deals surely would have widened had he read any of the fine eulogies the boxing fraternity has conferred on him since his death at 84 on Saturday.
No stranger to deception, Duff was never less than ruthlessly direct in his professional relationships – with fighters, rivals, journalists and friends – and authored one of the enduring truths of his business: "If you want loyalty, buy a dog."
The notion that Monek Prager would one day become a rabbi seemed reasonable to his religious father when the family fled Nazi-threatened Poland in 1938 for a new life in London's East End. But a life of devout preaching was as foreign to the young man as it was to any of the rascals with whom one of the great deal-makers in the history of boxing subsequently did business.
He was born in Tarnow, Poland, in 1929 and was still learning how to speak English when lured into the excitement of the boxing ring as a young teenager. He left school at 13 and changed his name to Mickey Duff to conceal his new enthusiasm from his rabbi father.
Mystery still surrounds his nom de guerre. He took it either from a Jazz Age Philadelphia bootlegger called Mickey Duffy or, according to the version he gave, a boxer from a 1930s movie, called Jackie Boy Duffy – and played either by James Cagney or Arthur Kennedy. However, there is no corroboration of such a character. He told one reporter the movie was Cash And Carry – which was a 1937 Marx brothers comedy. Either way, he must have revelled in the joke.
Duff's fighting career was brief and furious: variously chronicled as 69 or 44 bouts as a lightweight and welterweight, mostly eight-rounders down the bill, between September, 1945 (illegally as a 15-year-old minor) and December 1948. I was told he boxed in red shorts, to reflect his radical credentials, embroidered with the Star of David. While he suffered only a handful of defeats, employing a decent jab and nimble footwork, he was never stopped, but nor was he a ticket-selling attraction.
"Put it this way," he told me once. "I wouldn't have paid two bob to watch me." Indeed Duff wanted to throw his last fight but ringside gamblers declined his offer, pointing out that his opponent, Neil McCearn, was going to win anyway. (He did – then was knocked out twice and retired).
Duff had seen enough ring action. "I decided there was a better living to be made on the other side of the ropes," he said, and into a world of matchmaking plunged the keen-eyed kid from Aldgate, going on to manage or promote 19 world champions, and secure after 55 years what he liked to call "fuck-off money".
While Duff often gave the impression that sentiment was an alien concept to him (he did not speak to his father after an argument when he was 21), those close to this last-century behemoth of the fight business regarded him with the sort of affection a jailer would reserve for a favourite inmate.
Alan Hubbard, who knew Duff better than most boxing writers over a long period, accurately described him as, "abrasive, but always pugnaciously engaging".
At his peak – which stretched from the last days of Harry Levene in the 60s until the rise of Frank Warren in the 80s – he was as formidable an enemy as he was an ally, and few navigated the shark-filled waters of the fight game more adroitly. He was associated with a string of fine British fighters in various capacities, including world champions Jim Watt, Howard Winstone, Barry McGuigan, Lloyd Honeyghan, Alan Minter, John H Stracey and Frank Bruno. Duff was the heartbeat of The Cartel, a combination that included Mike Barrett, who died at 85 in 2011, and Terry Lawless, who was 76 when he died in 2009, and Jarvis Astaire, who is 90.
Jack Solomons, whom Harry Levene edged out, called them "the syndicate".
But Duff maintained it was one "benevolent" monopoly replacing another.
After Warren was shot and wounded in 1989, Duff observed: "It couldn't have been anyone in boxing. They wouldn't have missed."
"From the moment he got up in the morning until he went to sleep at night, Mickey Duff knew a hundred different ways to make money," Bruno wrote in his autobiography. "He was one serious cat." They fell out, the promoter and the fighter, but that's hardly a novelty in boxing, nor was it rare in Duff's life.
In November 1987, after three days in the high court, he was awarded £10,000 in libel damages for a story in the Sunday Times in 1983 that alleged he had done business with the convicted American embezzler, Harold Smith. A jury of seven women and five men took just under two hours to find his favour, unanimously. It was the sort of decision he craved for his fighters. In court papers, he gave his name as Morris Prager, and sometimes it seemed as if we never properly knew who Mickey Duff was.
In later years, separated from his wife of 50 years, Marie, he lived alone in a stylish apartment overlooking Marble Arch, not far from where he and Jarvis Astaire founded the Anglo Sporting Club at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane in 1964. On opening night, he famously refused entry to the Kray twins, whom he used to promote ("They were bloody useless"). When they sent Marie a gift box containing four dead rats, Duff informed they guys he called, "my bouncers in blue", the police. "After four months they were both in prison for life," he recalled.
When his last fighter, the Luton lightweight Billy Schwer, lost a world title challenge in 2001, Duff quit his lifetime obsession. "I could have retired years ago," he said shortly before the fight, "but the main reason I hung on was because too many people wanted to see me go."
Although he was a prudent matchmaker, he was never afraid to gamble, on a fight or at the tables. He once had a winning bet of $200,000 on Sugar Ray Leonard to beat Marvin Hagler, but he lost big as well, taking hits of $20,000 or $30,000 like a good sparring partner.
He says he never knew of a fixed fight involving fighters paid more than £500. But there is a story, unverified and possibly true, that he got wind of "an arranged bout" in Las Vegas once and was torn between cashing in or telling the owner of the casino that was staging the fight. It is said he did both – and stayed at the hotel for nothing every time he came back to town.
Mickey Duff always knew where the bodies were buried. Now he has joined them, after the most interesting life any fighting man could wish for. Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.