The late Granville Gorton was a fine boxing analyst, having spent many years in the sport, briefly as a fighter and much longer as an official.
When I met him in 2001, he was a wiry, chain-smoking raconteur, with a wide friendly smile and many insights into life and fisticuffs.
Funnily enough, 22 years earlier, he officiated at the very first boxing tournament I attended, when I was 12, topped by Kallie Knoetze’s 10th-round stoppage defeat to Canadian Mike Koranicki at the Cape Good Hope Centre.
Granville, when he lived in Cape Town, was heavily involved with the NSRI and worked in the motorboat industry. The calmest fighter he ever met, he said, was Pierre Fourie, who once chatted about outboard motors in the dressing room before a world title challenge.
Granville lost his ring finger in a boating accident, which led to arguably his most famous, or most notorious, moment in the ring.
He was refereeing an undercard fight involving one boxer, a perennial loser by stoppage who had been threatened by the commission that he would lose his licence if he suffered one more defeat inside the distance.
If Silence Mabuza gives you cold shivers, it’s a good thing you never saw Vic Toweel or you would have got pneumonia.
Sure enough, the boxer got knocked down and Granville started counting. The fighter rose in time, but Granville, wanting to make sure he still had sufficient senses to continue, held up his one hand and asked him: “How many fingers do you see?”
“Four,” replied the fighter.
“That’s it, you’re obviously out of it,” replied Granville, waving it over.
“But you do have four fingers,” pleaded the fighter. That’s when Granville realised he’d held up the hand with the missing finger.
He was happy to laugh at himself.
His most important moment as a referee came in another fight at a show in Soweto.
A boxer went down from a flash knock-down and easily beat the count. Granville looked into his eyes, and for reasons he couldn’t explain until his own death in 2017, he waved it over.
“I don’t know why, but I didn’t like what I saw,” he told me once.
The fans booed his decision and the head honchos at the commission top table called him over and asked him to explain himself. He didn’t have an explanation.
The next morning he was phoned by the commission executive director, Stan Christodoulou, telling him the boxer had collapsed soon after arriving home.
He was rushed to hospital suffering from bleeding on the brain, underwent surgery and was already on the road to recovery.
Had Granville allowed that fight to continue that boxer might have died.
Granville was outspoken and wasn’t shy to take on the top people in the game.
When bantamweight Silence Mabuza came onto the scene in the early 2000s, the late publicist Terry Pettifer and trainer Nick Durandt proclaimed him a special talent. Durandt said he was the type of talent that comes around once or twice in a lifetime, and Pettifer said he got cold shivers each time he watched Mabuza.
“If Silence gives you cold shivers, it’s a good thing you never saw Vic Toweel or you would have got pneumonia,” Gorton retorted.
To him, Mabuza was decent, but not special. He turned out to be right.
One point Granville could never stress enough was the importance of a fighter having a decent punch.
Not every pugilist packs a knockout punch, but it’s crucial to have enough clout to earn the respect of one’s opponent.
Brett Taylor, who dethroned the rugged “Black Prince”, Arthur Mayisela, to win the SA junior-welterweight crown, didn’t have a punch. Taylor is one of the nicest guys the fight game has ever known, but he couldn’t hurt a fly. Just four of his 18 wins came inside the distance. “He wasn’t a tasty puncher,” Granville insisted.
And that brings me to Kevin Lerena, who enters the heavyweight division after campaigning one division down.
It’s the same route Evander Holyfield took, but even his knockout ratio dropped from 78% as a cruiser to 41% in the uncapped division. Oleksandr Usyk went from a 75% ratio to 33% after three fights in the heavyweight division.
They were tasty punchers, however.
Lerena is migrating to the heavyweight class with a 50% score after 13 stoppage wins in 26 outings.
He may be quicker and more skilled than many of the dreadnoughts out there, but when you’re going 12 rounds, you have to pack sufficient power to keep them at bay. If not, they’ll walk through you.
And that’s the big question Lerena will have to answer, starting with Bogdan Dinu of Romania at Emperors Palace on Saturday.
I can still hear Granville: “But is he a tasty puncher?”
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