Showbusiness with Blood E-Book

Eamon Carr

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 428

Beschreibung

In Showbusiness with Blood, Eamon Carr beguiles the reader with an insightful account of the world's greatest boxers, from Steve Collins to Mike Tyson to Tyson Fury and Katie Taylor. Boxing, Ireland's most successful Olympic sport, became turbo-charged in the mid-90s. A golden age followed as Irish boxers excelled in the harsh, violent and sometimes tragic business that is professional boxing. Having become enamoured of the sport during a period of serious illness as a child, Eamon Carr was on hand to witness the victories and disasters. The core principle of prize-fighting – striking and defence – demands enormous courage each time the boxer steps forward. Surrounded by enthusiastic fans, the ring can yet be the loneliest place in the world. Ireland embodies this tradition with renewed focus over the past three decades in a golden age of boxing. Showbusiness with Blood takes the reader on an intimate journey through Irish boxing's years of triumph and desolation. Carr's enthusiasm for the sport illuminates the dark corners of the fight game with stories from gruelling training camps, noisy press conferences, behind-the-scenes hustling and the savage brutality of championship fights. These are stories of aspiration and devastation. Yet amid the chaos and destruction of the boxing ring are inspirational tales of courage, resilience and personal redemption: boxing's enduring saving grace. Featured boxers include: Steve Collins, Wayne McCullough, Bernard Dunne, Darren Sutherland, Tyson Fury, Jamie Conlan, Andy Lee, John Joe Nevin, Katie Taylor, Willie Casey, Carl Frampton, Michael Conlan, Mike Tyson, Seamus McDonagh, Conor McGregor, Martin Rogan, Michael Carruth, Francis Barrett, Matthew Macklin and Gary 'Spike' O'Sullivan.

Leseprobe

SHOWBUSINESS

with BLOOD

For Cynthia Lowe, who has always punched above her weight.

THE LILLIPUT PRESS DUBLIN

First published 2023 by

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill

Dublin 7, Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Copyright © 2023 Eamon Carr

‘Keep It Between the Lines’ by Russell Smith and Kathy Louvin © Universal Music Publishing Group. All rights reserved. With kind permission.

The lines from ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh reprinted from Collected Poems edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Catherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

ISBN 9781843518730

eISBN 9781843518891

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Lilliput Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Set in 11pt on 15pt with Adobe Caslon Pro by Compuscript

Printed in the Czech Republic by Finidr

Contents

Prologue

1 Warrior

2 Pocket Rocket

3 Sergeant

4 The Phantom Puncher

5 Dazzler

6 Big Bang

7 Golden Gloves

8 Iron Man

9 The Gypsy King

10 Tornado

11 KT

12 The Mexican

13 The Jackal

14 Andy Lee

15 Notorious

16 Nuisance

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Prologue

‘It was the dream itself enchanted me.’

W.B. Yeats (from ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’)

‘Cus D’Amato … made me believe that I had a purpose and could live out my dream. If only he had told me to be careful what I wished for …’

Mike Tyson

IN 1885 A LARGE bronze statue was unearthed during excavations on the Quirinal Hill in Rome. An imposing, lifelike figure of a seated boxer, the discovery was dated to the second to first century BC and believed to have been from Greece. Those on the site of the dig were astounded. ‘I have never felt such an extraordinary impression as the one created by the sight of this magnificent specimen of a semi-barbaric athlete, coming slowly out of the ground, as if awakening from a long repose after his gallant fights,’ wrote Rodolfo Lanciani in 1888.

On close inspection, the muscular bearded figure is scarred. Some wounds appear new. Others, such as the broken nose, are older. Seated with his elbows resting on his thighs, the wraps on his hands are in full view. In real life, they would have been leather, probably with metal and wool between the thongs. Then, as now, these coverings were designed to protect the fists from damage. Deft application of red copper was used to signify the blood stains and darker alloys of bronze to create the bruised swellings.

Boxing was included in the ancient Olympic Games, 688 BC, and the combatants were professionals, not amateurs. The boxer we see in the museum in Palazzo Massimo alle Terme presents an accurate interpretation of how it was, and brings within touching distance Virgil’s epic account in the Aeneid of the bout at the funeral games of Anchises. From over two thousand years before the world could read ringside scribes Gerry Callan or Budd Schulberg, the report is of the Prizefighter series in the raw.

An ox with gilded horns awaited the winner. Just one contender stepped forward. ‘An immense man’ named Dares, he had a fearsome reputation. He had crushed Butes (‘that gigantic hulk’) and was the only man to have taken on Paris, the strongest boxer in Troy. Dares was super confident. He dazzled the crowd with a bit of shadow-boxing. ‘Hand over the prize,’ he demanded. ‘There’s no one to face me.’ He may possibly have said, ‘I am the greatest.’ But Virgil didn’t record it. In the crowd a previous champion, Entellus, looked on. His friend goaded him, ‘You’ve lost it, mate. Where’s it gone?’ Entellus complained of growing old and slowing down. But he took the bait. ‘My pride remains strong,’ he said, throwing down the gauntlets. These were solid, heavy gloves, rows of ox-hide stitched to hold lead and iron. We’re told they were still ‘crusted with blood and spattered brains’. No wonder Dares looked a bit worried. But Entellus agreed to both boxers being given new gloves of equal weight. Their hands taped, the boxers squared up in the centre of an outdoor ring.

There was a hint of the Clay–Liston bouts about this ancient duel. Dares, quick on his feet, danced around the older fighter, jabbing, probing, trying to find an opening. Both men landed impact punches but neither relented. And on they went. Entellus, conserving energy, used his upper-body movement to avoid his busy opponent’s combinations. His plan was to finish the bout with one big punch. Lumbering and breathing heavily, he unleashed a monster right hook, which Dares ducked. The momentum carried Entellus forward and he toppled over. He hit the ground. The crowd went wild. Winded, Entellus struggled to his feet. Pride dented, he took the fight to Dares, letting rip with a series of combinations and crunching power shots. The younger fighter retreated but there was no escape. Entellus kept up his onslaught. Dares was out on his feet as the older man’s fists hammered a rapid-fire tattoo on his head and body.

