Judith Wilson wears Joe Bugner’s Championship belt, flanked by the boxer and her husband Fergus Wilson, right<\/p>\n
Bugner won the WBF title after beating James \u201cBonecrusher\u201d Smith.<\/p>\n
He was 48 at the time – the oldest boxer to win a world title.<\/p>\n
The belt was bought from him in 2008 by the Boughton Monchlesea private lettings tycoon and boxing fan Fergus Wilson.<\/p>\n
Mr Wilson boxed in his youth, training at the same London gym as British heavyweight champion Henry Cooper, though he knew Cooper\u2019s brother George better.<\/p>\n
Mr Wilson used to box at country fairs and workingmen\u2019s clubs for 10 shillings (50p) prize money to supplement his income while training to be a maths teacher.<\/p>\n
British boxer Frank Bruno, Fergus Wilson and Joe Bugner<\/p>\n
He met Bugner on several occasions in the latter stages of Bugner\u2019s career.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cAt the time, I had a number of Hungarians working for me on my houses and I took some of them to see Joe. He was delighted with the chance to speak Hungarian again, which he said he hadn\u2019t done in decades.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although a naturalised British citizen, Bugner had been born in Szeged in southern Hungary, fleeing with his mother to Britain after the 1956 Soviet invasion of their country.<\/p>\n
Bugner\u2019s career of 69 wins and only 13 defeats saw him take on fighters such as Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Henry Cooper.<\/p>\n
Mr Wilson and his wife Judith once owned the largest buy-to-let property portfolio in Kent, making them both multi-millionaires, but he has since largely disposed of his homes.<\/p>\n
Fergus Wilson adopts his boxer’s stance<\/p>\n
But Mr Wilson said: \u201cI am 77 this summer and not in the best of health.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was time to pass Joe\u2019s belt onto another collector.\u201d<\/p>\n
Auctioneer Robin Fletcher said: \u201cSporting memorabilia such as championship belts always spark a lot of interest – and Joe Bugner was a very popular fighter in his day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The auction is on Friday, July 4 and starts at 10am.<\/p>\n
Viewing is between 1pm and 5.30pm, on Wednesday, July 2, and between 9.30am and 5.30pm, on Thursday, July 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A boxer\u2019s world heavyweight championship belt is up for sale at a Kent auction house. The World Boxing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[605,1935,609,9137,79,16,15,43920],"class_list":{"0":"post-93010","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-ashford","9":"tag-boxing","10":"tag-human-interest","11":"tag-maidstone","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-weald"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114489836529252900","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93010","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=93010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}