AFTER A while with Frank Bruno, I begin to feel like a very small fly buzzing round a great big giant. A fruit fly: tiny, but just big enough to be a pest. I'm flying in the face of the former heavyweight champion of the world, round his head, in his ears, and I can tell the steady drone of my probing is making him uncomfortable. On the surface he is a genial giant, effusive in his thanks when handed a drink. "Wicked, wicked, wicked," he says. "Cheers. Thanks. Wicked." His eyes dart downwards, head nodding in shy thanks, but ask him a question and he focuses those eyes and stares, and they become big, unyielding black rocks: the stare that tried to intimidate Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis. It may not have worked on them, but it's working on me. I imagine those massive hands closing on the fruit fly. Splat.

Most people take questions and run with them. Bruno absorbs them like punches. Takes the sting out and hands them back. Are you aggressive, Frank? The rocks swivel towards me, fix me to the seat. "What do you mean, aggressive?" he says, the deep voice rumbling quietly. He does that a lot, returns questions with questions, makes it nerve-racking to repeat the original. At one point, he says he learned a lot about himself from the mental breakdown he suffered in 2003. Naturally, I ask what he learnt. "A lot, a lot about myself." What things? "A lot." But what sort of things? "The interesting thing was I learnt a lot about myself." Give me a clue, Frank. He shifts in his seat. "The Glasgow girl is beating me up," he mumbles.

And then, just as I'm giving up, I ask about Mike Tyson and suddenly we're discussing rape. Bruno replies instinctively at last, completely silencing me. I say nothing because if I react he'll stop, but dammit my eyes must have revealed shock. Bruno retreats, raising his hands as if to protect himself from blows, alternating throughout our conversation between the intimidating giant and the nervous puppy who regularly gets kicked. "Oh, shit," he says. "Oh, God." He sighs. He thinks he's in trouble now? "I think so, yeah. I'm not even going there, man."

Boxers are complicated people. "No more complicated than women," retorts Bruno. Women? Straightforward creatures. Bruno's eyes widen. "Oh, gosh," he says, "Oh, gosh, oh, gosh, oh, gosh..."

BEFORE we get to that Tyson conversation, let's go back. Bruno steps from the chauffeur-driven car organised by his publishers dressed all in black: black trousers, smart black shirt. Very imposing; the size of him, the scale: 6ft 3in tall, shoulders like a gable-end. No fat. At first, there is an almost self-deprecating politeness to everyone around him. He calls women "ma'am". So I'm taken aback a few minutes later in the private club where our interview is scheduled. The room isn't quite ready. Just as I am switching on the tape to begin in the public lounge, someone walks towards us and I look up, pausing, waiting to see if our room is now available. Bruno hasn't yet realised we are moving. "Do you want to just concentrate on what you're doing and start?" he says quietly.

There is a sense of suppressed boredom about him. Before he realised his psychiatrist could help him, Bruno gave him a hard time. "I wasn't really listening to what he was saying to me. I was just counting off the days until I got out." I can believe it. You get the strong feeling that he has grown a public skin over himself. Yes, ma'am. Yes, chief. Underneath that ultra-politeness is a more restless creature. He answers questions, but his mind is flitting elsewhere.

He was, he admits, very angry as a child. "I was full of confusion when I was younger, very, very confused. But I wasn't confused about my sexuality, because I like women," he adds, and he laughs that strange, deep, rumbling Bruno laugh that is so infectious. "Just confused, a lot of energy. My dad got sick very early, when I was a youngster, and I was very confused." His dad's illness made him angry? "There are so many things I got angry with, I couldn't really pull one thing out."

His father was tough but fair. "Very, very hard, very strict, but very kind-hearted to me and my sister." His mum, a Pentecostal lay preacher, was strict too. Both parents had children from previous relationships - which Bruno seems rather vague about - and he had two half-sisters and two half-brothers as well as his full sister. But he grew up largely alone, having been sent away to a special school after hitting a teacher in primary school. Bruno's explanation of this strikes me as sad; his words sound like part of a lecture he got as a child that has simply stuck. "If you're young and you don't listen to what your parents are telling you, you get sent to boarding school - and rightly so. I got warned, I got told, and if you're not willing to listen... I have only myself to blame."