Eventually, the official stepped in and saved him from further damage, because Entellus was in no mood to stop. The old man was declared the winner. His vanquished opponent, semi-conscious and reeling, was helped from the scene spitting blood and bits of broken teeth. Entellus then turned his attention to his prize, a live bull. Pulling back his fist, he delivered a death blow between the animal’s horns, crunching its skull and bursting its brains. Then he threw down his gloves and officially retired. In ancient Greece, as now, boxing was a serious business.

I

The core principle of a boxing bout remains the same as when the Greeks first formalized the sport. It’s about hitting and trying not to get hit. Or, as journalist Hugh McIlvanney once put it, ‘Boxing is a sport in which two men try and batter each other senseless. No matter how you dress it up, the basic objective in boxing is to render the opponent unconscious.’

Boxers are by definition brave. Whatever mix of emotions they may be feeling, they display enormous courage every time they step forward to fight. Even when surrounded by thousands of enthusiastic spectators, the ring is the loneliest place in the world. As Joe Louis said, ‘Once that bell rings you’re on your own. It’s just you and the other guy.’

I was introduced to the sport years before television became commonplace in Ireland. As a small boy, I accompanied my father to the local amateur boxing gym, where he was on the coaching team. He also took me along to various tournaments. It was exciting. Around this time I also spent months in a sanatorium with chronic bronchiectasis, the dilation and destruction of the airways. Visiting uncles would regale me with accounts of the latest big fight they’d heard on the radio or seen on newsreels in the cinema. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered my illness had, for a time, been life-threatening. Looking back, it’s obvious that, in attempting to raise my spirits, my uncles resorted to the kind of psychology trainers like Eddie Futch used to motivate fighters. Gathered around my bed, ducking, weaving and throwing punches, they’d engage me with vivid, epic stories of real flesh-and-blood superheroes who fought against the odds. And won. Their kidology worked. I eagerly awaited the following week’s instalment. Rocky Marciano sounded the most exotic. He’d defeated everyone’s favourite, Joe Louis. I knew that Louis was a colossus who’d held the world on his broad shoulders. But no one could beat Marciano. Knocking people out was his speciality.

I knew I was ill. There were innumerable painful injections daily and various scary tests. The days lying in bed on a veranda in the open air, watching the clouds and listening to birds in nearby trees, were the best. When some patients disappeared suddenly, we assumed they’d been allowed go home. Nurses smiled wanly and seemed sad. I was too young to know that this was primarily a TB hospital. I hadn’t heard of tuberculosis and didn’t realize I was surrounded by children at death’s door.

Neighbours sent relics of the saints: Don Bosco, Blessed Martin, Dominic Savio. I sensed these guys were on my side but, always triumphant, St Marciano was the one I thought about most. Because of him, I had something to aim for. I desperately wanted to get home to my friends and revisit the gym – the crackling excitement of the young boxers in training, skipping ropes beating mesmeric rhythms on the wooden floor, the staccato snap of the speed bags, the thud of gloved fists sinking into the heavy bags and the acrid air heavy with the pungent aroma of wintergreen and liniment.

Though bedridden, I was already there, training with the big boys. In my innocence I convinced myself that I might even become a champion one day. If not of the world, then maybe of my school. Or even my street. But most of all I just wanted to be allowed out of my iron bed. Much deeper down was a profound wish that somehow or other I’d get to star in the ring at the National Boxing Stadium in Dublin. Childish dreams. As Lucinda Williams sings, ‘If wishes were horses, I’d have a ranch.’

And so, on those dark terrifying nights, as I lay sweating, struggling for breath, retching and spewing mucus into an enamelled basin and hearing my fragile chest wheezing like a battered old accordion, I wasn’t alone. I was part of the great boxing universe. A tiny pinprick of light circling the heavens, orbiting an endless celestial ring in the company of glowing and fiery stellar giants. In my imagination, I was a southpaw, jabbing, hooking, keeping my guard up, boxing shadows. Yes. I was going to come out fighting. That’s what we boxers, big and small, did. One more round. One more chance. Please.

II

With six boxers representing Ireland in the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, we followed the team’s progress with interest. Four of them won medals. While Fred Tiedt, John Caldwell and Freddie Gilroy became legends, Tony Byrne was the most celebrated in our house. Known as ‘Socks’, he had carried the Irish flag at the opening ceremony. On our way to the seaside we would detour to drive past his house in Drogheda. Such is the fate of local heroes.

The following year, disaster struck. My mother died young. Grief-stricken and confused, I became somewhat wayward and, though still in short pants, fell in with a bunch of older delinquents. With the wildness of rock ’n’ roll and the reckless abandon of the Teddy Boy ethos now taking precedence, concerned relations staged an intervention and I was packed off to boarding school, a uniquely alien environment. In St Finian’s College, the diocesan school for Meath, contact with the outside world was forbidden. Newspapers, radio and TV were banned but, like a POW planning an escape, I listened through static on a borrowed crystal set in the middle of the night to 7:1 underdog Cassius Clay’s challenge in Miami for the world heavyweight title held by Sonny Liston. The man who was about to become Muhammad Ali was overjoyed when Liston failed to come out for the seventh round; so hyped up, the commentators couldn’t pin him down. Suddenly he exclaimed, ‘Sam Cooke! Hey, let that man up here. This is Sam Cooke!’ Sam, who’d been a staple on the jukebox that became my devotional shrine during those nascent feral years, was a friend of the new world champion! And in the gym a week earlier, the young contender had his photo taken with a young band visiting from England, The Beatles. Right then, I couldn’t have been happier. My two boyhood passions, boxing and rock ’n’ roll, had merged.

