BBC BOXING commentator Harry Carpenter has died, aged 84. With his departure goes sporting commentary’s last link to an era of bow-ties, rounded vowels and gentle, post-war understatement.
Frank Bruno, with whom the commentator developed a firm friendship, was said to be “shattered” on hearing the news last night.
Carpenter suffered a mild heart attack last year and died in his sleep in the early hours of Saturday morning at King’s College Hospital in London. His family will bury him in private and his many friends and colleagues will celebrate his life at a memorial, the dates of which are yet to be announced.
Carpenter’s good friend and rival, Reg Gutteridge, died in January last year, also aged 84. Both had grown steadily disenchanted with the way their favourite sport, boxing, had lost not only its mainstream profile but much of its credibility.
Carpenter, the son of a Billingsgate fish merchant, had what the former world featherweight champion Barry McGuigan yesterday described as “an amazing voice”.
The measured and mellow Carpenter tones had echoes of his war-time schooling at Selhurst Grammar School in Croydon and gave him the quiet authority of a friendly vicar.
He was as big a name as were the scores of famous athletes across several sports, from the Boat Race to Wimbledon and the Open, whose deeds he chronicled in a career that started in newspapers and finished in 1994, after 45 years at the BBC.
It was for boxing, though, that he was best known and Carpenter and Gutteridge gave the sometimes shabby undertaking a veneer of respectability in their contrasting styles.
They operated at a time when the public at large knew who the British and world champions were and watched their fights in the many millions. As the number of title-holders and governing bodies grew, so did the sport’s broader appeal contract in keeping with its retreat to non-terrestrial broadcasting outlets. Carpenter was not that sad to let go, when he briefly left Britain to live some of his retirement in France.
Carpenter had great respect for the fighters on whom he commentated, none more so than Bruno. Their friendship, and subsequent commercial partnership, grew out of the fighter’s habit of finishing each interview with, “Know what I mean ’Arry?”
Carpenter’s objectivity famously deserted him when Bruno discomfited Mike Tyson in his doomed challenge for the world heavyweight title in 1989 as he voiced the hopes of a nation with the observation: “Go on! Get in there, Frank!”
His most memorable moment came 15 years earlier in Zaire when Muhammad Ali did what nobody thought him capable of any more and knocked out George Foreman. “Oh my God! He’s won the title back at 32,” Carpenter screamed as the world took in the wonder that was the Rumble In The Jungle. – (Guardian service)