Ken Norton

Ken Norton, the former world heavyweight champion who  died aged 70, will always be remembered as the man who broke Muhammad Ali’s jaw on the way to outpointing “The Greatest” in a non-title fight in San Diego in March 1973.

Clash of the Titans: Ken Norton (left) defeats Muhammad Ali in 1973

A formidable opponent who ranked among the best in what can now be viewed as a golden era of heavyweights, the rugged former US Marine reinforced the view that he was Ali’s “bogeyman” by pushing him very close in two subsequent encounters.

In total the two men went 39 rounds together – and every one was closely-fought. While technically inferior to Ali, Norton clearly possessed the style to give him trouble. “I knew what to do and I never listened to his mouth,” he once reflected.

Norton’s other claim to fame was becoming heavyweight champion without throwing a punch. This farcical situation resulted when he was awarded the World Boxing Council crown in March 1978 after the WBC controversially stripped Leon Spinks of the title following his decision to give Ali a rematch. Norton – who had scraped past Jimmy Young on points the previous November – subsequently became their new champion.

Norton’s reign turned out to be one of the briefest in history, however, as he lost a titanic 15-round showdown with Larry Holmes just 72 days later. It proved to be his last great performance and a horrific first-round knockout at the hands of the emerging Gerry Cooney ended his career in 1981.

Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, on August 9 1943, Norton, who came from a stable, middle-class background, showed early promise as an athlete before leaving college to join the US Marines in 1964. Having been introduced to boxing during his service, he turned professional in September 1967 and proceeded to win his first 16 fights.

Norton’s first loss – an eighth-round knockout against Jose Luis Garcia in July 1970 – was attributed to over-confidence and led his trainer Eddie Futch to pin the photo of the knockout to Norton’s locker room door as an enduring warning against complacency.

Standing 6ft 3in and weighing 210 pounds, Norton had all the makings of a heavyweight champion; a fact recognised by Ali’s training camp, who in 1970 employed Norton as a sparring partner. Over the next two years he continued his rise up the rankings, knocking out Californian champion Henry Clark in nine rounds on November 21 1972, to ensure that his next showdown with Ali would be not as partner, but opponent.

A largely unknown 29-year-old, Norton was written off by most observers. Howard Cosell, the veteran fight commentator, even labelled the contest as “the worst mismatch in boxing history”.

Undeterred, Norton gave up his day job and prepared for the fight with a ferocious intensity. When the pair clashed in San Diego on March 31 1973, it was nothing like the routine victory Ali undoubtedly expected. The pair went toe-to-toe for 12 exciting rounds, Norton benefiting from the advice of cornerman Futch, who had first-hand knowledge of Ali’s style and tactics, having worked with Ali’s great nemesis Joe Frazier two years previously.

To the visible shock of many ringside, Norton was awarded a split decision, while Ali – whose jaw was broken in the early rounds – was whisked off to the nearest hospital to have his mouth wired shut.

Six months later, on September 10 1973, the pair met for the North American Boxing Federation title at the Los Angeles Forum. Again the outcome was desperately close with Ali, who had prepared far more diligently on this occasion, getting the nod on a split decision following a last-ditch effort in the final round.

Norton emerged from the defeat with his reputation enhanced, however, and on March 26 1974 he travelled to Caracas, Venezuela, to challenge the fearsome George Foreman – the WBC and World Boxing Association title-holder. Norton – by now without Futch – failed badly on the biggest night of his career. He was floored three times before being stopped in the second and later claimed he was distracted by promotional rows and a threat to kidnap his parents, who had travelled to watch the fight.

The biggest disappointment of Norton’s career was still to come, however. Following seven successive stoppage wins – including a revenge triumph over Garcia and fifth-round knockout of title contender Jerry Quarry – he sealed a third fight with Ali for the WBA and WBC titles at Yankee Stadium on September 28 1976.

Convinced he had Ali’s measure, Norton exuded confidence going into the fight. For 15 rounds the two men again went toe-to-toe, and Norton returned to his corner following the final bell convinced he had outworked the ageing champion. But the decision was a close but unanimous decision in favour of Ali, and Norton was heartbroken. “I was smiling and crying at the same time,” he recalled in his autobiography. “I had accomplished the unthinkable, beaten Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight championship of the world.”

Norton was now 31, but still not finished. On November 5 1977 he returned to face Duane Bobick, a much-touted white hope who had Futch in his corner, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Bobick was on the cusp of a world title shot and Futch clearly felt Norton was there for the taking; yet Norton turned back the clock to leave the hapless Bobick unconscious after just 58 seconds, effectively ending his career.

