{"id":572931,"date":"2026-05-08T12:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T12:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/572931\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T12:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T12:30:11","slug":"bradford-boxing-legend-beats-rocky-campbell-and-goes-on-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/572931\/","title":{"rendered":"Bradford boxing legend beats Rocky Campbell and goes on run"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n  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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  That Wolverhampton humiliation was probably still on Dunn\u2019s mind when he did battle with Campbell again on the night of May 7, 1975.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  Plenty had happened for the Bradfordian between the two bouts.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  Dunn had finally got the better of Aird, this time in an eliminator for the British heavyweight title.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  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\u2019s Ngozika Ekwelum and Spain\u2019s Jose Manuel Urtain.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  Yet with a couple of wins under his belt off the back of that, Dunn went into his rematch with Campbell full of confidence.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  And on this day 51 years ago, the T&amp;A\u2019s Jim Dalton reported on the Bradford man\u2019s sweet revenge the night before, as he stopped his British-Antiguan opponent inside seven rounds in Solihull.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  That kicked off a glorious 12 months for Dunn, who then beat Johnson and Danny McAlinden at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk\/sport\/sportbcfc\/playoff_final\/playoff_news\/?ref=au\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Wembley<\/a> to become two-time British Heavyweight champion.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  He then won the European title by stunning the prodigiously-talented Bernd August in April 1976.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  That denied the young German his shot against Muhammad Ali in Munich the following month.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  And it was there that \u2018The Greatest\u2019 denied Dunn the ultimate glory, winning the pair\u2019s world title bout inside five rounds.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  <img   width=\"100%\"\/>Even by May 1975, Richard Dunn hadn&#8217;t &#8216;exploded&#8217;, 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)\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  From there, certainly on the world stage, Dunn&#8217;s star faded as quickly as it had ascended.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  There was no real coming back from that, and after one more fight, a September 1977 knockout defeat to South Africa&#8217;s Kallie Knotze in Johannesburg, Dunn promptly retired from the sport at the age of 32.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After making his professional debut in 1969, two frustrating defeats to Billy Aird the following year, the latter&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":572932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-572931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572931","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=572931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}