He didn't have a criminal record, didn't nick nothing, he says, but somehow, he was always there when other people did... Boxing saved him from the wrong path. Certainly, the public adored him. He was big affable Frank, clowning around in pantomime, turning every post-match interview into a pastiche with his infamous "Know what I mean, 'arry?" to commentator Harry Carpenter. How does that person become aggressive enough to box? What happens when the bell rings? "You have to change and defend yourself and do what you can to win. When you go in there, you'd rather hurt them than have them hurt you." And if he had seriously injured someone? "It would be difficult, but no more difficult than if he hurt me."

Boxers separate forms of aggression quite instinctively. Bruno, for example, becomes uncomfortable describing sectarianism. He became a Catholic, like his father, and recently he went to see Rangers play Celtic. "I was sitting with a boxing promoter, Alex Morrison, and it wasn't a joke," he says, shaking his head. "To see the fans - big, grown-up men - chucking abuse at each other, it was scary. I thought, 'Whoaaa...' I didn't smile. I didn't look this way or that way. I just looked straight in front of me, ma'am, because it weren't a joke. When you see people shouting abuse..." He breathes out heavily.

He would prefer to walk away from arguments. But in the ring, what does he feel like? "It was a scary experience, you know what I mean? Sometimes, if you were superfit, it was a nice experience. Tingling in your hands. Pins and needles. Butterflies in your stomach. It was an exciting feeling."

Maybe the most fascinating thing about boxing is the importance of the boxer's mind. All that staring and taunting before the bouts. (Bruno was frequently derided as an 'Uncle Tom' in attempts to rile him.) He was defeated twice by Mike Tyson, but in the first match he gave him a run for his money. In the second, Bruno crumbled. Those around him described seeing Bruno energised for the fight, then just five minutes later, appearing defeated before it even began. What happened in those five minutes? "I don't know. I can't remember what happened. All I knew was the nerves went a little bit. Sometimes, if you are not right mentally, your mind can play funny tricks."

People said he was frightened. Bruno's black rocks fix on me. "If I'd have been frightened, I'd have run to the toilet and I wouldn't have come out."

When he finally won the world title in 1995, after four attempts, Bruno was understandably emotional in front of the cameras. "I am not an Uncle Tom," he insisted, showing how deeply that taunt had cut him over the years. He had even been criticised for marrying Laura, the white mother of his three children, whom he met when she pinched his backside at a roller-skating rink in 1981. "I can't really understand it at all," he says of the Uncle Tom label. "People just say that kind of thing out of jealousy. It's sick in the head. They try to wind me up."

After so many years of striving, he lost the title to Tyson just six months after winning it. Bruno retired, but faced the most testing battle of his life. He could not adjust to life without the discipline, the rigour, of boxing. "I had 25 years of getting up in the morning, dedicating myself, and then I didn't know what to do. I looked after the kids, did bits and pieces, but nothing could replace boxing."

What does he believe triggered his breakdown? "The break-up of my marriage. My divorce. Not working as much as I thought I would, not eating right, not sleeping right. The pressure suddenly got on top of me."

Asked how he copes with pressure, Bruno's answer is vivid. "I don't know how you handle it. It's like a kettle. If it's a kettle, you turn the kettle off, you know what I mean? I wish I could put a hole in my head and let the steam come out. The steam was getting so high and the pressure was just getting a little bit much for me."

Can he describe how it felt inside himself? "All I can say is that at one stage it got so confusing for me, thinking too much... You know how you listen to a radio station, and another radio station comes in... Things got a little fuzzy for me."

Does it scare him? Bruno talks naturally about things being "scary", but seems to bridle slightly if I ask a question about fear. "Does what scare me?" Mental illness. "It scared me when I went into hospital and saw some other people. It scared me enough to really pull myself together and pull my socks up and get myself together."

He admits in his autobiography that he smoked cannabis. The drug has been linked to mental illness, but Bruno dismisses that in his case. "I tried it once when I was 12 and then when I was 17 or 18. When I was a boxer, I wasn't dabbling in it at all. I wasn't a full-time user over the years, so I don't think that it had anything to do with it."

