Frank Gilfeather does not talk like most Scottish men within touching distance of an 80th birthday. It’s about creating content and giving viewers what they want, he says. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and what works best for each platform. The different audience profiles. How to monetise the output. He’s plugged into all of it. Sometimes he wears a T-shirt that says “Boxers Not Influencers” but, oh, he knows that’s not true. An influencer is exactly what he has become, and no one is more surprised than he is.
I’ve known Gilfeather for three decades and he has had an astonishing reinvention in the three or four years since we last met. The former amateur boxer (he once fought Ken Buchanan) and then sports journalist and broadcaster (different sorts of fights then, notably with Sir Alex Ferguson) has become an unlikely social media star. The amiable, gently spoken, white-haired grandad of seven is one of the stories of the online boxing world.
A couple of years ago he had 170 followers on Instagram. Now there are more than 650,000 and rising. On TikTok he has 345,000. Add the subscribers to his YouTube channel and there are more than one million followers including Oleksandr Usyk, Tyson Fury, Roberto Durán, Lennox Lewis, Conor McGregor and celebrities including actors Matt Dillon and Channing Tatum and comedians Rob Beckett and Rob Brydon.
Every so often his son Paul messages to tell him some new star has popped into their world. “Usyk started following about six months ago. A while before that Paul messaged me saying, ‘Have you seen who’s shared one of your videos? The rapper, 50 Cent. Then a few weeks later, Ice-T.”
All of this kicked off when Paul joined him in the gym and posted on TikTok as Frank showed him how to correctly deliver an uppercut. Frank had decided to get fit again in his late 50s and continued boxing training ever since. Soon an online audience was drawn to a man of his age moving so nimbly and thumping heavy punches into a bag, and impressed by the easy clarity of his instructions. With subsequent clips the online numbers took off. Sometimes he was filmed training in a park, or at the harbour, or on the roof of a graffiti-covered city centre car park.
Gilfeather was Scottish lightweight champion and fought about 200 times as an amateur in the 1960s, including against the great Buchanan at flyweight. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to punch him in the heart, get underneath that left jab and thump him to the body, slow him down, slow him down.’ I could hear him wincing every time I hit him there. It was a great fight and there was no dubiety about the decision. He didn’t overwhelm me by any means, but he beat me on points.
“My tuition is old-school boxing. I’ve seen coaches and the last thing they think about telling young guys is how to defend themselves. It’s all about aggression, ‘attack, attack, come on’. That’s fine, we need that in certain cases, but you need to have a boxing IQ. You need to teach kids how to defend themselves.”
People find something irresistible about an elderly boxer still in great shape, still able to handle himself, still respecting and energised by a love of the art. Gilfeather admires the technicians who can defend as well as attack, box as well as fight. His channels are called: “Frank’s Noble Art.”
Followers are encouraged to take care of their general health rather than finding excuses to avoid exercise. Go for a walk or a jog, a cycle or a swim, he preaches. Get off the couch. He says some of the feedback he received could bring a tear to the eye. Men with drug and alcohol addiction issues have told him his posts turned things around and saved their lives.
He is endearingly surprised and thrilled by the impact he has made. “I was 76 at the start and people were going, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ TikTok is essentially young people. Kids. If I walk down Albyn Place [in Aberdeen, the city where he has spent most of his life] and happen to hit the school coming out at lunchtime I get surrounded. On Instagram the analytics show that around 34 per cent of the followers are in the US. There’s a similar number in the UK and then it’s spread over the rest of the world. There’s a big following in South America.”