Gradually, in my study-hall reveries, boxing was replaced by beat groups. Trainers and boxers’ CVs made way for lists of obscure record producers and forgotten 45 rpm vinyl discs. I became convinced that this was a world I could live in. Back on Civvy Street, music dominated my life. After a few years scuffling around, Horslips, an unlikely band assembled by me and friends, released a record. At the time, I was sharing a house with legendary Scottish boxing correspondent Jim McNeill, who worked with the Irish Press. Jim’s wife, Jackie, was a talented seamstress and on more than one occasion Jim would arrive home from work to find me half-undressed with Jackie fitting me for an outlandish glam rock costume. Jim would snort with derision but, in public, he’d be first to defend my reputation.

As the band began to find an audience in the early 1970s, with David Bowie and Marc Bolan dominating the charts, I made a discovery that was to change my life. While guitarist Johnny Fean was quietly running through some scales and finger exercises, a curious cadence caught my attention. What was that? I had Johnny retrace his steps. And there it was, taunting like a ghostly tribal war cry. An ancient sequence of notes, interpreted by my new flatmate with the authority of a Chicago bluesman, conjured up dramatic widescreen images. I felt the rush of history but I also glimpsed a future of sorts. This felt like a once-in-a-lifetime encounter. Stamping my foot on the floor, I urged him to hammer out the riff again so as not to lose it. ‘If I write some lyrics, will you flesh out a melody?’ I asked. Of course he would.

At the time, I was working on reshaping the old Irish tale, ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’ (‘An Táin’), as a rock ’n’ roll concept album and now I had my centrepiece. The mythical hero Cú Chulainn was the central character in the story. A fighting man, his named translated as the Hound of Culann. Featuring in the many books in my grandfather’s library, he’d been my childhood companion. I knew him well. He was volatile and dangerous. A man with supernatural powers. A voodoo man, both charming and menacing. ‘When you see me coming, you had better run, run, run …’ From who exactly? From Cú Chulainn? No. From the Hound of Culann? No. He was more sinister than that. He was Dearg Doom. ‘Dearg’ being the Irish word for ‘red’, here was Ulster’s bloodied Red Hand. ‘I’m The Red Doom!’ A warrior boast and a unique comic-book, rock ’n’ roll character. His name would be spat out like a hermetic oath. Its very utterance was like unleashing a cabbalistic invocation.

Years later, I was gratified to see the figure of Cú Chulainn, based on Oliver Sheppard’s famous statue in the GPO, feature as the logo for the Boxing Union of Ireland (BUI). Recalling the legend, the hero has tied himself to a stone pillar in order to fight his enemies to the last. An inspired choice by the BUI. I spent long hours researching the occult dimension of this totemic figure through the notebooks and papers of W.B. Yeats in the National Library of Ireland, and the significance of having him draw together various strands of my life seemed uncanny, if not oracular.

If Dearg Doom was a spell, it certainly worked. The song proved successful. It opened doors worldwide. Much later, the riff would form the core of the great Ireland football anthem ‘Put ’Em Under Pressure’. In the 1970s, as Horslips began touring internationally, occasional headline title fights were the only ones that registered. For over a decade, the cycle of writing, rehearsing, recording and touring felt like being permanently in training camp concentrating on the next big fight. And, while it wasn’t exactly what I’d envisaged as a child, no one in the audience could have guessed the profound personal significance of finding myself headlining on stage in the National Stadium. It was the country’s premier rock-music venue back then, hosting The Who, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac … and me.

III

In 1985, when Barry McGuigan became WBA world featherweight champion, the country experienced a joyous communal sense of hope and celebration. In those troubled times, Barry’s achievements were beyond the range of Irish expectation. It was as if, as McGuigan’s biographer Jim Sheridan put it, ‘A boyhood hero stepped from the comics of our childhood, fearless, strong and full of insane life.’ We weren’t to know it at the time, but the future was exceptionally bright. Many more glorious boxing nights lay ahead.

Around this time, I’d begun writing about my interests for newspapers and magazines. As fate would have it, a new career as a journalist coincided with a steady boxing renaissance in Ireland. Michael Carruth won a gold medal at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Steve Collins became WBO world super-middleweight champion in 1995. As many more Irish fighters began winning world titles, the skinny, pale youngster from the sanatorium was with them, every step of the way. Through a curious alchemy of fate and fortune, the wish he’d nurtured as he’d received extreme unction – an anointing with oils of the sick and dying – saw him afforded opportunities denied his father. He became a regular at ringside on the big nights. Got to be in the gym, at the weigh-in and even in the changing room. He observed the fighters’ extreme training regimes, glimpsed their private torment and probed their self-belief. He shared their joy and celebration and felt their loss, their dejection, their despair.

This being boxing, the dramatic painful interface between glory and failure, fulfilment and frustration, he watched, time and again, the lives of brave men, and women too, turn, to reference Virginia Woolf, on ‘moments of humiliation and triumph’.

The frail, ‘delicate’ kid lived to witness, first-hand, a golden age for Irish athletes in the toughest, most ruthless, most demanding sport of all.

Profound gratitude is due to all those boxers, trainers, managers, promoters and officials who made him welcome and impressed with their commitment, their knowledge and their zeal.

What follows are stories of aspiration, violence and catastrophe. Yet amid the chaos and destruction are inspirational studies in courage, resilience and personal redemption: boxing’s enduring saving grace.

1

WARRIOR

‘All boxers live with the presence of death.’

Steve Collins

I

‘I’M NOT GOING TO be able to hurt him enough.’

Regret trumps animosity as Chris Eubank delivers his lamentation with clinical precision. No histrionics. No braggadocio. A calm, conversational tone makes the world champion’s promise of egregious violence all the more chilling.

