{"id":495705,"date":"2026-03-26T03:37:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T03:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/495705\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T03:37:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T03:37:11","slug":"charismatic-and-controversial-trainer-darkie-smith-passes-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/495705\/","title":{"rendered":"Charismatic and controversial trainer Darkie Smith passes away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;\">\u201cWe were much smaller at the time in terms of a team,\u201d recalled Kalle Sauerland of his father\u2019s promotional team, Sauerland Event, in the 1990s. \u201cIt was still [Henry] Maske and [Axel] Schultz times so they were all based over in Frankfurt Oder in the East with Manfred Wolke, the former Olympic champion, and then it was the time when we just started to use a house-trainer system so we had other boxers from abroad but with Darkie, my dad had Zeljko and he picked them to go together and then Stephen came over and he was a good-looking young man, boxed with flair and style and we rolled with it. We built him up and went back to the UK. At the time, the main [Sauerland] trainer was Ulli Wegner and his team wasn\u2019t that big, maybe six or eight fighters, Sven Ottke, Marcus Beyer\u2026 And Darkie also trained Torsten and his younger brother Rudiger May.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe were much smaller at the time in terms of a team,\u201d recalled Kalle Sauerland of his father\u2019s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":495706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,6102,10078,174605,101,174606,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-495705","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-boxing-news","10":"tag-boxingscene","11":"tag-darkie-smith","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-stephen-smith","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/495706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}