Boxing: Gilmour happy to have 40 years under his belt

THE NAMES – each one more evocative than the last – come tumbling out in conversation, little stops on the journey that has brought Tommy Gilmour into his 40th year as a boxing promoter and, on 15 March, to the 300th show of his beloved St Andrew's Sporting Club.

There's Dunky Jowett and Cowboy McCormack, Benny The Bandit and Happy Howden, the Skipton Weasel and Paddy Byrne, the legendary cut-man from Dublin. Stays on the marina in Brighton now, apparently. Shares the same birthday as Mickey Mouse.

"Let me tell you about Paddy," says Gilmour. "He was pals with my dad and all the rest of it. The Starmaker, that's what they called my father. One of the biggest boxing promoters in Britain in his day. Oh, aye. Huge. Anyway, Paddy brought me into the inner sanctum, told me all about the operators who were capable of stealing the milk from your tea – and then stealing your tea. He was streetwise. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried in boxing, it's Paddy. He's seen more bodies than Burke and Hare. Him and Dunky were cut-men, the best in the business. Dunky could stop rivers of blood flowing. You could put a bomb under Dunky's arse but when he was working on a fighter you wouldn't move him. He used to say that he'd 50 seconds to heal a cut and it was all about keeping his cool and holding his bottle. Some man, Dunky. From Paisley. Owned all the newspaper corners. Dunky had a job for everybody."

Characters and stories, Gilmour is full of them. He's a walking history of Glasgow life and Glasgow boxing. The 300th show, at the Radisson in the city centre, is special to him, you can tell. It's a big night. At the previous 299, dating back to 1973, he's always had a guest of honour – a brilliant range of characters from footballers to managers to showbiz personalities, from Sir Alex Ferguson to Lennox Lewis to Taggart – but on the 15th, he says, there isn't one guest of honour – "because everybody is a guest of honour that night".

Gilmour's story is a Glasgow epic. His grandfather fought in the Olympics in 1920, worked in the shipyards of Fairfield, became a successful boxing promoter and drove about in a flash limo. The auld yin had style. And he passed it on to his boy, Tommy Snr. He had money. At one time he had 11 bookmaking shops in the city and was one of the biggest players in the boxing game. The Gilmours did things that were unheard of in their circle. When young Tommy was just a few months old they went to America on holiday. They sailed on big ships and did things with flamboyance. "My father didn't know what it was like not to have an arse in his trousers," says Gilmour.

His mother? Different story. Lizzie Gilmour died of cancer when her boy was only 16 years old, but she left behind a set of values that he lives by to this day. "Her dying was a major blow, I don't mind saying that. She was from a place called The Dwellings in Bridgeton, just down from Bridgeton Cross. That was a poor area. Proper poor. We had the trappings of a middle-class life, if you like, but really my mother always had the working-class instincts. I'm like my mother, without a shadow of doubt. I'm careful. If the options are for low, medium or high-risk, put me in for low. All the high-risk boys, they're all skint."

Lizzie and the Starmaker had a great life, albeit one that was cut short by her premature death. Lizzie was clever. She put money away for a rainy day. When Tommy Snr was raking it in through his betting shops and his promotions empire, she set some aside for when things weren't so rosy. It was like she could see the future. After she'd gone, things went awry. The taxman came after the Starmaker with a vengeance. Cleaned him out.

"My dad's dead 30 years but he's still remembered everywhere in Glasgow through the boxing. When my mother went, she left me nearly 30,000 and my father didn't even know she had it. It was her rainy day money. She'd tucked it away because she thought that if my dad had gone before her, we were all moving to America. This was in the 1960s. Thirty grand back then was a fortune."

It wasn't like Tommy Snr avoided tax, he didn't. It's just that people were of the opinion that he didn't pay nearly enough. "Aye, he got a heavy pull. The betting shops were all gone at that stage, the big chains had moved in and the independents were finding it hard to survive. He was stuck for a few quid, so my mother's money went to the taxman. He died in debt, really. Did I miss it? Not a bit of it. That's the truth. I never thought about it."

It was out of deference to the Starmaker that Gilmour didn't start managing fighters properly until after his father died. In the decades since, he's had some amount of champions go through his hands, some amount of great nights at the Sporting Club, none better than the first fight of the lot, Ken Buchanan v Jim Watt for the British title, or more emotional than the 1992 clash between his boy, Pat Clinton, and Isidro Perez, the champion from Mexico, for the world flyweight title. Clinton wowed the Kelvin Hall that night.

"I ask boxers sometimes, 'Why do you want me managing you?' And they say, 'You're the guy we see at ringside, encouraging your fighter, supporting him, you're always there'. I think that's right. I'm not just a friend when they win the titles, I'm their friend when they're beat as well. I've sat with boys and the tears blinding them after they've lost. And you feel for them, you have an affection for these fighters, you see them agonising over things. The efforts they put in, just incredible. Boxing is the worst game in the world for ear-hole blowers, but the fighter is such a humble person normally, so vulnerable most of them. I saw one guy at the Sporting Club one night and he was winning the British title and all he had to do was stand up for the last couple of rounds, but the boy got caught and his world collapsed in. If it was today it would have been 12 rounds and he'd have won, but this was 15 rounds and he didn't make it to 15. That was his chance. His big night. And he got hit by one good shot and it was over. I've seen that happen numerous times and you can't help but feel sorry for them."

He's a good man, Gilmour. Generous, entertaining, an example of decency in a world that's not always honourable. He says he's been blessed all along the way. Never wanted for anything, always had good people guiding him, teaching him the right thing. He's seen some promoters come and go and he's still here, large as life and as passionate as ever.

"Och, I'm a lucky sod," he says. He knows better than anybody, though, that in the unforgiving world of boxing, you make your own luck.