He took a trip to Vegas with Elvis, wore a Man United scarf gifted by George Best and took Muhammad Ali the distance (twice)… now a new book lays bare the astonishing life of Joe Bugner

DAILYMAIL.COM • 50m ago

By RIATH AL-SAMARRAI, CHIEF SPORTS FEATURE WRITER 16:40 14 Oct 2026, updated 16:40 14 Oct 2026

Joe Bugner Jr is charting the occasions when his late father called someone ‘a f****** idiot’. It’s a conversation that finds room for both Elvis Presley and Russell Crowe.

‘I might have even been there when the Elvis one happened,’ says the son, aged 56. ‘I would have been tiny but I was definitely on that trip to Vegas.’

The occasion behind the tale was fairly spectacular – Joe Bugner, the Greek God of British heavyweight boxing, was in town for his first of two fights with Muhammad Ali, The Greatest. The year was 1973 and Elvis, The King, happened to be staying at the same hotel, so he invited both men to his suite for a gathering of divine beings.

‘Elvis gave Ali a robe with “People’s Choice” on the back for the ring walk,’ Bugner Jr recalls. ‘My dad asked something to the effect of “Where’s mine?” and Elvis then said something my dad didn’t like. I gather dad called him a “f****** idiot”. Or it might have been “d***head”.

‘He called a few people “f****** idiots”, actually. One of them was Russell Crowe. This was years later. He had originally hired my dad as a boxing consultant for Cinderella Man but then he went with someone else. My dad lost the plot on that!’

There’s a lot of laughter down the phone in this chat. But there’s also some sadness for Bugner Jr, because it was a year ago last month that his father passed away at 75 in Australia, which he had called home for four decades.

As a man who had once ranked among the most colourful, recognisable and contentious personalities in British sport, Bugner had incurred the erosions of dementia in the latter stages of his life.

‘It still hurts,’ says Bugner Jr. ‘I miss him. Dementia is terrible, it really is, but I’d say he had a good version of it. By that I mean he was happy.

‘In his head, he was still 38 years old and getting ready for a boxing fight. The next day he might think he was doing an interview in the newspapers. In reality, he was just sat in his room at in the care home, but he was happy up until the last days of his life. And it was some life.’

The legacy of that life is why we are talking. Bugner Jr and the respected author David Tossell have collaborated on an excellent new book, The Bugner Identity, that dives into the enduring riddle of its title character.

That being the boy who fled Soviet-occupied Hungary on foot aged six, went the distance with Ali (twice) and Joe Frazier as a man, played football most Saturdays with Rod Stewart, golfed with Dean Martin, named a son after James Hunt, deployed Tom Jones as best man for his second wedding, and later blew his fortune on a wine business.

Showbiz types loved him, allowing a level of celebrity in the United States rarely matched by British athletes in subsequent decades, but boxing fans were far harder to convince, which was the cost of winning British, European and Commonwealth titles from the nation’s darling, Henry Cooper, in 1971.

Bugner was never forgiven for the receiving the favourable side of a razor-thin verdict. As Bugner himself once put it: ‘When I beat Henry Cooper I was no longer British. I was a Hungarian refugee.’

‘There was so much resentment from the Cooper fight,’ says Bugner Jr. ‘I spoke to my father about it so many times and probably watched it back even more.

‘The thing is, it was a close fight. In the Seventies and Eighties, if the champion was down by a point, he would still get the verdict, but if fight happened nowadays, I do believe he would have got the decision 100 per cent. Back then he became the villain for it.’

Older generations will be better placed to understand the tighter grip boxing possessed in that golden era. Likewise, they will likely know Bugner was hardly reluctant to lean into his role as the bad guy.

Rebranding himself as ‘Aussie Joe’ after emigrating to Australia in 1986 only widened certain rifts and he repeatedly claimed that he was hounded out of this country by the press. The truth probably lay somewhere in the middle.

‘Look, my dad was not above saying things for publicity!’ says Bugner Jr. ‘But he wasn’t a villain. He was a really nice, caring guy, and he always loved England. I can promise you, behind closed doors, he was always grateful for what he had in this country after arriving with nothing from Hungary.

‘The villain reputation stuck for some people, I suppose. I’ve thought about that a lot in the past year, but I’ll tell you what gave us a lot of comfort after he died – there was genuine warmth in what people wrote about him a year ago.

‘It was really touching and actually quite surprising. I think it would have surprised my dad a bit as well.’

The book will perhaps go some way to shifting perceptions further. The merit of Bugner’s sporting accomplishments has always been underrated, which seems bizarre in review of a career that spanned 1967 to 1999 and saw him take Ali to the cards in 1973 and 1975. In between those bouts, he contested the full 12 rounds of a classic with Frazier, but didn’t landed a credible world title.

‘One thing I won’t forget is Ali on Michael Parkinson’s show and really stuck up for dad,’ says Bugner Jr. ‘Parky had laid into him and Ali goes, “He’s the only man that took me took me 15 rounds and took me 12 rounds, and you are telling me that he’s a crap boxer. Does that mean you’re saying I’m a crap boxer?”

‘It’s strange to look back now and think how normal it felt for me to be around Ali growing up, but dad and Ali spent a lot of time together in and out of the ring. They were good friends.’

The subject leads Bugner Jr onto the other side of his father’s life – the remarkable cast of people in his orbit. Frank Sinatra and Oliver Reed were among those who fell in with Bugner during his LA years in the late Seventies and it was at Joan Collins’s house that he met his second wife, Marlene Carter.

‘It’s only as an adult that you look back and realise it was quite unusual,’ says Bugner Jr. ‘I’d see them at the house and, like with Ali, it all seemed normal! I remember asking dad years ago why he supported Manchester United, because there wasn’t any obvious connection, but he had this United woolie hat and scarf. It was because George Best had given them to him.

‘I mean, Christ, my brother is called James because he was friends with James Hunt. He would play a bit of golf with Dean Martin, play football with Rod Stewart on a Saturday, Tom Jones was his best man – the way I saw it was he was a kind of a David Beckham figure in the Seventies. But he was a warm and funny guy, nice to anyone on the street, and people liked him.’

With the possible exceptions of Elvis and Crowe, of course. And many Cooper fans. But the book at least offers a wider context that might have been missed by some in the first telling of Bugner’s complicated life.

‘He did well for a for a for a kid that walked from Hungary to England and didn’t have a pot to p*** in,’ says his son. ‘I’m super proud of him. He wasn’t a villain.’

The Bugner Identity, published by Pitch Publishing, is available now

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