Eubank has had time to ruminate on a simmering feud, which reached boiling point in Dublin earlier in the week. In the lobby of a luxurious hotel in Brighton, he’s relaxed. But there’s no disguising his indignation. Since time immemorial, a sense of retribution has provided powerful motivation. Today, the message is shared with missionary zeal. The object of this vengeful wrath is Steve Collins, the WBO world middleweight champion, who is set to contest Eubank’s WBO world super-middleweight title in a few weeks’ time. The clash will be televised in Ireland, and Eubank, unbeaten in forty-three pro fights, is intent on punishing the disrespectful Dubliner with as much pain as is legally permissible.

‘It’s kill or be killed,’ says Eubank, on a bright mid-February morning. ‘You’re going to have to kill me to win.’

Alarmingly, these studied remarks carry a reminder of Eubank’s most notorious bout. On a Saturday night in White Hart Lane in September 1991, he picked himself up off the canvas where he’d been dumped by the people’s favourite, Michael Watson, just seconds from the end of the eleventh round. Cut and bleeding for the first time in his career, Eubank looked finished. But, with one almost superhuman effort, he connected with a right uppercut, which pulverized the blood vessels in Watson’s brain. Watson’s chances were saved by the bell. As he gamely went out for the last round, it was obvious to referee Roy Francis that Watson was seriously injured. The fight was terminated, much to the chagrin of many spectators, who responded by rioting. Disoriented, Watson slipped into unconsciousness in his corner and appeared lifeless as they manoeuvred him from the ring onto a stretcher. He was lucky to survive. Despite a series of complex neurosurgeries, he remained in a coma for six weeks, spent a year in intensive care and, paralyzed in a wheelchair for six years, had to re-learn how to speak, read and walk.

Before that fateful encounter, Michael Watson had publicly mocked Eubank’s speech patterns. As I sip my coffee, Eubank holds eye contact and coolly lisps his grievances. ‘You’ve beaten me,’ he says. ‘You’ve humiliated me. You’ve downed me. I’m true to the man within. I don’t care about my life, my family, money. All I care about is beating you.’

There will be no mercy shown.

II

A few days earlier, arriving for the Dublin press conference, a familiar voice rings out. ‘Howaya, Eamon.’ I turn to see Steve Collins perched like a supermodel on the bonnet of a vintage Jaguar car: the hard man from Cabra is nattily attired in a smart tweed jacket with matching waistcoat and flat cap. The country-gent look is offset with an eye-catching bow tie. Nor has this unlikely doyen of high-style forgotten to accessorize for the photographers. One meaty hand grasps the lead of an imposing Irish wolfhound while the other fist brandishes a rugged blackthorn walking stick in the manner of an offensive weapon. ‘There y’are, champ,’ says I.

Arriving in the penthouse suite ahead of Collins, I study the players waiting at the top table. The promoters’ upbeat demeanour fails to distract from the aura of irritation radiating from the man being kept waiting, the man Collins will fight for the world super-middleweight title, Chris Eubank.

Scheduled to interview Collins in London later in the week, I’m interested in observing the dynamic between the fighters. Eubank is both a sports superstar and a major celebrity whose artfully cultivated image of aristocratic elegance is as challenging and entertaining as the plummy to-the-manor-born persona he’s adopted. He often wears a monocle and jodhpurs, carries a silver-tipped cane and enunciates a faux upper-class accent. While he might seem like an effete toff from the pages of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, there is no disputing that Eubank can fight. By the time he’d agreed to Collins as a contestant, the reigning champion had staged fourteen successful defences of the world title he’d won four years earlier.

By keeping the champion waiting and attempting to upstage him in the fashion stakes, Collins is clearly deploying a barbed display of disrespect. It’s a high-stakes gambit.

While Collins had been based in the US, the middleweight division in England exploded with a series of rivalries that created huge box-office bonanzas. A lucrative but dangerous zone, the middleweight division was populated by several contestants who combined technical skill, raw courage and savage barbarity. Public interest in the middleweight division had been cranking up when, in 1989, Michael Watson defeated Commonwealth middleweight champion Nigel Benn, a former soldier with the Royal Fusiliers. Despite the setback, Benn went on to claim the WBO world middleweight title in April 1990 in Atlantic City. Seven months later, he lost his title when Eubank forced a stoppage after nine vicious rounds in Birmingham. The triangle of animosity that developed between Watson, Benn and Eubank dominated boxing in Britain.

In June 1991 Eubank beat Watson by a hotly disputed majority decision. Three months later, the pair fought again, with catastrophic results for Watson’s health. The following year Benn, the self-styled ‘Dark Destroyer’, went to Italy and stopped his opponent to claim the WBC world supermiddleweight title. Following three successful defences, Benn met Eubank again. Television rights sold to sixty countries, as each man put their respective world titles on the line. The result was a draw. In Britain alone, 16.5 million people viewed the fight on ITV.

Eubank’s flamboyant image, stylized ring choreography and often inflammatory pronouncements attracted a growing audience. Boxing fans shared a degree of disquiet when Sky Sports agreed a £10-million deal with Eubank to fight eight bouts in a year. A top-level prize fight every seven weeks seemed an impossible task. ‘I’m here to prove I’m not the normal man,’ declared Eubank. Appropriating Tina Turner, he began marketing himself as ‘Simply the Best’. ‘Farcical,’ snorted rival promoter Frank Maloney. ‘Simply the best conman is more like it.’

When Eubank’s first opponent of 1995 failed a brain scan, Eubank’s manager cast around for a replacement. Steve Collins had never fought at super-middleweight, and hadn’t boxed since he’d won the WBO middleweight belt in May ’94, but after intensive negotiations, the Dubliner landed a £150,000 purse, an unprecedented fee for a challenger. His biggest payday ever came with the possibility of further big-money fights.

