Boxing: Likeable rogue dies

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Gil Sullivan, one of New Zealand boxing's most colourful characters, has died in Auckland at the age of 60.

Sullivan was a former gym manager, sometime committee member of, and thorn in the side of, the Auckland Boxing Association for many years. While Sullivan's major claim to fame in later years was as an outspoken opponent of what he saw as flaws in the way amateur boxing was run in Auckland, his two sons, Marty and Sean, went on to achieve considerable success in the ring.

Marty Sullivan has held the New Zealand middleweight title, Sean Sullivan the New Zealand welterweight and light-middleweight titles. They were born to it: Marty Sullivan remembers his father staging "title fights in the lounge." Gil Sullivan was a self-appointed champion for "Everyman." He was scathing about what he called "the blazer brigade," a stance which led him to a decades-long standoff with officialdom. He saw his life's work as labouring at "grassroots level, doing all the jobs no one else wanted or was prepared to do."

His propensity for the defamatory statement and his unorthodox methods of dealing with authority earned him a reputation in some circles as a loveable rogue. In others as simply a rogue.

He was also involved in schoolboy and Marist rugby and had, as he put it, "done a 40-year apprenticeship in sport." He is survived by his two sons and two daughters.