After making his professional debut in 1969, two frustrating defeats to Billy Aird the following year, the latter in a Central Area title bout, set him back.
Dunn got on track again with six successive victories, including one over a certain Bunny Johnson, but Rocky Campbell stopped him in his tracks with a brutal first-round knockout in December 1971.
That Wolverhampton humiliation was probably still on Dunn’s mind when he did battle with Campbell again on the night of May 7, 1975.
Plenty had happened for the Bradfordian between the two bouts.
Dunn had finally got the better of Aird, this time in an eliminator for the British heavyweight title.
But he subsequently lost to Johnson in the final eliminator, before suffering back-to-back painful knockout defeats against his first-ever European opponents, Germany’s Ngozika Ekwelum and Spain’s Jose Manuel Urtain.
Yet with a couple of wins under his belt off the back of that, Dunn went into his rematch with Campbell full of confidence.
And on this day 51 years ago, the T&A’s Jim Dalton reported on the Bradford man’s sweet revenge the night before, as he stopped his British-Antiguan opponent inside seven rounds in Solihull.
That kicked off a glorious 12 months for Dunn, who then beat Johnson and Danny McAlinden at Wembley to become two-time British Heavyweight champion.
He then won the European title by stunning the prodigiously-talented Bernd August in April 1976.
That denied the young German his shot against Muhammad Ali in Munich the following month.
And it was there that ‘The Greatest’ denied Dunn the ultimate glory, winning the pair’s world title bout inside five rounds.
Even by May 1975, Richard Dunn hadn’t ‘exploded’, but within the next year, he had become two-time British champion, the best in Europe and fought Muhammad Ali on the world stage, so it was no surprise he had a sports centre named after him by 1978. (Image: Newsquest Archives)
From there, certainly on the world stage, Dunn’s star faded as quickly as it had ascended.
The Bradford icon lost his British crown to Joe Bugner five months after his bout with Ali, knocked out by the Hungarian-born British-Australian in the first round at Wembley.
There was no real coming back from that, and after one more fight, a September 1977 knockout defeat to South Africa’s Kallie Knotze in Johannesburg, Dunn promptly retired from the sport at the age of 32.