Even when everything goes right, boxing still manages to have a problem

“Hands were made for hitting people,” Mickey Duff once argued. Then again, he would have said that, wouldn’t he? asks Brendan O’Brien.

Born Monek Prager in a town near Krakow, Duff and his family fled to Britain a few years before the Second World War as the shadow of Nazism was poised to fall across Europe. His father was a rabbi who had a similar path in mind for young ‘Mickey’, as he became known, but boxing was a strong competing religion in London’s East End at the time.

Ultimately, it was no contest.