“I do fighting scenes, car smashes, jumping through windows, getting thrown into lakes, taking falls, ordinary stuff like that,” says Donovan Boucher.
It hardly sounds like “ordinary stuff”, especially for a man in his 60s who you’d think would rather be relaxing after a long fighting career that included two of the biggest events in Canadian and British boxing history.
But then the life of any boxer is a life less ordinary, and perhaps movie stunt work is a way for Boucher to replicate the buzz that most fighters miss once they quit the ring.
“Yes, exactly – but you don’t get hit!” says the man who has most notably worked on The Day After Tomorrow, Cinderella Man, Four Brothers, an X-Men sequel and the remake of Assault On Precinct 13. “You make it look like you do – you turn your head in just the right way. As a boxer, you know how to do that. They like that they have a champion boxer working. It’s an amazing job, and I stay in shape, so physically I can do a lot of things.”
Now 63, Boucher looks much younger. He is visibly happy and clearly fit and healthy, not far off his welterweight prime.
That was when he scored the two wins he is best remembered for on either side of the Atlantic – first, a March 1988 second-round rout of Olympic silver medallist Shawn O’Sullivan in an all-Toronto grudge match, and then, three years later, a knockout over English enigma Kirkland Laing.
“I beat Kirkland Laing, who beat Roberto Duran, who beat Sugar Ray Leonard,” he points out. “I’m the man who beat the man who beat the man who beat the man!”
It is a tongue-in-cheek take, delivered with a chuckle. Boucher would not claim to be Sugar Ray’s superior, but to British fans he is the man who beat several of our men in an exciting Commonwealth title run in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Before that came the O’Sullivan affair. It was a classic crosstown rivalry with a deep storyline involving a trainer torn between two pupils, and then a changing of the guard as the rising talent upset the established star.
“Shawn had just failed to win the North American title, so he had to kind of reset if he wanted to fight for the world title,” says Boucher. “He said, ‘Boucher has just won the Canadian title and I never won the Canadian title, so we gotta get this fight together.’
“Peter Wylie [who trained and managed both] went with Shawn. He was hoping he’d make him a lot of money. Shawn was bigger than the Leafs [the Toronto Maple Leafs ice hockey team], that’s how big he was. He [Wylie] said to me, ‘Shawn will win, but then you and I can get back together.’ I said, ‘this doesn’t sit right with me – I’m leaving!’ and went straight to [new manager] Irv Ungerman.
“It was a big fight in Toronto; sold out in no time and was on TV across the country. We signed contracts at a big press conference and did public training sessions at the Eaton Center, a big mall. Everybody came to watch. It generated a lot of money. So many guys came to support me. Lennox Lewis came to support me. Twenty guys walked me to the ring. It was like a dream.
“I’d sparred with this guy enough times, I knew he doesn’t have a strong defence and I went at him, boom-boom-boom. He went down. One of the highlights of my career.”
Eighteen months after beating O’Sullivan, Boucher suffered a seventh-round stoppage loss to world-rated Glenwood Brown that seemed to suggest he’d hit his ceiling. But he would find, more than once, that boxing’s perverse logic sometimes engineers greater opportunities from defeats than victories.
While the O’Sullivan win had led only to a period of treading water, it was defeat that opened doors. Scotland’s Commonwealth champion Gary Jacobs probably now viewed him as a respected but beatable name as he looked to build towards world contention.
“They saw I was Canadian champion but had lost to Glenwood, so they thought ‘he’ll be good for a [Commonwealth welterweight] title defence,” Boucher says. “But nobody cares about your preparation, they just see the result. For Glenwood, I had a big toothache and sometimes you’re just not mentally prepared.
“But [for Jacobs] I said, ‘any title fight, I’m there!’ I trained hard, sparred well, went to the Kronk in Detroit. They thought I was coming to lay down, but I was coming to win. I went to Scotland [in November 1989] and I gave a great performance, knocked him down a couple of times, and only the crowd helped him last 12 rounds.
“But that crowd… they were booing me on the way in, and afterwards they were saying they didn’t like him anyway! I thought, ‘wow, they can turn on a fighter just like that?’ I was flabbergasted. Boxing fans are ruthless.”
Maybe so, but for now Boucher was back in demand, on both sides of the Pond.
“Winning the Commonwealth title meant I was champion of half the world,” he says. “They broadcast it [the Jacobs fight] over here. A lot of people saw the fight. When I came back, I was doing interviews across Canada, I was on the front page of the papers, girls were chasing me…”
Three stoppage wins in Canada followed before Boucher was invited back to the UK, this time to defend against Laing in Nottingham in April 1991. ‘The Gifted One’ was nine years removed from beating Duran, but was still a box of tricks, and again Boucher was boxing in his opponent’s hometown.
“Laing was older by the time but still a tremendous fighter; very unorthodox, fighting with his hands down,” he says. “I had to adjust, and I caught him in the ninth round and knocked him out.
