As Frank Warren readily admits: Open and fearless should be much shorter. Even against people over thirty. The boxing promoter/manager/entrepreneur escaped death twice: in December 1988, he gave up his seat on Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie. Eleven months later he was shot dead by a masked assailant outside Barking’s Broadway theater.
The would-be killer didn’t miss. The bullet penetrated a lung but missed an artery, missing Warren’s heart by just a millimeter. A former client, troubled boxer Terry Marsh, went to trial and was acquitted by a 10-2 majority. “So there were two people who were convinced it was him…” Warren shrugs. For example, although he says, “I know with absolute certainty who it was,” he does not appear to have passed on this potentially important information to the police.
It doesn’t matter because Open and fearless It’s dirty fun. On the one hand, it is a grim tale of the rise of a Labour-supporting plucky young man from an Islington council flat, albeit a plucky young man with enough underworld connections to justify it. Crime Watch especially. Armed (so to speak) with little more than a boxer’s eye and, more importantly, a boxing contract, Warren became an extremely wealthy, conservative adult and owner of a country house in Hertfordshire. “I,” he says shyly, “don’t pretend to be an angel.”
Descriptions of deceptions in North London in the 1960s involving his uncle Bob along with gangster Frankie Fraser for a knife attack on “horrible bastard” Jack Spot and his colleagues such as Moishe Blueball (so named because he there was a discolored testicle). …were tracked down flow seamlessly into the story of Warren overthrowing the complacent boxing establishment. But there are plenty of digressions, such as an evening in London with Frank Sinatra (Warren was promoting his dates at the London Arena, the ill-fated venue he co-owned), where the old blue eyes aged, still in stage clothes. “Red eyes after drinking an entire bottle of Jack Daniels.”
Warren is a vegetarian who happily admits to being in therapy and being kind to those he loves. According to disgraced phone hacker Andy Coulson, former editor News from around the world – who visited Warren in prison along with Claudia Winkleman’s husband and another “friend”, Piers Morgan, is a “very nice person”.
However, Warren doesn’t seem to have too many people on board, and the reckoning escalates to an industrial level, much like Father Ted’s “Golden Clergyman” acceptance speech. Rival boxing promoters, most notably father and son Barry and Eddie Hearn (“Eddie hardly had it easy”), show no mercy. Neither do boxers Barry McGuigan (“another one who disappointed me”) or Chris Eubank, whose reputation Warren destroys with a terrible anecdote, and whose ex-wife Laura Bruno is “an absolute liability.”
It continues. The Krays have been described as “paedophiles preying on boys”, while “champagne socialist” Mick Hawickel, former MP Tom Watson and “that idiot” Kelvin McKenzie might want to look the other way. Ted Heath may have been ridiculed too, but Warren shows Heath snoring loudly in the front row of a London arena while the former Prime Minister, incredibly, attended a Duran Duran concert.
Because he’s not afraid to make a statement (“I’m the most successful fighter manager this country has ever had, as well as the most successful promoter”), some of Warren’s claims are laughable, such as the suggestion that he was never “aware of it.” “, “put up” a solid fight, or after detailing his charity work: “I don’t do anything for fame, which is good, because I haven’t had it yet.” But such stupidity only strengthens his story.
Carney ends up angrily outmaneuvering his current client, struggling boxer Tyson Fury, in Warren, but after this thrilling, slightly crazy, but ultimately charming ride, the villain can be forgiven almost anything.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.