“I thought it was a fight Bobick could win,” Futch said plaintively afterwards. “Norton wasn’t a big puncher, except with the uppercut. If you kept him busy he couldn’t get it off.”

After two more victories Norton unexpectedly became WBC champion after Spinks was stripped of the title. Then on June 9 1978, Norton and Holmes staged one of the great heavyweight fights at Caesars Palace, the latter just edging the decision following 15 pulsating rounds. Norton was never able to scale such heights again.

Nine months later the big-hitting Earnie Shavers flattened him inside two minutes, and a draw with the limited Scott LeDoux – in which he was downed twice – should have persuaded Norton he was on the decline.

Instead, he took on future title challenger Randall “Tex” Cobb in Texas on November 7 1980, dropping a split decision. A final bout with Cooney at New York’s Madison Square Garden on November 5 1981 resulted in a gruesome first-round exit after a helpless Norton took dozens of unanswered punches. In all he had won 42 of his 50 bouts, losing seven with one draw.

Norton went on to reinvent himself as a film and television actor, with roles in Mandingo (1975), Drum (1976) and The A-Team (1983), among others. For a time he worked with NBC as a fight analyst, and also formed a management agency.

In 1986 a road accident in Los Angeles left him with brain injuries, but following a long spell in rehabilitation he had recovered sufficiently to open his own gym. His final years were blighted by ill health.

Ken Norton’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Jacqueline, whom he married in 1977, and by five children.

Ken Norton, born August 9 1943, died September 18 2013

Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy, who  died aged 66, was the author of gung-ho techno-military thrillers which generated many millions of dollars, a number of successful films, and a franchise of equally popular – and profitable – video games.

Novelist Tom Clancy during target practice in his private underground pistol range in 1989

In Clancy’s books, Armageddon is always on the horizon. In The Sum of All Fears (1991), the city of Denver is obliterated by a nuclear explosion; in Debt of Honour (1994), which prefigures the events of 9/11, a kamikaze pilot crashes into the Capitol Building, wiping out much of Congress and killing the President.

“As real events always prove, bad things tend to happen,” Clancy once observed. “I write about those possibilities. Now, that doesn’t make me a good fit for the so-called literary establishment. They want to write pretty, complicated things that show off how brilliant they are.” And while he claimed to be merely “a pretty good storyteller”, “what I offer most is verisimilitude, showing my readers what’s real”.

The book which made Clancy’s name was his first, The Hunt for Red October, released in 1984 by a small publisher, the Naval Institute Press. The story turns on the disillusioned captain of a new class of Soviet nuclear submarine who decides to defect to the United States with his boat, Red October, which is equipped with ballistic missiles. The Soviets respond by dispatching the whole of their northern fleet to destroy the submarine before it can reach America; meanwhile, the US Navy — alerted by a spy in the Kremlin — waits to provide assistance.

Despite its rip-roaring plot, the book would almost certainly have languished had not a copy found its way under the White House Christmas Tree. President Ronald Reagan lapped it up as “the perfect yarn”, while his Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger went further, declaring: “The technical detail is vast and accurate, remarkably so for an author who originally had no background or experience.” (At the time of the book’s publication, Clancy was working as an insurance agent and had only a single published article to his name.)

When the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, read the book, he asked: “Who the hell cleared it?” Clancy claimed that he had had no access to classified material, but had gleaned details of weapons systems simply by researching technical manuals, magazines and reference books. He also drew on the mass market war game Harpoon.

If some critics complained that the characters were one-dimensional, the public did not mind. In the first two years The Hunt for Red October sold more than 300,000 copies in hardback and a further two million in paperback, earning Clancy an estimated $500,000 in royalties and a further $500,000 for the rights to the subsequent film, which starred Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin and grossed $200 million worldwide.

“Reality is fairly simple,” Clancy observed. “My critics say my characters are cardboard, but the people I know and write about tell me I get it all right. The mark of a superior person is to take complexity and find the simplicity in it.”

The success of The Hunt for Red October secured Clancy a $3 million, three-book contract, and the Pentagon took him under its wing, permitting him to spend time in a missile-carrying frigate and a submarine and to drive an M1 tank (“Sixty tons, 1,500 horsepower and a four-inch gun — that’s sex!” Clancy enthused. “That was a ball! The army treats me right... When I was a kid I wanted to be a tanker. With a tank I am death!’’). Meanwhile, in Baltimore harbour he was allowed to go on board a Royal Navy ship to meet Prince Andrew, then serving as a helicopter pilot.