“We partied after. He was a great guy; I can’t say nothing bad about him, but he loved to party, and drinking and fighting don’t mix.”
Next up was London’s Mickey Hughes in York Hall. “That motherf***er could punch, god damn!” he exclaims, wincing at the memory. “He caught me in the stomach and my leg seized up. I was frozen, I was stuck – but I never let him know. Yo, that boy hit me hard! I never knew a body shot could hurt like that.”
Boucher boxed his way to a points decision after navigating a few scares, posted another title defence in Canada, and then returned to London to meet Dudley’s Robert Wright. Boucher won in 11 rounds, and it would be his last victory in Britain – although there were two more important chapters to write there.
By November 1992, in Doncaster, Boucher was engaging in his seventh Commonwealth title fight in three years, so could be forgiven if he was getting a little impatient, maybe even complacent, as he waited for bigger things. And Northern Irish underdog Eamonn Loughran was ready to capitalise.
“I said ‘I don’t wanna come over no more, I want a world title fight,” recalls Boucher. “‘This kid is a nobody’.”
The “nobody” then knocked Boucher through the ropes in the third round and finished him moments later in what was a huge upset.
“He got lucky,” claims Boucher. “It was a lucky punch. But hey, it was his time.”
If Boucher thought that had ended his world title aspirations, boxing’s weird ways would again see things differently. He was back in the UK 11 months later, fighting in the chief supporting bout to the Chris Eubank-Nigel Benn rematch, an event staged in front of 42,000 fans at Old Trafford and watched by an estimated 18.5 million people on ITV.
Not only that, but it was a world title challenge, too. Much like how defeat to Glenwood Brown had made Boucher appear an attractive opponent to Jacobs, the Loughran loss had made a similar impression on WBA 147lbs champion Crisanto Espana.
The Belfast-based Venezuelan was 29-0, 24 KOs, had brutalised Meldrick Taylor a year earlier and was a powerful, intimidating figure known for his uncanny height and reach at the weight.
“I trained for the whole summer; I was ready to go,” says Boucher. “You know how tall he was [5ft 10ins], how big he was… well, at the weigh-in, he looked like me – 147lbs, skinny, ordinary. But in the ring, when he took his robe off, he was massive! I’m like, ‘I’m fighting this guy?’ His arms went from here to the end of the street. He was jabbing me, he knocked me down, the ref stopped the fight. I was devastated.”
Not as devastated as he would be when, after one more fight, he lost his boxing licence in 1996.
“The scan showed a dot on the brain,” he says. “The doc said it’s inconclusive, there’s probably nothing wrong with me, I might have been born with it, but the commission wouldn’t let me box”.
It wouldn’t be the end of Boucher’s boxing journey, but meanwhile he just kept busy with his day job with Toronto Water, conducting maintenance, repairs and construction of the city’s water supply network, which he still does to this day.
There was a comeback 11 years later, when new brain scans could find nothing wrong – “The dot was gone. Still don’t know what it was” – and he was relicensed. But, at 46, it was too late. Boucher scored a couple of wins over journeymen, then made two creditable but unsuccessful challenges for the Canadian super-welterweight title against Gareth Sutherland, a man 19 years his junior, and then finally bowed out on a routine win in September 2008.
Since then, Boucher has added a number of strings to his bow. He coaches amateurs at Budo Fitness, MMA & Boxing in Toronto, there’s the aforementioned stunt work and, since 2014, regular appearances as a boxing referee and judge.
“The referees today are garbage,” he says of his contemporaries, and in particular the official in charge of his second fight with Sutherland. “I knocked him down with a body shot, but the referee said it was a low blow and took points from me,” he says. “It wasn’t a low blow. I’ve got it on tape. It was the Sutherland fight that motivated me to be a referee.”
As well as the stunt work, it is this job that keeps Boucher fit and relevant. BoxRec shows he has worked as a referee or judge 195 times, mostly across Canada but with some overseas assignments in Mexico, Ukraine, Cayman Islands and Jamaica, the land of his birth.
“My dad passed away in Jamaica,” he says. “He and three other guys were electrocuted in a work accident. I was about five years old; I remember going to his funeral. He was just 24 or 25. They never had no payout. Then mum moved over here [to Toronto] two or three years after that. She came here, was very successful working at the hospital as a dietitian, then brought us [Donovan and his sister] over. I was about nine or 10. I used to get picked on, that’s why I started boxing – but I didn’t tell my mum!”
She would find out soon enough, though, as Boucher had an estimated 80 amateur bouts that included Ontario titles and representing Jamaica in the 1984 Olympic qualifiers, before turning pro and fighting on millions of TV screens. She even attended some of his matches, including that Nottingham night against Laing, when she watched her son become the man who beat the man who beat the man who beat Sugar Ray Leonard.
“She’s still alive, in her 80s and very healthy,” says Boucher of his mother. And, despite getting punched for pay 40 times and then entering a post-boxing life that has involved jumping through windows and getting thrown into lakes, Boucher can, in his 60s, say the same about himself.