The stage was set for one of the most astonishing sagas ever in Irish sporting history.

III

The escalating rivalry between Chris Eubank and Steve Collins marked the beginning of a golden age for Irish professional boxing.

Collins had been Irish middleweight amateur champion before making his professional debut in October 1986 in Massachusetts. He returned with a record of twenty-one wins and three losses. The statistics didn’t tell the full story. Collins took champion Mike McCallum the distance in a world-title fight. His two other narrow defeats had also been in championship fights. Still without a meaningful belt, Collins landed a shot at the WBO world middleweight title held by Chris Pyatt. Presenting as the ‘Celtic Warrior’ for the first time, Collins fought Pyatt in Sheffield in May ’94. Channelling years of disappointment into a furious fifth round, he forced a stoppage. The Dubliner was now a world champion.

The Eubank–Collins fight was set for the lavishly titled Green Glens Arena, a draughty equestrian venue that, two years earlier, had been pressed into service as the venue for the Eurovision Song Contest finals. On the national festive weekend in March 1995, the market town of Millstreet, County Cork, would become the most unlikely setting for a high-profile fight between an Irishman and an Englishman since Dan Donnelly hosted George Cooper in Belcher’s Hollow on the Curragh in County Kildare in 1815. Donnelly settled the fight in the thirty-fourth round. Following the Dublin fighter’s death five years later, his body was stolen by grave robbers. At the time of the Eubank–Collins fight, Donnelly’s severed right arm, as weathered as ancient bog oak, was on permanent display in a custom-made exhibition cabinet in a pub in Kilcullen in County Kildare.

Supercilious and condescending, Eubank drove opponents to distraction. In Dublin, Collins set about turning the tables. No sooner had Barry Hearn made the introductions than Collins fired his first volley. Purposely referring to the visitor as ‘Eubanks’, he proceeded to read a statement in Irish, welcoming the champion and declaring, ‘Go mbeidh an bua agam ar Christó MacEubank.’ ‘I will have victory over Christó MacEubank.’ The crowd hooted with laughter. Clearly stung, Eubank announced imperiously, ‘Steve gets beat.’

Both fighters ran through the obligatory litany of threats and promises until, hearing Collins assert that he deserved to win, Eubank retorted, ‘That has nothing to do with it. Why are people in Africa suffering or dying of famine? Do they deserve that?’

Collins responded, ‘You’re an African, an Anglo-African, of African descent, right? Why do you deny your African heritage and try to impersonate and behave like an Englishman when you’re not? You should be proud of your roots and your people.’ Collins’ supporters cheered.

Eubank fumed. Repeating his claim that Collins would be beaten, he turned abruptly and strode out of the room in a huff. His seething anger was lost on Dublin Lord Mayor John Gormley, who shared the lift with him. Misjudging the mood, the Green Party stalwart enquired brightly if the visiting boxer might be taking a sightseeing trip around the city. The furious Eubank snapped, ‘Fuck this city.’ The quote was widely reported and a media firestorm ensued.

Colleagues at FM104, where I presented a rock show, pressed me to discuss the matter on that evening’s phone-in programme. When I joined the conversation, the show’s host was complaining that, ‘dressed up as a leprechaun’, Steve was ‘stage Irish’. The presenter then began to discuss the possibility of racism in Steve’s barbs.

A phone-in show is no place for nuance. Explaining that boxing press conferences are usually games of banter and one-upmanship, I said I felt Steve had simply been ill-informed in claiming that Eubank was impersonating an Englishman when, in fact, he’d been born in Peckham.

Five minutes later, a second call told me, ‘Steve Collins wants to talk to you.’ Live on air, I was amazed to hear the distinctive Dublin accent of the WBO champion going hammer and tongs with the presenter. Dragged back into a conversation that was on the verge of overheating, I pointed out for the benefit of the presenter and his listeners that Collins and Eubank were both managed by Barry Hearn. Quizzed by the host, Collins explained:

Although it’s a tough business, it’s a business of entertaining. The entertainment starts with the head-to-head press conference. I don’t think Eubank meant what he said about Dublin city or the Lord Mayor. Neither did I mean anything racial. Although it might be a touchy subject, I knew it would hit a nerve. It’s not just a physical fight. There’s a lot of psychology involved as well.

While outwardly confident he could beat Eubank, privately Collins was beset by worries. He was distracted by a high-stakes legal dispute with the Petronelli brothers in Boston. He hadn’t fought for nine months and was suffering from the after-effects of a viral illness. Physically and mentally, Collins wasn’t at his best. But, unknown to most, he had taken a bold initiative, which he hoped would give him an advantage. In the gamble of a lifetime, Collins had hooked up with health-shop business guru and hypnotherapist Tony Quinn.

IV

As the row rumbled on in the Irish media, Eubank agreed to an exclusive interview in Brighton. I had coffee while he sipped water. Surprisingly polite, he would have chatted for ages but for the fact that I urgently needed to phone through a news report for the later editions of the Evening Herald.

Under the headline ‘I’M OUT FOR BLOOD!’ the following piece is as it appeared on page 3:

Loud-mouth boxer Chris Eubank today warned Steve Collins that he is out for blood at their Millstreet clash next month.

The controversial world champion angrily declared that he is not going to forgive and forget.

‘I will not be able to hurt him enough,’ he said. ‘The man has caused me hurt.’

Speaking in Brighton, the f ighter declared, ‘I’m not interested in anything except beating Steve Collins. I’m only interested in out-thinking, out-boxing and hitting harder.’

‘I haven’t been this way since the Nigel Benn fight. It’s not him, it’s his ignorance I want to beat.’

Eubank called Steve Collins’ remarks about his origins at their Dublin press conference earlier this week the ‘insult of insults’.

