He was ahead on the scorecards when Evan Armstrong stopped him in the 12th round, ending both the fight and his championship reign. Jimmy Revie, the former British featherweight champion whose career turned on fractions of a point, died on September 18, 2026, at the age of 79.

Revie was born on July 8, 1947, in Stockwell, south London, and came up through the city's amateur clubs. He won the National Schools junior title in 1960, taking home the Gold Star award for the tournament's most stylish boxer, then added Amateur Boxing Association junior titles in 1963 and 1964 while fighting out of Brixton. By 1966 he had reached the ABA senior semi-finals for Fitzroy Lodge, and that September he turned professional, stopping Brian Gullefer in the fifth round on his debut.

The knockouts kept coming. Revie won his first twelve professional contests inside the distance and was building a reputation as one of London's most dangerous punchers, according to a career retrospective in Boxing News, before Jimmy Anderson stopped him in the ninth round of a British junior lightweight title challenge in February 1968. Revie dropped back to featherweight and rebuilt, and in March 1969 he stopped John O'Brien in the fifth round to win the vacant British featherweight title, receiving the champion's belt from the retiring Howard Winstone.

The title fights that followed were desperately close. Revie beat the European champion Tommaso Galli and then Miguel Herrera, twelve days apart in the autumn of 1969, both by half a point on the referee's card, and he defended his British title against Alan Rudkin at Wembley's Empire Pool in September 1970 by the same razor margin. In January 1971 he challenged Jose Legra for the European featherweight title and was outpointed over 15 rounds.

Six months later, on 6 July 1971, he was ahead on points against the Scottish challenger Evan Armstrong at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London when he was stopped in the 12th round, ending both the fight and his championship, a night Ringside Report still references in its account of Armstrong's own career, and one a ringside Getty Images photograph dated precisely.

He fought on for five more years, taking on opponents including Vernon Sollas, Jim Watt and Charlie Nash, before retiring from the ring in 1976. Boxing record keepers differ on his exact final tally, but across a decade as a professional he beat some of the best featherweights of his era and rarely won a close fight by more than a whisker.

What persists is the shape of that one fight. Revie's name sits in the roll of British featherweight champions between Howard Winstone, who handed him the belt, and Evan Armstrong, who took it from him in the 12th round. Boxing News returned to his career in a 2022 retrospective built around exactly that moment, a champion ahead on every card until he wasn't, and it is the detail that followed him into the record books and, decades later, into the notices marking his death.