THIRTY-six years after his death, Benny Lynch was recalled in October 1982 by some of those who had known him, or boxed with him.
The occasion was the Evening Times’s serialisation of a new biography of the one-time world flyweight champion, and among those who discussed him was Paddy Docherty, a former boxer.
The pair of them had shared a boxing ring several times in their early days, and Docherty had won twice – hence the memento. Docherty had been a schoolfriend of Lynch’s, and he recalled, with glee, that the pair of them would sometimes fail to appear in school for weeks at a time. “Benny was like myself – rough and tumble,” he said. “Benny was the schoolboy champion and we came to be rivals.
We stayed friends but when he became champion, he faded away. He’d come back to see the boys sometimes but you couldn’t blame him for not coming more often. All that money he was getting. He was a wonderful man,” Docherty added. “There won’t be another flyweight like him.”
Lynch won the world and British flyweight titles in 1935 and staged successful defences of them in 1936 and twice in 1937. He lost them, however, in June 1938. His final bout was against Aurel Toma, in October 1938, when he was knocked out. This paper’s obituary of him, in August 1946, described him as “the complete boxer-fighter, one who compared favourably with any man at his weight in the world ... [he was] an artist in every move.”
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