And asked if he regretted swearing at Lord Mayor John Gormley, Eubank said, ‘I’ve been insulted and you’re asking me if I’m interested in your town? I’m not. I’m interested in Steve Collins. I’m supposed to walk around your town with a big smile on my face when I’ve been insulted? No. I will hurt.’

‘When one wants to defend oneself and one can’t, then one becomes hostile,’ he explained.

Eubank today was outwardly calm and serene. As unruffled as the flat grey sea across the road from the hotel where we sat. But inside he was still an angry man.

‘I do not see colour. I refuse to. It’s made too many people bitter, twisted and warped and they become victims. I’m way past that. What hurt was that he must have thought about what he said. Is it my fault that my skin is black, but I’m English?’

‘The forefathers of the English colonised my people. They enslaved my people and brought my forefathers to Jamaica. My parents emigrated from Jamaica to England. Here I am. I’m a citizen of this country.’

‘I haven’t a problem with who I am,’ he added. ‘What got me riled was that I was not going to be given the opportunity to explain myself. The man was behaving like a child. If his strategy was to get under my skin, he’s done that.’

The boxer people loved to hate, Eubank reminded me of an old-style rude boy: the style-conscious anti-hero whose rebel philosophy was intertwined with the Jamaican ska and rocksteady music that swept popular culture in the 1960s and 70s. For me, Eubank echoed the mythical streetwise gangster Johnny Too Bad, a maverick who challenged the system. Eubank warmed to my thesis. ‘That fact that I adapt and overcome, that makes me even more the proper rude boy,’ he enthused.

A bombastic and unrelenting moral stance added more than a touch of the comic-book character Judge Dredd to his character. ‘The right way is the hardest way,’ he declared. Saying goodbye in Brighton, Eubank climbed up into the cab of the gleaming Peterbilt truck he’d imported from America and roared off to his mansion in Hove.

V

The following morning, as arranged, I arrived at the offices of Matchroom Boxing, the fight promoters, to discuss the upcoming fight with Steve Collins and also hear his side of the story. There was a hitch. Steve had nixed the interview. Preparing to fly to a training camp in Las Vegas, he didn’t need the distraction. Obligingly, he left me a written statement regarding the press-conference banter:

To Whom It May Concern

This letter is in reply to the accusation Chris Eubank made about me. Chris Eubank claimed that my remark about him forgetting his roots was a racial remark.

It was not in my opinion a racial slur. It was me expressing my opinion from observations.

Chris Eubank is definitely an Englishman, but he is an Englishman of African origins. Chris Eubank refers to the plight of starving millions in Africa due to war, crop failures and so on. Chris Eubank is only paying lip service and that is what annoyed me.

Chris Eubank is in a great position to help these people in many ways. It would not cost him any of the money that he loves and treasures so much.

All he would have to do is lend his time and participate in activities for Third World charities.

Since the late ‘80s I have been involved in GOAL. It is an organisation made up from sports stars throughout the world. I have been involved in fundraising for this charity. If you look back at photographs of the fight I had with Mike McCallum in February 1990, you will see me wearing the GOAL emblem on my boots. I still wear the GOAL emblem to date. I do not intend to insult people, races or countries. If I did, it would be unintentional and I would apologise immediately.

Yours in sport,

Steve Collins

World Champ

VI

On fight night, the Millstreet equestrian venue was packed to the rafters. Local bars were bursting at the seams with thirsty punters. Stewarding was easy-going. The squash-faced Liverpudlian gent who joined me at ringside didn’t have a ticket. Nobody seemed to mind. In a corridor beneath the stands a bookie was touting his odds. Fashionably dressed young men with chiselled chins and laser-beam eyes tried to convince themselves they were in Caesars Palace.

At ringside, I sat behind London legend Henry Cooper, the former British and European heavyweight champion who once decked a young Muhammad Ali before losing the fight on a technical knockout. ‘Our ’Enry’ had seen it all but in the Green Glens Arena even he seemed bemused by the pageantry of the ring walks. As blazing fireworks on the back wall of the venue spelt out the name ‘Eubank’, the champion was raised aloft on his Harley-Davidson like a mutant Minotaur, muscles and motorbike gleaming. Despite the glitz and razzmatazz, this wasn’t a Meatloaf concert. This was the overture to an evening of orchestrated punishment.

Throughout the hullabaloo, Collins reclined in his corner. As challenger, he had entered the ring first, a hooded figure of mystery, seemingly lost in some trancelike state. The soundtrack from the Rocky movie on the Celtic Warrior’s headphones shut out Eubank’s ritualistic chest-beating display. The psychological warfare, waged by both men since the controversial press conference in Dublin, had continued at the weigh-in where Eubank complained that Collins was employing a hypnotist to ensure he wouldn’t feel pain. The war of nerves continued throughout the twelve-round contest, with the unprecedented appearance of bearded yoga teacher Quinn in Collins’ corner apparently massaging the Cabra man’s chakras and whispering hypnotic hocus-pocus. On the back of his shirt, clearly legible from Eubank’s corner, was Quinn’s logo, ‘The New Mind Technology’.

As the fight progressed, Collins seemed the more determined to win. He fought like a man possessed. Ruse or not, the hypnotism ploy was working and Collins advanced in strength until he walked into a crushing right hook in the tenth round. Eyes glazed, he began to flap in ungainly fashion as his legs buckled. Collins was down. Below him at ringside, his wife, Gemma, buried her head in her hands in horror. His friends looked shaken. But slumped on the lower ropes, the grotesque rictus of a smile that appeared on Collins’s face further confounded Eubank.

Before the fight I had heard an account of Collins’ resolve from Matchroom stablemate Garry ‘The Hammer’ Delaney who’d trained alongside the Dubliner in Las Vegas. ‘As far as Steve’s concerned, he’s already won this fight,’ revealed Garry. ‘He locked himself away in his room, cooked his own food and concentrated on nothing else but this bout. No one can get near him. I’ve never seen him like this. It’s uncanny.’

