Monzon beat Emile Griffith (twice), Denny Moyer, Jean-Claude Bouttier (twice), Tom Bogs, Bennie Briscoe, Jose Napoles, Tony Mundine, Tony Licata and Gratien Tonna.In 1974 the World Boxing Council withdrew recognition of Monzon on a technicality and installed their own champion, Rodrigo Valdes of Colombia. Monzon retained the approval of the rival World Boxing Association – and the sporting public. In 1976 in MonteCarlo they met to settle the argument in one of the peak moments of the boxing decade. Monzon won a classic struggle on points, and did so again in a rematch in July 1977.But he felt he was fading at the age of 34 and retired. Every afternoon he could be found in La Cuyantina bar, in Buenos Aires, playing cards with a group of old men.

Night time found him in a club somewhere.There were two women in his life before the ill-fated Muniz. He married Beatriz Garcia when they were young, but their volatile relationship ended when she shot him. He carried one of her bullets in his back for the rest of his life.Garcia was followed by an actress, Susanna Gimenez, and then came Alicia Muniz, whom he met at an airport in 1979. Their relationship was as stormy as his others, although they had a son, Maximiliano, in 1981, and Monzon declared happily, “This is the beginning of a new life for me.”But at around 5.30am on Valentine’s Day 1988, at his house in Mar del Plata, Monzon’s temper got the better of him. In the ring he was grim, expressionless, cold, his personality understated. Outside it he was usually jovial, always the centre of attention, readily quotable.

After he was found guilty of killing Muniz, he said, “Me and my bad temper are the ones really responsible. Yes, my bad temper.” Yet he was an extraordinary athlete, one of the leading sporting figures of his generation. His car left the road and he was killed, but the exact circumstances are at present unclear, just as much of his life, most notoriously the incident which led to his incarceration, was mysterious.Monzon was a hard, violent man. Although it contained a certain amount of creative tension, it was a spontaneous combustion of comic invention, which took no prisoners, in film (such as Bedazzled, 1968, The Bed Sitting Room, 1969, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1977), on television (Not Only But Also, 1965-73) or on stage (Behind the Fridge, 1971-72). His Harold Macmillan, defending Britain’s nuclear policy and the alleged inadequacy of the “four-minute warning” preceding nuclear attack: “I would remind them there are some people in this great country of ours who can run a mile in four minutes.” A joke which brilliantly clamped its teeth on that era’s self-delusion and hopeless nostalgia for power and glory.Just to quote examples does Cook a disservice, because it never stopped, anyway as long as I knew him, the fountain of original, freshly minted stuff, unmediated by political correctness, or any other form of correctness.His performing partnership with Dudley Moore was unique. The premiss would often be simple, and so self-evident no one had thought to remark on it: the vengeful judge, or the miner who wanted to be a judge but failed because he didn’t have the Latin, despite his preference, on balance, for the trappings of luxury over the trappings of poverty. Carlos Monzon, one of the greatest middleweight boxers in history, spent the last five years of his life serving a jail sentence for the murder of his lover, Alicia Muniz.
When he died, driving down a road near Santa Fe, in Argentina, on Sunday, Monzon was out of prison on a permitted home visit.

Its distinguishing mark is the “double focus of morality and fantasy”.Cook wouldn’t easily have forgiven me for calling up this academic artillery barrage, but those phrases perfectly describe the way his humour worked.He would be seized by an idea (in his case the image is almost literally true) and pursue it through vertiginous spirals of logic, allusion, and spectacular connections until it, and his audience, was exhausted. Carlos Monzon, boxer: born San Javier, Argentina 7 August 1942; died Santa Fe, Argentina 8 January 1995. Northrop Frye wrote of satire that “it demands (at least a token) fantasy, a content recognised as grotesque, moral judgements (at least implicit), and a militant attitude to experience”. The obscenity in their Derek and Clive records was very liberating. Cook’s own view of the satire boom was as disenchanted as his view of its targets: he said of the Establishment Club that it was to be modelled on the political cabarets of Berlin in the Thirties “which did so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler”.Still, a satirist is what he was, but only if you use the term for its richest and most complex connotations. At the same time he created The Establishment, billed as “London’s First Satirical Nightclub”; these two entertainments were highly successful both here and in New York, at a time when some of the structures of traditional British institutions were falling apart.”Satire” is sometimes given at least part of the credit for the collapse of the old order (in the form of Harold Macmillan’s administration); another view is that it was just a lot of undergraduates repaying the state for their expensive educations by being rude to the Government.

And indeed he came to fame as one of the four writer/ performers – the others were Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore – of Beyond the Fringe, advertised as a “satirical revue”. It had everything to do with a compulsive articulation of his view of life, beady, remorseless, hilarious.Cook’s name is associated with the “satire boom” of the Sixties. Ben Elton, who was compering the show, introduced Peter as “The Boss” Which was fair enough. Many years ago, when “alternative comedy” was all the rage, Peter Cook made one of his – then increasingly rare – television appearances, in a show done before a studio audience who thought comedy had been invented by Monty Python in some prehistoric past and brought to the peak of perfection by Rik Mayall.
Beyond the Fringe was probably not even a name to them. Peter Edward Cook, writer and entertainer: born Torquay 17 November 1937; married 1964 Wendy Snowden (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1971), 1973 Judy Huxtable (marriage dissolved), 1987 Lin Chong; died London 9 January 1995.