Magic ring for fearless dreamers

Being there: In a boxing club in the heart of Dublin's inner-city, young hopefuls and toughened veterans keep a 40-year-old sporting institution on its toes, writes Róisín Ingle

FROM HER FRAMED perch on the wall, Mary Robinson watches over the ring with an indulgent half smile. In the dingy changing room, where crumbling bricks are exposed by peeling plaster, men and boys get ready to rumble. A few local girls sit giggling on a bench, escaping the cold city night, waiting for the show to start. This is St Saviour's Olympic Boxing Academy, Dorset Street, Dublin. The name is etched in blood on the door.

Well, not exactly, but that's what John McCormack, who runs the gym with his brother Pat, likes to say. "St Saviour's, it's in blood on the door, you can't miss us," he had laughed down the phone a few days earlier. "Just around the corner and across the road from where the wax museum used to be." The wax museum is now a hotel, but even without the blood-splattered door, St Saviour's isn't hard to find.

IT'S THE SMELL that hits you first, even as your eyes adjust to the garish red and yellow paintwork and your ears buzz with the sound of fists connecting, men skipping, breath releasing noisily from nostrils, all backed by the sudden shrillness of the three-minute bell. It's the whiff that overwhelms even as War Is Over pumps unseasonably from a mix-tape. Four decades of sweat have soaked into these brick walls, dripped onto the floorboards, been trod deep into the blue canvas floor of the ring, that "magic carpet" for the "fearless dreamers" described in a poem on the wall.

You'd have to demolish the place to get rid of the smell and even then it would probably linger.

A towering red-brick building, built in 1901, it was once a fire station and for the last 40 years a boxing gym famous with fighters around the world. It's even more famous since Saviour's, a no-budget documentary made over two years by Ross Whitaker and Liam Nolan from Street Films. The film, which follows the lives of three young fighters from the gym, was well received recently at the Chicago Film Festival, where it was praised for displaying "the best in bare-bones, small-scale film-making".

The windows at first-floor level are bricked up, the building standing defiant in the face of the development in this terminally neglected part of the inner-city. Across the road is number 12 Dorset Street, the dilapidated house which may or may not have been the birthplace of Richard Brinsley Sheridan - on the exact location, commentators are still divided.

Inside, hot air from the heaters blows around the gym."Go on, ya bum," the brothers, both former British boxing champions, shout to the budding pugilists as they swing punches in the ring. "Keep your hands up, I keep telling you, left hand high, elbows in." All the big names in boxing have been here over the years. Lennox Lewis posed for photos for an hour at the back with local women and their babies. When Naseem Hamed, playing the benevolent prince, threw 20 quid notes from the window of his limo to the children on the street, it was like a scene out of a boxing movie.

Anyway, notes aren't required here, with subs at just €2 a week. Pat keeps track of the money and the members in a red hard-backed notebook.

"With the obesity problem now, parents send their kids here, just to keep fit," says John. Even with competition from computer games there are still enough members to keep the club ticking over three nights a week.

"See you Sunday," the boys say when they leave on Thursday evening. "They say that but then some of them go drinking at the weekend so you don't see some of them on Sunday morning," says John. "Boxing is not a sport where you can burn the candle at both ends. The drinking culture has changed things."

But not too much. On Sunday morning at 11am there are still enough teenage boys burning with ambition, and enough older men who want to keep fit, to create an atmosphere. Back in the 1980s the fiercely determined world champion in-the-making Deirdre Gogarty came here when another club didn't want the headache of looking after a girl. A young Polish teenager has just started; John and Pat say she's promising. But it's boys and men mostly and these days, as well as from inner-city Dublin they come from Africa, from Asia, from Spain, from England. "We take them all, from everywhere," says John.

Closer to home, Thomas McDonnell is 13 and lives in a caravan in Finglas with his family. His face is lightly freckled, his eyes lively as he moves around the ring. Taking a break, he explains how he came here four years ago, aged nine, and how it was strange at first. "But it blew me away. To be coached by two former British champions, I look at those two and I want to be like them."

On the walls are the club's mottos: "Winners are simply willing to do what losers won't." "When you're good at excuses it's hard to be good at anything else." "It's better to sweat at the gym than bleed on the streets." A diagram shows the ladder of success, from a medal at the County Dublin League Championships all the way up to Olympic Gold. St Saviour's member Darren Sutherland will be in Athens next month, attempting to qualify for the Bejing Olympics, but most members won't make it that far.

"It's not only about that," insists Thomas. "I am learning about discipline here. You won't see me drinking in a field. That's stupid. And none of my friends do that, if they did I wouldn't be around them. You can't do that and come to the gym, you are just harming your body."

The oldest person working out here, apart from the brothers, is Billy Roche, his shiny bald head in constant motion as he weaves around the club.

John says every boxing club across the world has a Billy, the gym's resident "warmer upper". Every night, tough and wiry at 55, he leads members in jumping jacks and skipping and shadow-boxing as the music pumps, his charges nice and limber for sparring sessions in the ring. After a while he is fairly warmed up himself, tiny rivulets running down his head. The steam that rises off his pate as he talks is mesmerising. "I come here because of the family atmosphere, we are all like brothers," he smiles. "For me it's about looking at the young fellas, seeing their raw talent and trying to bring that talent out of them."

One of the young fellas is aching with disappointment today. The night before Sean O'Neill was up four points in the All-Ireland final and with 15 seconds to go he got disqualified for repeatedly holding on to his opponent. It was the first time he'd been in the final after reaching the semis on a few occasions before. Learning to cope with moments such as this is as important as perfecting your jab. "I won't let it stop me," says Sean.

"Anyway, this is a great education, I'd be here even if I never won anything. You do what you are told here and you learn a lot, not just about boxing. They are great trainers, they always make me laugh," he says. He is quiet for a moment. "John and Pat are my heroes."

The gym is plastered with the faces of other heroes, photos and posters featuring members past, many depicting Spike, legendary Dublin fighter of the 1940s and father to the McCormack brothers. Once a son of Spike McCormack, always a son of Spike. "When you have a father like that, it's never you in your own right, but that's no problem," says John. Anyway, in their younger days he and Pat travelled the world as boxers themselves, making big names for themselves. "Twice around the world," says Pat. "We went everywhere, we've had two lifetimes, the best kind of life." Pat was on the same bill as Mohammad Ali at that famous fight in Croke Park in 1972. John has been quoted as saying he didn't know whether to kiss Ali or shake his hand, because "he was so bleedin' gorgeous".

PAT WAS ALWAYS the smaller one, always wilder in his ways. "I was born wild," he grins, and if you look closely you can still see the fire in his eyes. In his teens, he was sent to Artane school for young offenders for smashing a window. There was a £5 fine which his mother duly paid "but I got seven years anyway". John kept mitching off school and was sentenced to six years in Artane. The place couldn't contain Pat and he was sent to Letterfrack Industrial School, or "Alcatraz", as Pat calls the detention centre. "My father always said I was the gentleman boxer and he was an absolute divil, in the ring, he was the real fighter out of the two of us," says John. "I got my wildness out of me in the ring," says Pat.

With just 18 months separating them, the lives of the brothers always had a certain symmetry. Borstal. Boxing. And both chose painting and decorating as a way to earn a living outside of the ring. Both now in their early sixties, they've spent most of that time passing on skills, instilling discipline, barking directions, offering encouragement and feeding those fearless dreams. They'll be doing more of the same for all those who walk through the door at St Saviour's, the smell of teen spirit whacking you full in the face, for a good while yet.

"We're ex-boxers, we'll always come back to the environment we know best. We were born to do it," says Pat.