The fight went the distance and the hypnotism conspiracy was floated as an explanation for Eubank’s failure to deploy his customary destructive capabilities. Finally, tension gave way to pandemonium as the judges’ decision was announced. ‘The winner and the new …’ The venue erupted in riotous celebration. Jubilation quickly turned to triumphalism as the capacity crowd taunted the defeated former champion and sang in one voice, ‘On your bike, on your bike, on your bike’ to the tune of ‘Here We Go’. Even in victory there was to be no peace initiative. Steve Collins was now a double world champion. ‘I’m not just the best Irish boxer ever,’ he told the Sky interviewer after the fight. ‘I’m the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world.’

Proper legends aren’t commonplace. In binding folk belief and shared experience, they defy memory, logic and the phoney grandeur of death itself through confirming a community’s wishful self-image. Collins created a legend in Millstreet. A legend as vibrant as that of Dan Donnelly in the Curragh in 1815. Against British boxing’s hottest property, and in defiance of the bookmakers’ odds, he fulfilled a long-standing dream and came to realize his twin ambitions of earning a million and riding down Dublin’s O’Connell Street on an open-topped bus.

2

POCKET ROCKET

‘There’s no way this guy is going to beat me. He’ll have to kill me.’

Wayne McCullough

AN EERIE HUSH FELL over the Manchester crowd in 2006. They had just borne witness to the most brutal, uncompromising and destructive fight in recent history. At stake was the British light-middleweight title and the coveted Lonsdale Belt. As Matthew Macklin lay prone on the canvas, many feared they’d witnessed an execution. Before the medics slid the stretcher under the bottom rope, the victorious Jamie Moore dropped to his knees and whispered words of encouragement in Macklin’s ear.

The media is obsessed with celebrity diet fads. But what’s known in the fight game as making weight is less than compelling. Often the toughest, most challenging part of the sport – what’s sometimes called ‘the fight before the fight’ – shedding pounds gives boxers an advantage by enabling them to qualify to fight in the lowest possible weight category. They then put the pounds back on after the weigh-in, hoping to be bigger and heavier than their opponent. Making weight correctly is a science and, if it isn’t done properly, it can sometimes put a boxer in harm’s way.

At the weigh-in Macklin had been five pounds overweight. Drastic action was called for. An hour on the treadmill, wrapped in a plastic sweatsuit, his body smeared with cream to make him perspire, was followed by a stint in a bath of nearly boiling water. The gruelling procedure worked. Macklin lost the necessary weight. Some say he looked a shadow of his former self.

The bout was scheduled for twelve rounds. Macklin usually finished work early by way of knockout. Anxious to build on his growing reputation, he began at a high tempo. Moore responded. Neither man relented. ‘We both went to the darkest place,’ recalled Jamie a few years later. Each man was taken aback by the other’s formidable punching power, but neither opted to take a backwards step. After nine ferocious rounds, Macklin was running on empty and boxing on instinct. Under a crushing right-left combination from Moore in the tenth, he went down and remained unconscious for a worryingly long time. As he was carried from the ring, his friend Ricky Hatton surveyed the carnage with tears in his eyes.

‘You don’t know whether you’ve got it in you to be involved in a fight like that until it happens,’ Moore told me. ‘Some people would give in halfway through. Neither of us was willing to do that.’

Although he prefers not to revisit the trauma, Macklin later told me that even if he’d been standing at the final bell, he believes he would have collapsed unconscious in the dressing room afterwards from sheer exhaustion and dehydration. He’d lost a stone in weight and had given everything but his life in his pursuit of the title. He never fought at light-middleweight again.

I

It still pains coach Nicolas Cruz Hernandez that Wayne McCullough had to settle for a silver medal from the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. ‘There would have been two gold medals in Barcelona but for Wayne’s injury,’ he insists. ‘He almost caught the guy in the third round.’

McCullough had earned his Olympic final place with convincing wins in the opening rounds of the competition. In the semi-final, he defeated Gwang-Sik Li by 21-16. But the sturdy North Korean had left his mark. McCullough’s left cheek was swollen and painful. ‘If there’d been proper medical testing they wouldn’t have let him fight,’ says Cruz. ‘Don’t you dare stop the fight,’ McCullough warned his coach.

In the final, Cuban Joel Casamayor, a southpaw, peppered McCullough with jabs and power shots. ‘I felt like I was being electrocuted with a live wire,’ said McCullough. His shattered cheekbone caused blood to seep from the left eye socket. Despite a phenomenally brave final round, which he won, McCullough lost the bout. ‘The damage to my face was a huge price to pay,’ he said later, ‘as I didn’t fight again for a year.’

Six months later, McCullough turned professional and signed a lucrative contract with American promoter Mat Tinley.

Promised a minimum of seven fights a year in the first two years, with guaranteed television exposure, McCullough relocated to Las Vegas. He trained in the Top Rank gym under the guidance of Eddie Futch. Tinley was building a formidable team. ‘It’s not a risk-free sport,’ he explained. ‘Neither is motorracing. There’s always a gamble involved. We’ve got the best trainers in the world. We’ve got the most experienced guy in boxing. Eddie Futch.’ Now in his early eighties, Futch knew more about the craft of boxing than most coaches could ever dream of learning. McCullough knew Futch had coached Mike McCallum and Joe Frazier among countless others. Hell, he’d been in Smokin’ Joe’s corner in Manila. He’d even trained and sparred alongside Joe Louis.

Together, Tinley and McCullough seized the day. McCullough knew the demands on a pro fighter are more onerous than those made on an amateur boxer. When he beat Victor Rabanales for the NABF belt in 1994, the twelve rounds had been his personal Rubicon. ‘He hit me from directions I’d never been hit before,’ McCullough told me. ‘He’s the only guy to ever have me out on my feet. We just beat the crap out of each other. There and then I knew, “I want it or I don’t want it.” … I knew then that nothing was going to stop me becoming a champion.’

