Former champion kickboxer and West Midlands campaigner Barrington Patterson died this week after suffering a heart attack, aged 56.
Known to all as ‘One-eyed Baz’, Patterson, a former football hooligan turned around his life from 1980s thuggery to charity work, helping to combat homelessness and knife crime.
On Tuesday, his wife announced on Twitter: “At 6am this morning my beloved husband had a massive heart attack. West Midlands Ambulance Service worked for over an hour to save him unfortunately it wasn’t to be our hearts are broken.”
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The Sun reports: Tributes called him big-hearted, a good friend and an inspirational bloke.
He set up Birmingham’s Homeless Support team with wife Tracey after he saw a school friend sleeping rough on the streets.
And his final tweet last week before he died was a video sharing some of the community work for his Knives Down Gloves Up campaign.
Barrington, nicknamed One Eyed Baz after being blinded in his left eye when his sister threw a can at him as a youngster, also competed in kickboxing fights across the world.
And he worked as a mentor, film actor and wrote a best-selling autobiography in 2013.
He rose to fame when he featured in the 2006 TV documentary The Real Football Factories and appeared in Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men.
