Retired boxer puts thieves on the ropes

Two would-be-robbers got more than they bargained for in central Sweden this week when a retired professional boxer proved he can still pack a punch. Rolf Klasson, who is 62, has grey hair and walks with a zimmer frame; was about the withdraw money in Lidkoping when the knife-wielding thugs demanded his cash.

But Mr Klasson, who was once the sparring partner of former European light-middleweight boxing champ Bo ‘Bosse’ Hogberg, gave the pair a crash-course in respecting their elders while proving that there’s still plenty of fight left in him.

“I said to them, ‘this isn’t going to go well’,” he told Expressen newspaper. When the men scoffed at his warning, he knocked one of them to the floor with a sharp right hook before laying the other out with a left jab. “They came after the wrong guy,” Klasson explained.

Both the thieves fled the scene and Klasson has been praised for fighting his corner.”It was well done. One does have the right to defend oneself,” Margita Johansson of Lidkoping Police told local newspaper NLT.