INSPIRATION: Phil Martin’s legacy remains strong in Manchester
EYEBROWS were raised in 1982 when former lightheavyweight Phil Martin took over a derelict building and turned it into a rough-and-ready boxing gym. Martin named it Champs Camp and it rose like a phoenix from the streets of riot-hit Moss Side. Two days of strife in July 1981 had set the area on a path of nationwide notoriety that it would struggle to shake off decades later.
For Martin, though, the area was his manor and the gym was his home. By 1993 it housed four British champions in Carl Thompson (cruiserweight), Frank Grant (middleweight), Maurice Core (light-heavyweight) and Paul Burke (lightweight).