Two years and five months after his first pro fight, McCullough was in Japan for the toughest test of his career. Under Tinley’s guidance, he’d moved up the rankings and got to fight for the WBC world bantamweight belt against champion Yasuei Yakushiji in 1995. Having already successfully defended his title four times, Yakushiji was determined to keep the belt in Japan.

Eddie Futch had a plan. In the dressing room before the fight, he instructed McCullough to use his jab and to repeat it. The strategy worked. Yakushiji was tough but McCullough’s jab upset his rhythm and caused problems. After twelve gruelling rounds, the judges declared McCullough champion by split decision.

In his seventeenth professional fight, McCullough had become world champion.

Travelling to the fight, McCullough asked why Tinley was so quiet. Tinley replied that he was just hoping McCullough would win. McCullough laughed and grabbed his arm, saying, ‘Don’t you worry. That’s the least of my worries.’ Tinley described the moment as ‘chilling’, telling me:

He’s like a fighter pilot. When you get up to that level as a boxer, if you make a mistake, it costs you. It’s a high-pressure game. The next day was even more concerning. We were on our way into the hospital because the guy had headbutted him and he had a few stitches and his hand was hurting. McCullough told me, ‘I knew my whole life was on the line last night. I knew I had to win or I’d be going back to square one.’ He was twenty-four then and he said, ‘When would I get another chance at the title? Maybe when I’m twenty-seven or twenty-eight? They won’t want to fight me. And I can’t make this weight much longer. I knew that if I win this fight I’d be on top of the world but if I don’t I’d be scratching to get back.’

‘He said he felt fatigued in the first two rounds from losing the weight just to get to 118 pounds’ said the manager. ‘The first round was close. He told himself, “There’s no way I’m going to let anybody take this from me.” Wayne is almost dangerously focused.’

Futch, who’d worked with nineteen world champions, rated McCullough in his top five. With a professional record of eighteen unbeaten, thirteen wins coming by way of knockout, McCullough’s second title defence was planned for Dublin in March 1996.

II

Of Norman origin, the Luttrell family was widely hated in Ireland for centuries. For his role in helping to subjugate the native Gaelic population, Sir Geoffrey de Luterel was presented with a large tract of land on the outskirts of what is contemporary Dublin. For 600 years, the disenfranchised Irish regarded the Luttrell dynasty’s homestead as a house of pain. Having played a role in suppressing the 1798 rebellion, Henry Laws Luttrell became such a reviled figure that his grandfather’s grave was ransacked and the skull smashed. Luttrell wasn’t stupid. He sold Luttrellstown Castle in 1800.

Luttrellstown Castle and Estate, now a splendid five-star country club and resort, became world famous as the wedding venue for Victoria Adams, aka ‘Posh Spice’, and Sir David Beckham. By the time I first visited the crenellated pile in 1994, to meet REM who’d based themselves in the castle while in Europe promoting their album Monster, my output as a journalist had expanded dramatically. I was covering a heady mix of cultural, political and sporting matters, reviewing theatre and music events, interviewing political leaders, reformed gangsters, convicted killers and showbiz celebrities and also reporting on major news stories. In Luttrellstown I was struck by how baronial splendour interfaced with contemporary countryclub chic. Children’s laughter echoed down the broad stairwells and along wood-panelled corridors as singer Michael Stipe and I discussed the cultural significance of Beavis and Butt-Head.

When I went back to the castle a couple of years later, the ambience was very different. This was where Wayne McCullough and his entourage pitched camp ahead of the world title defence against José Luis Bueno.

Emblematic of a new breed of boxing impresario, McCullough’s charismatic manager Mat Tinley could have fitted comfortably into the REM entourage. ‘You can’t pick your relatives,’ he joked. ‘You can pick your friends and people you do business with. You do it on your terms.’ A former TV executive with Prime International, Tinley had a similar grasp of the medicine-show hoopla that Tom Parker, the self-styled Colonel who managed Elvis Presley, once displayed. Cannily, Tinley had secured television coverage for all McCullough’s fights. The Belfast man’s unremitting aggression delivered the viewers. If, as Jim McNeill had informed me, boxing was showbusiness with blood, then the manager with music-industry smarts could be just the man to guide McCullough to superstardom.

‘My main problem is I’m a bit of an elitist,’ Tinley told me. ‘I couldn’t manage club fighters. I just want champions.’

It was obvious that, although razor-cheeked, McCullough was struggling to make weight days ahead of his Saturday night WBC world title defence against Bueno at the Point Depot. The central heating was on full blast even before we moved to sit by a roaring log fire. It was a mild March afternoon. I needed to take my jacket off. McCullough, on the other hand, wore a rubber sauna suit, designed to make him perspire, under his tracksuit. Towels were wrapped around his neck and tucked into his top. He appeared used to the ritual of shedding pounds. His focus was on Bueno who, anxious to depose the Irishman as reigning champion, had been winding things up. ‘He can talk all he wants,’ snorted McCullough. ‘My fists will be talking faster than his. No one can help him.’

The Luttrellstown camp had been stung by the suggestion that Tinley had bolstered McCullough’s record by picking easy competitors. ‘What boxing is about is the fights you can remember,’ Tinley declared:

Fights like Ali–Frazier, Leonard–Hagler, even Benn–Eubank. Two guys who are perceived as evenly matched. A super-fight that can put fifty thousand people in a stadium, that’s boxing’s best moments. Eddie will tell you that Wayne’s like the old guys of yesteryear. If he had his way, he’d fight every week. This will be the fifth world champion he’s fought in nineteen fights. And he’s beaten them all. A lot of boxers don’t want to take a risk any more. When Jake LaMotta beat Sugar Ray Robinson they had a rematch nine weeks later. That’s phenomenal. There are guys out there not boxing.