The Scottish boxer Ken Buchanan, who has died aged 77, is viewed by most good judges of the sport’s history as one of the best produced by Britain. A nimble and technically gifted fighter, he became world lightweight champion in 1970 and had sufficient global recognition to have topped the bill on several occasions at the New York boxing venue Madison Square Garden.
He won the world lightweight title by outpointing the Panamanian fighter Ismael Laguna in the Puerto Rican capital San Juan, but lost two years later in an epic battle against the Panamanian lightweight legend Roberto Durán. Buchanan claimed, with justification, that Durán had illegally punched him in the groin to end the fight in the 13th round, adding that he felt the pain of the blow for the rest of his life.
Two Buchanan fight stories have been indelibly written into boxing folklore. When he fought Laguna in a 1971 title rematch, tissue around Buchanan’s eye was so badly swollen that his vision was being affected. Unseen by the referee, Buchanan’s Welsh trainer, Eddie Thomas, sliced the swelling open using a razor blade. Blood gushed out, but Buchanan’s sight was restored, allowing him to go on to win the fight. A similar gruesome scenario was enacted in the first of the Rocky films when Sylvester Stallone instructs his trainer to cut his eye open in his heavyweight title fight against Apollo Creed.
The second true Buchanan story surrounded a Madison Square Garden event in which the Scot was due to top the bill, with Muhammad Ali also appearing on the card in one of his comeback contests. Ali had arrived only to find he had not been allocated a changing room, and his trainer went to Buchanan’s to ask if Ali could share with him.
Playfully, Buchanan chalked a line down the middle of the room and told the great heavyweight champion, who was roughly twice Buchanan’s size, there would be dire consequences if he ventured outside his designated space.
Ali became a lifelong friend of the gently spoken Buchanan, as was the Glaswegian boxer and television commentator Jim Watt, who became world lightweight champion in 1979. Watt had lost to Buchanan six years earlier over 15 fierce rounds in Glasgow and their mutual respect turned into a friendship that lasted 50 years.
Numerous successful British and European title fights adorn Buchanan’s professional boxing record, which began in 1965. He was appointed MBE in 1972 before retiring in 1982 after an unwise comeback laid bare his declining skills. Finishing with four consecutive defeats against men he would have brushed aside in his prime, Buchanan ended his career with 61 wins in 69 contests and was only stopped once inside the distance by Durán.
Born in Portobello, the coastal suburb of Edinburgh, to Cathy, and Tommy, a tram driver, Ken credited his father with introducing him to boxing as an eight-year-old boy. He said: “If it wasn’t for my dad, I’d never have been a boxer, let alone a world champion.”
He recalled being taken to the cinema to watch The Brown Bomber, about the life of the world heavyweight champion Joe Louis. “I saw it, and that was it. By the end of that year, I had won my first title, at eight and a half and weighing 3st 2lbs. When I was eight, Dad would get down on to his knees to get to about the same height as me and he’d say, ‘Right, show me how you throw that other hand of yours.’ Unknown to me I was dropping my left to throw my right and he’d go ‘boof’ and give me a wee hit on the side of the head and say ‘Now, see that? You need to keep your hands up all the time.’”
Tommy travelled all over the world to see his son’s great triumphs, but Cathy, whom Ken described as his greatest fan, died in 1968, aged 51. He claimed this spurred him on to win the world title: “I told [Eddie] I wanted to be champion so that when I visit my mum’s grave I can show her my world championship belt.”
Buchanan freely admitted that drink had been his undoing. In Nick Parkinson’s 2016 book A Champion’s Last Fight, he spoke of his reliance on alcohol: “I started drinking when I was 30 and it just got worse and worse.”
When I interviewed him for BBC Radio many years ago, he spoke of two broken marriages, to Carol, the mother of his two younger children, and Eileen, who left him after six months. There were also failed businesses, including an Edinburgh hotel he had bought when his big-money fighting days were over.
Perhaps most frighteningly, after returning to work as a carpenter on building sites, he endured a sexual assault that left him terrified and depressed.
For the year before his death, dementia meant he was living in a care home. However, last August, Buchanan had been well enough to attend the unveiling of a bronze statue of himself in Leith.
He is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage, Mark and Karen, and a son, Raymond, from a previous relationship.
• Ken Buchanan, boxer, born 28 June 1945; died 1 April 2023