This summer he met the heavyweight champion. Or the heavyweight champion met him. Contact was made through Usyk’s management team and Gilfeather was invited to the champ’s London hotel before his rematch with Daniel Dubois. “He came down in the lift, greeted every member of his team and then looked over to me and just sidestepped others and came right to me, gave me a big hug and said, ‘Great to see you.’ ”
Gilfeather, who often gets “surrounded” by schoolchildren recognising him from TikTok, has a big following in South America too
CRAIG WATSON
Soon Gilfeather was in the motorcade taking Team Usyk to Wembley for the pre-fight press conference. “There were seven people-carriers and Usyk was in a Rolls-Royce leading the convoy across London. We’re part of this entourage. ‘Who’s that wee guy with the white hair? Doesn’t look Ukrainian …’
“After the press conference I get in a lift with Usyk and about eight others. The security guy in the lift, huge guy, is standing there in silence until he says, ‘Nice to see you, Frank.’ ”
Gilfeather created and markets his own branded bag mitts to use on punchbags. They have sold in 60 countries and he says they are more comfortable especially for non-boxers who want to keep fit rather than fight. He showed them to Usyk. “I said, ‘Olexander, I want you to have these.’ He put them on and he’s going, ‘Great, I love them.’ ”
At boxing events Gilfeather is a conspicuous figure for fans, podcasters and fellow social media content providers, who often ask him to pose for pictures. He is recognised by big names as well as big security guards. He has talked boxing with Lewis, Durán, Terence Crawford and trainer Teddy Atlas. The Saudi Arabian sports promoter Turki Al-Sheikh invited him to Riyadh for the Dmitry Bivol-Artur Beterbiev fight in February. He has attended coaching seminars around the UK plus one in Paris and a week-long boot camp in Lanzarote. Soon there is an event in Amsterdam. Film director Sean Ellis invited him to the London premiere of his new boxing film, The Cut, where he met Orlando Bloom.
Gilfeather was invited to meet Usyk, right, before the fight against Dubois at Wembley this summer
At the peak of his amateur career Gilfeather was encouraged to go professional but his keen intelligence meant he looked around a boxing dinner in Glasgow and realised the only ones there with the trappings of wealth — the mohair suits, Havana cigars and Napoleon brandy — were promoters, not the fighters taking the punishment.
He can still be waspish about the business. In November the YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul has an exhibition fight against Gervonta Davis, who is 65 pounds lighter. “Somebody made a comment to me on a video saying, ‘Is Jake Paul conning the public?’ And my answer was no, he’s not conning them, it’s the governing bodies who are conning the public. They’re rubber-stamping this. Why? Because they get 3 per cent or whatever it is of the takings. So in that way, it’s corrupt.”
Gilfeather has written a play and three books and is 35,000 words into an unfinished crime novel but he made a career in print and broadcast journalism and covered Scottish football into his seventies for various newspapers including The Times. Being Grampian TV’s man during the rise of Aberdeen FC in the 1980s meant constant exposure to Ferguson. There was no warmth between them.
Gilfeather with Bloom at the London premiere of boxing film The Cut
“I’ve been very critical of guys like Tyson Fury trying to intimidate, trying to bully. What’s happening is that young people, and certainly many young boxers, think that’s the way to behave. That’s taking the dignity away from boxing in my view. It’s kind of veering towards WWE [wrestling]. This is what I love about Usyk. His dignity, his unwillingness to be dragged into the gutter by these people.
“I was kind of on the receiving end of attempted bullying.” He stresses attempted because there was no chance of it succeeding. “As far as the Fergie thing is concerned I never felt intimidated.” It wasn’t that he had a former boxer’s certainty he could handle himself in any physical confrontation, it was just that he would rise above it by thinking of his father, Dennis, who was “full of values that you would want in your life”.
His own life has entered this wonderful new chapter. On December 30 he will turn 80 and he is in great shape, just three or four pounds over his final fighting weight of more than half a century ago. The average life expectancy of a man in Scotland is just under 77 years but then what is average about a wee old boxer going on TikTok and being followed by 50 Cent and Ice-T?
“We’ve got a T-shirt and on the back it says ‘Boxers Not Influencers’,” he says, smiling. “But I am, whether we like it or not. I am an influencer.”