Dan Goossen

Dan Goossen, who has died of liver cancer aged 64, was a boxing promoter who progressed from a small backyard boxing ring at his home in San Fernando valley to working closely with modern giants of the sport such as Floyd Mayweather, James Toney and the present WBA super middlweight champion Andre Ward.

American showbusiness is replete with great dynasties (Douglas Fairbanks Senior and Junior, Kirk and Michael Douglas, and many others) all of whom won immortality and fortune for their families. Dan Goossen and his nine family members ,who made up internationally renowned Ten Goose Promotions, arguably made just as large an impact on boxing .

Remarkably, Goossen, who was born the son of a police detective in Los Angeles, did it without the outrageous showmanship of Afro-American promotional Don King or without the privileged Harvard Law School background of Bob Arum.

Goossen's initiation could not have been more low key or a greater contrast to King's headline hogging Thrilla in Manila in 1975. Goossen started with a small boxing ring in his own backyard in his north Hollywood home.

His personal charisma, based on being able to project his fundamental decency, was an essential ingredient of his subsequent success in big-time American boxing. But he also had an instinctive ability to spot and effectively exploit the main chance wherever and whenever it appeared.

Witness the example of the two Ruelas brothers, Gabriel and Rafael, who arrived on Goossen's porch as teenage door-to-door candy vendors before accepting the Goossen invitation to learn to box in his makeshift backyard ring. They graduated as adults to win world titles.

Then there was the vote of confidence from some of the US boxing scene's most gifted but personally hard-to-please megastars: for example, five weight division world title winning Floyd Mayweather Jr who won 10 world titles in four different weight classes. Mayweather was famously fastidious in his relationships with promoters and everyone else and it speaks volumes for Goossen's personal promotional karma that Mayweather and he came to work together.

Indeed, gaining Mayweather's professional trust was no mean achievement for somebody like Goossen who started his working life flogging stationary in a boiler room but ended up signing and guiding the last two American boxers to strike gold at the Olympic games: in 1996 with middleweight winner David Reid and then Andrew Ward who struck gold in 2004. But before that, nothing illustrates Goossen's capacity to inspire confidence in his boxers better than the case of Samoan David Tua.

In hindsight, it is obvious that the fearsome looking Tua was not really in the same class as Britain's Lennox Lewis, who saw off Tua's challenge for Lewis's world heavyweight crown comfortably enough. But Goossen's mastery of media manipulation convinced millions of fans who watched this clash on pay-per-view that it was indeed a credible bout.

More recently, Goossen showed his nous with his fellow Californian Andre Ward. The fact that Ward was a 1996 Olympic gold medal winner was no guarantee of success in the ring, as several Olympic boxing gold medal winners had failed to shine in the pro ranks, ranging from Howard Davies in 1976 to British heavyweight Audley Harrison.

However, Goossen's array of boxing promotional and managerial abilities saw Ward not only become WBA world champion but also triumph in 2011 in Atlantic City over the formidable British world super middleweight titlist Carl 'The Cobra' Froch, whom Ward out-scored over 12 rounds.

Goossen's executive position as vice-president of the leading US boxing television company Top Rank was also recognition that he had definitely arrived to claim a place in boxing history beside the boxing promotional elite.

Hugely popular for his gregarious personality, Goossen was also a caring family man who always fought for his boxers. On hearing of his old mentor's death from liver cancer, world champion Andre Ward said: "He was a great man, father and husband; he will be greatly missed in the boxing community."

The words of tribute were enhanced by the fact that both Ward and Goossen had recently fallen out and were in a legal battle over Ward's contract.

Goossen is survived by his wife, four sons, six brothers and two sisters.