‘e Give Me The Finger!’

[Tim]

‘E GIVE ME THE FINGER!’

Joe Bugner, at 44, handsome, massively-built and 6ft 6 ins. tall, sits on the fringes of the movie set awaiting his call.

'You won't believe this,' Joe tells a friend unfamiliar with the $35m. production Street Fighter (also starring Kylie Minogue), 'but I am a torturer in the film.'

Muhammad Ali and Henry Cooper might well believe it. And so would the suicidal motorist who, on the way to the production, gave Joe the finger as he passed him in Surfers Paradise that same morning. The young driver had an unpleasant surprise when the enraged Bugner caught up with him. "Oh Jeez, I’m sorry, Mr.Bugner."

'I haven't given anybody a smack in the mouth since I stopped fighting,' says the polite, thinking-man's boxer. 'But it seriously gets up my nose when people who abuse the road system give me the finger. Not the old V sign; the finger. That enrages me.'

Joe Bugner's life is on the up. He has appeared in a film shown on British television, 'The Sher Mountain Mystery'. And his present movie being made with American and Japanese money on the sundrenched Queensland Gold Coast will, he says, 'give me great exposure.' Next on the agenda: a large power-tool emporium and politics.

'I would really love to be a full-time actor. When I was a young boy fighting my heart out in places like Shoreditch, I was a great fan of Stanley Baker. I said to him one day: "I would really love to be an actor, Mr.Baker." And he said: "Call me Stan."

'They had just started shooting 'Zulu' and I missed out because Michael Caine got it. I have,' he goes on, 'one great ambition. I want to meet Sean Connery; he's my idol.'

This is the same "blond Adonis" who 15,000 howling fans packed into Earl's Court to see stand up to Smokin' Joe Frazier. 'That,' he says, 'was my greatest moment. I put my whole career on the line then, and I thought I had actually beaten the man. He won the fight by one round when I had gone down on one knee. But you know, he thought I had won it! "I thought the fight was so close, it could have gone either way," Joe said. As a winner he could have said anything. He was decent enough to say that.

'I was a kid of 21. I fought Henry Cooper, Ali, Jack Bodell. It was ludicrous. Here was I at that age in 15-round title fights. People were totally disregarding my immaturity, for God's sake. My handlers couldn't understand the pressure they were putting me under.'

And then there were the sports writers. Cruel, heartless people, recalls Joe. Michael Parkinson called him "a horizontal heavyweight." One of them, Hugh McIlvanney, wrote that in his prime Bugner had the physique of a Greek statue, but with fewer moves.

'That hurt me. Hugh had never had a pair of gloves on in his life. And the closest he ever got to me' (probably fortunately for McIlvanney) 'was when he watched me at the fights. People, like Peter Wilson and Desmond Hackett were considered gods. But they were staid old reporters who happened to be Henry Cooper-lovers to a man. They totally forgot I was a kid.'

Anyway ...today, as the sun beams down and stars in battledress mill around, that is all behind him. His face is still good. He never had his nose broken and there is no visible disfigurement from the jaw he had smashed in 1972.

Only one thing from the past still rankles: he is baffled by the British Inland Revenue still pursuing him for money 'when I am not even a British citizen.'

'When I fought Frank Bruno I had to leave behind 35% of my purse. That was an automatic withdrawal the government took. When I came out to Australia there was a withholding tax because I was bringing in foreign currency. I ended up with about 25% of my earnings from which I had to pay all the minders and hangers on. Most of it was left in England and my ex-wife got some as well.

'And after all that, the Inland Revenue does not recognise me as an Australian citizen. I pay Australian taxes and haven't been resident in the UK since 1976. They are so clever back there they don't even know which way their bum is facing.

'They have made me feel like a criminal. It is a bad feeling to know that when I go back people will criticise me as a tax-dodger, which I am not.'

Joe has a clipped British-Australian accent with tiny touches of Hungarian, the occupied country he fled when he was six. 'I remember when the Russian tanks rolled in. They were on every Hungarian road. I was so saddened to see them deliberately knocking down rows of beautiful trees. My brother, Bill, who was 13, jumped up on the turret of one of the tanks and reached down. A Russian officer pulled a gun on him. A few weeks later, when we could see it was a no-win situation, my mother and three of us kids escaped across the border. She was a single mother and brought up five kids. All she took with her was a briefcase.'

Joe was 'saved', he believes, a second time, by his journalist wife, Marlene, his business manager, minder, and partner in his many ventures.

Marlene had worked for TIME, for Rupert Murdoch, a Mexican political magazine and the National Enquirer. When they met in the US she asked him what he'd like to do with his life. 'When I said "actor" she said: "Oh my God! Not another one!" She had known a lot of them and she said the heartbreaks were far greater in acting than in anything else in the world. I said to her they could not be so bad as in boxing', from which he made an estimated $4m.

They now live in a 40-Square home on Runaway Island at the Gold Coast, "a beautiful lifestyle." Joe doesn't jog any more, his knees and other parts of his body punished by 20 years of boxing begin to hurt. So he does power walking and calisthenics and lifts light weights.

Joe has been on television doing car and soft-drink commercials, and when he lived in the US had parts in five movies.

He and Marlene have scores of acquaintances, and a small number of carefully chosen friends. In a millionaires' playground where his fame makes him a 'collectable', he sees beyond the transients and the party lovers. His close friends admire his intelligence and dignity. Only errant motorists need worry...

[KP Nuts]

Oh, just to be there to give him the finger, just to meet an shake his hand, an excellent man an well underestimated.

Mr KP Nut.