He also admits taking cocaine. "It wasn't a big problem. That was maybe five, six years ago. It was a crazy thing I went through in my life, and I wouldn't like it to come back again. It was okay at first, but after a while... You could see why people got hooked on it. I just had to come out of it. It wasn't really my cup of tea. It was this horrible thing."

But perhaps it was a sign of the searching that was going on under the public skin of affable Frank. Laura, his manager as well as his wife, was reputedly the tough one of the partnership. For legal reasons, Bruno cannot discuss Laura. "Don't even go there, Jimmy," he says, eyes shooting floorwards again. "I'm not at liberty to discuss that, ma'am."

A less-than-flattering picture has sometimes been painted of Laura. But when Bruno was in hospital, Laura visited. Once he got out, they went on a family holiday together, and his book is dedicated to her and their children. He writes that he still loves her. Would he like another partnership eventually? "I've got a partnership with my right hand at the moment," he says. (A conversation with Bruno is no place for the prudish.) "Yeah, I hope that one day some beautiful young lady will come along, but I am in no rush. I am free, having fun, not bothering nobody..."

There is nothing inherently wrong with the phrase "beautiful young lady", but it does jump out at you. It seems a bit clichéd, especially for a 43-year-old man who has already been married. Like the male equivalent of Cinderella, waiting for Prince Charming. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by the Tyson conversation.

It starts when I say that I notice an empathy for Tyson in Bruno's book. Bruno suddenly becomes less automatic in his responses. "I am very sympathetic to him," he agrees. "He beat me up twice, but that doesn't take away from the fact that deep down in his soul, away from the hangers-on and the people round him, he is one of the most nicest people you could meet. He's a nice guy."

Why? Bruno seems to hate questions that ask him to explain his thoughts. "He's a nice guy," he repeats. "He's just... I think he has confusion with certain different things he has been taking, but get him away from all that and he's a nice guy. He's one of the most kindest and warmest people you're likely to meet."

Intrigued, I say few people describe Tyson as nice. There is his conviction for attempted rape for a start. "Yeah, attempted rape," says Bruno, sounding sarcastic. "At one o'clock, two o'clock in the morning, and a woman comes up to your room, and that's attempted rape?" The silence starts small and ends up big, filling the room. Bruno retreats immediately, shrinking away physically and verbally.

Certainly, celebrities can be at risk from set-ups. But I am uncertain if Bruno has some inside knowledge, or if he merely thinks nice girls don't go to hotel rooms late at night, and those who do deserve what they get. Why was it not attempted rape? "Why would a girl come to your room at two o'clock?" he demands. "Wanting to play chess? You've got to know the full story behind it and everything. I don't think you know the full story. You're a woman and you're going to see it in a woman's..." He breaks off. "Oh, shit."

What do you like about women, Frank? "Women are beautiful creatures. I love them. I wouldn't go to the Barrymore side of the fence. I love a lot of different things about women, but I wouldn't go so far as to say..." He stops. Well, what does he find hard to understand about them? "Sometimes, they are very confusing. They can be very confusing, women. Very, very kind, women. If a woman is on your side, and she likes you or loves you or whatever, she's the most beautifullest creature ever. But sometimes they can be very confusing, you know what I mean? Every month they get confusing. But that's women's bits and pieces. No... Women are very nice..." For Frank, it's a long speech.

AS IF things weren't tough enough, Bruno's old friend and trainer George Francis committed suicide in 2002, after losing his wife and his son to cancer. "He was a diamond. A very, very good; very, very warm; very, very special person," says Bruno, with feeling.

It's a macho world, boxing. Is it hard for people to talk? "Me and George had a good relationship where we could go for walks and talk certain things out."

They had visited a health farm together and Bruno knew Francis was under pressure. But not how much. When it comes to macho, Bruno says there is only so much of that you can take. "You need a bit of company, a bit of emotion to get away from that macho thing. A bit of romance, a bit of chilling-out. I prefer the chilling-out to being macho."

And yet he is so constantly suspicious. "I am always going to be suspicious of people," he agrees. "People are very unpredictable. You've always got to be on your guard."

Sometimes, he wonders what people want to know about him. They just want to know who you are, I say. Bruno looks sideways at me. "My name is Frank," he says.

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