Clancy’s second novel Red Storm Rising — also a bestseller — offered his vision of World War Three, which breaks out after Arab terrorists blow up one third of the Soviet Union’s oilfields, and the Soviets respond by seizing the Gulf States to safeguard their energy needs before invading Western Europe. The war is a hi-tech affair, with no resort to nuclear or chemical weapons. Red Storm Rising was adopted as required reading at America’s Naval War College, and the military historian John Keegan declared that it would take its place in “a long tradition of military futurology” alongside Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and HG Wells’s War of the Worlds.

Patriot Games (1987) addressed the subject of international terrorism and featured Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst who had appeared in The Hunt for Red October, this time attempting to foil a plot by an Irish republican group to kidnap the Prince and Princess of Wales. In 1992 it appeared as a film with Harrison Ford in the starring role.

By now Clancy was a rich man, a turn of events which appeared to cause him little surprise. “In America,” he said, “there ain’t no excuse. You can go out and do anything you damn well please if you try hard enough.” All he had done was to follow his instincts, developing his boyhood fascination with aircraft, ships and tanks. As he once put it: “I’m a technology freak — and the best stuff is in the military.”

Thomas Leo Clancy was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 12 1947, the son of a postman. The family was devoutly Roman Catholic, and after attending a Catholic high school in Baltimore he went on to the city’s Loyola College, a Jesuit institution where he switched from Physics to English Literature. “Ethics [is] what they stress,” he later said of his education. “It’s what ought to be stressed. You’re taught to be accountable, to do the right things instead of the easy things.”

As a student, he enrolled in the US Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and was itching to serve in Vietnam — an ambition that was sabotaged by his defective eyesight. But he was also determined to become a writer, and was sorely disappointed when a short story he submitted to a science fiction magazine was rejected.

Yet his marriage in 1969, to Wanda Thomas, required him to earn an assured income, so he found work as an insurance agent, first in Baltimore and later in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1973 he moved to the OF Bowen Agency in Maryland, a business owned by his wife’s grandfather; seven years later Clancy and Wanda bought the firm for $125,000, although they were not able to produce all the money until he had achieved success as a novelist.

Clancy claimed he was “a lousy salesman; it was tough basically saying to people, 'Something bad could happen to you, so buy this [policy] from me’.” This was over-modest, since he was soon making about $250,000 a year. Well-off he may have been, but he was also bored — and his literary ambitions persisted. “I’d made my own trap,” he later recalled. “I had kids to support, mortgage payments, and a business to pay off.”

In 1976 he had read a story in the newspapers about a mutiny in a Soviet warship, Storozhevoy, in which some of the crew had tried to defect to Sweden. He now resolved to use the incident for the basis of a novel about a mutiny on board a nuclear submarine. At about the same time, the events of the Falklands conflict caused Clancy to start thinking about the weapons used in modern warfare. The seeds were sown for The Hunt for Red October.

Clancy’s fourth book was The Cardinal of the Kremlin, about espionage and SDI (the “Star Wars” nuclear defence shield proposed by the Reagan White House).

In all Clancy wrote 17 novels, the last of which is Command Authority. Others are Clear and Present Danger (1989); The Sum of All Fears (1991); Rainbow Six (1998); and The Teeth of the Tiger (2003). Several of his books were made into films — the latest, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is due to be released in the United States on Christmas Day.

A keen tabletop wargamer, in 1996 Clancy founded Red Storm Entertainment, which would adapt his complex military themes to computer games. Its first release, a turn-based strategy called Tom Clancy’s Politika, was published in conjunction with a board game and Tom Clancy’s Power Plays novel (penned by a ghostwriter) of the same title.

It had a muted reception, but the company struck gold with its third effort, Rainbow Six, again released in conjunction with a novel. A slew of sequels and four more franchises followed – Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, End War and Air Combat, all under the Clancy name. Championing a new breed of gaming that placed strategy and teamwork above virtual brute force, they none the less excited an inevitable degree of controversy for the uncompromising realism of their on-screen violence.

The game Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas (2006) had the desert city complaining about possible damage to its revenues, while US Army commanders faced a quite different problem: many new recruits stayed up late playing at virtual combat, leaving them too tired for exercises the next morning. Yet in 2001, the Department of Defense had incorporated Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear into its training programme, as a guide to successful military operation in urban settings. Red Storm Entertainment was sold to Ubisoft in 2000, and eight years later Ubisoft acquired all intellectual property rights to the Clancy name in video gaming.

Clancy was a part owner of the American League baseball team the Baltimore Orioles.

Tom Clancy’s marriage to Wanda Thomas, with whom he had a son and three daughters, was dissolved in 1998; the following year he married Alexandra Marie Llewellyn.

Tom Clancy, born April 12 1947, died October 2013