Thursday 21 May 2015

CARL GIZZI

Recently Dave Williams sent photos of some memorabilia including - to my surprise - Rhyl hotel cutlery. Among Dave’s other items was this souvenir programme which serves as a reminder of Rhyl resident Carl Gizzi’s career as a boxer: 


The following photo of Carl is from Daily Post:


Carl Gizzi was born in Rhyl. He was a professional boxer from 1964-1971 and won 31 out of his 43 fights. His heavyweight opponents included the American Ray Patterson who was Floyd’s brother, Jack Bodell twice (the programme is from their second contest) and Joe Bugner.

Later on in Rhyl, Carl was a familiar figure with his window cleaning business and as a night club bouncer.

This morning when I enquired of Peter Trehearn, a proprietor of The Bistro club in West Parade, he said, “Funnily enough Carl popped around this morning, he has just turned 71 years of age. Carl was a doorman at The Bistro for at least fifteen years during the 1980's& ‘90's until we closed down in 1999. Lovely bloke.

Lovely unless you were fighting him, I suppose.

Peter threw in the following picture of doormen from Bistro days. Left to right are: Brian Edwards, Carl Gizzi, John Brookes and John Allan Jones.
The three-headed curio/person remains unidentified.


Carl Gizzi's sporting achievements will always be remembered. For instance, his fight against Joe Bugner can be seen in three parts on YouTube starting here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-AqZ06Ingk

--

These names of boxers are added here for indexing purposes: Henry Cooper, Carl Thomas, Roy John.

--