Born Jozsef Kreul Bugner in Szoreg, Hungary, in 1950, he and his family fled the country after the 1956 Soviet invasion and eventually settled in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
Bugner began boxing as a teenager and quickly rose through the amateur ranks, winning the ABA light heavyweight title at just 17.<\/p>\n
As a professional, Bugner claimed a notable victory over Cooper at Wembley in 1971 to win both the British and Commonwealth heavyweight titles.<\/p>\n
His fights against Ali and Frazier further cemented his reputation for toughness.<\/p>\n
In their first bout, Ali controlled the fight with superior speed and accuracy, but Bugner went the distance, earning praise for his resilience.<\/p>\n
Later that year, he faced Joe Frazier in a gruelling match, ultimately being stopped in the 12th round after another courageous performance. Bugner lost again on points to Ali in 1975.<\/p>\n
Bugner retired a number of times throughout his career. After first hanging up the gloves in 1976, he made several comebacks.<\/p>\n
He moved to Australia in the mid-1980s and continued to take on top-level competition, including a defeat by Bruno, who stopped him in the eighth round in 1987.<\/p>\n
Bugner retired again but returned nearly eight years later to capture the Australian heavyweight title in 1995.<\/p>\n
In 1998, at the age of 48, he won the World Boxing Federation’s version of the heavyweight championship by defeating James ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith, before bowing out of boxing for good in 1999 after a win by disqualification against Levi Billups.<\/p>\n
Outside of boxing, Bugner appeared in films including the 1994 action movie Street Fighter and worked as a boxing adviser for the Russell Crowe film Cinderella Man. He was also a contestant on ITV’s ‘I’m a Celebrity’ in 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Born Jozsef Kreul Bugner in Szoreg, Hungary, in 1950, he and his family fled the country after the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-389489","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115129661740582790","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}