Thread: Australian boxing great Lionel Rose dies aged 62

IT is sadly ironic that on the day Australia crowned its latest indigenous world champion, Daniel Geale, the first and greatest passed away.
No other Australian boxer ever achieved the sort of popularity and affection that greeted Lionel Rose's world bantamweight title win in 1968.
Last night, after battling a string of illnesses that arose from a stroke several years ago, Rose, 62, died at his family home with his wife Jenny by his side.
When Rose arrived back in Melbourne after winning the world title in Tokyo, such a huge crowd met him at the airport he thought the Beatles must have been on the same plane.
Rose was later named Australian of the Year.
During his career, and his subsequent life as a national icon he made friends with a diverse range of identities from Elvis Presley, who met him in secret in LA to shake his hand, to Paul Keating, who Rose would badger at official functions to do more for Aboriginal Australians.
Rose is still seen as a timeless sporting hero and an inspiration to indigenous and non-indigenous sports stars from runner Cathy Freeman to boxer Jeff Fenech.
Last night Fenech, the three-time world champ who became a great friend of Rose and also a mentor to Daniel Geale, could only shake his head at the timing.
"What a day for Australian sport," Fenech said.
"Lionel was simply the best - a great, great champion and a beautiful person. I'm sure Daniel Geale, who is so proud of his indigenous heritage, will do all he can to honour Lionel's memory." Lionel Rose MBE was born on June 21, 1948 in a four-family Aboriginal settlement of corrugated iron and bark huts inside a eucalypt forest at Jackson's Track, near the Victorian Gippsland town of Warragul.
He was taught boxing by his father, Roy, a tent-show fighter. As a boy he sparred with rags on his hands in a ring made from fencing wire stretched between trees.
At 17, he won the Australian amateur flyweight title after he started training with Warragul coach Frank Oakes. He later married Oakes' daughter Jenny and together they had a son Michael.
Last night Jenny Rose told The Daily Telegraph : "This is a terribly sad day for us. It's still too raw to talk about."
Rose, who was also a popular singer with hits including I Thank You and Please Remember Me retained his charisma and good humour despite the 2007 stroke. His life was documented in the 1991 mini series Rose Against The Odds.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/spo...-1226052171833

Only one of 4 aussies to win a world title overseas.( Daniel Geal,Jeff Harding,Jimmy Carruthers)

I grew up with Lionel and he certainly was a great Australian.

RIP.

Ohh no. Really very sad. I didn't heard the news. So, thanks for sharing. We have lost a great boxer...

Lover, fighter and champion to the very end
Martin Flanagan
May 17, 2011



IT WAS a truly unique occasion - a state funeral deeply imbued with Koori spirituality for a world boxing champion, conducted in the stadium where he once fought.
The speeches commemorating Lionel Rose yesterday at Festival Hall in Melbourne were uniformly good and complemented each other.
Performing a welcome to country ceremony, the Wurundjeri elder Joy Murphy Wandin brought an early note of dignity to the service. The Premier of Victoria, Ted Baillieu, followed suit, recalling the late 1960s as a time of great change.

Australia had only recently lost its prime minister, Harold Holt, in a swimming accident; a generation of baby boomers were coming of age. And then, in February 1968, Lionel Rose became only the second Australian, and the first Aborigine, to win a world boxing title.
"Melbourne went nuts," Mr Baillieu said.
He pointed out Victorian sporting heroes were then popularly known by their first names - Polly (Farmer), Teddy (Whitten), Raelene (Boyle). And so, he said, Lionel Rose became Lionel, "and there was only one Lionel".

His importance went beyond the ring, he said, pointing out that Rose refused to fight in South Africa because of apartheid. Mr Baillieu said the former champion also "bent the ear of successive governments" on indigenous issues.
Pauline Cook taught at Glenroy North Primary School with Rose's wife, Jenny. Cook also taught the couple's son and only child, Michael.
"I got to know Lionel quickly and came to see there was so much more to him than being a boxing world champion". Ms Cook said Rose always gave time to people, even when he was ill and it exhausted him.
When Cook first met Rose and Jenny, the couple were divorced. They had driven to the divorce court together and the judge hearing the case had to instruct them to sit apart on opposite sides of the court. The separation lasted less than a month.
"From that time on, they were life partners and best mates. Jenny loved Lionel, Lionel loved Jenny - it was then, and still is, that simple."

The former St Kilda coach Stan Alves recalled a man who "could mix it with the toughest but still shed tears the day when [the former prime minister] Kevin Rudd apologised to the stolen generation".
Within 15 minutes of meeting Rose, Mr Alves felt he had known him all his life. "He was totally unaffected by his achievements. He did get into trouble but there was always an innocence about him."
Alves quoted Jenny as saying that rather than being a man who saw life as a glass half full or a glass half empty, Rose saw his glass as "overflowing".
He was not beyond asking for money, but that, Mr Alves said, was because he commonly gave his money to people he thought more deserving. He gave his world title belt to Tjandamurra O'Shane, the child set alight in a random attack in Cairns in 1996.

Archie Roach, a member of Rose's clan, the Gunditjmara, sang an emotional version of Took the Children Away.
When the time came for the coffin to be borne from the stadium, people began shouting "Love you, brother" and "See you, brother". Others stretched forward to touch the coffin as it passed. There was loud applause.
Then, as the funeral party headed off towards Warragul, where Rose was to be buried, a man of South Sea Island descent standing on the footpath stepped forward and performed a deeply passionate war cry that made the air vibrate.
It was the final recognition of a great warrior who also happened to be a great bloke.

News video here

A Credit to his race & a great aussie.

R.I.P. Lionel

Memories of Lionel, a champion man
Peter FitzSimons
May 21, 2011

WHEN they buried Lionel Rose this week it prompted a memory in my cousin, Steven Carter, who was working on the television show This Is Your Life back in 1977 when Rose was featured.

After filming in Epping was completed, there was a party held for the guest of honour at the Texas Tavern, Kings Cross. So it was that just after midnight, the three famous boxers, Lionel Rose, Fighting Harada and Johnny Famechon get out of a cab to walk to the bar when a drunken lout, who was not alone, flicks his lit cigarette butt into the chest of Lionel Rose and starts to unleash vicious racial epithets.

Fighting Harada speaks very little English but knows ugliness when he sees it, and instantly moves to cut off the drunk, even as the bum now tries to shirt-front Lionel.

The great Aboriginal boxer, who could have dropped the punk without blinking, restrains himself and moves the other way, still pursued by the drunk. This time Johnny Famechon, bless him, uses his trademark speed, grabs the drunken lout by the collar and pulls back his left hook, locked and loaded on a hair trigger, waiting … just waiting … for the drunk's next racial slur. (Altogether after me: Please ..? Just one ..?)

The crowd closes as Fighting Harada moves to stand by Famechon, shoulder to shoulder, as Lionel keeps walking. A dignified man, Lionel has been in this bad movie before too many times, wants no part of it, and knows that his own mates have his back. Luckily at this point one of the drunken lout's slightly less drunken mates steps forward and drags him away into the night, with his babbles of "I could have taken all three of them" soon fading into Kings Cross night.

Situation sorted, Lionel is on the steps of The Texas Tavern waiting for them as they catch up. "Thanks," he says, and they all go inside.

A champion man.

And I am reliably informed that next year will be the first time in more than four decades that Fighting Harada won't send Lionel a birthday card. Another champion. As is Johnny Famechon.

Three Champions.

On February 27, 1968, Lionel Rose became the first Australian aborigine to become a world boxing champion, when he outpointed Harada over fifteen rounds in Tokyo.

some good news footage here