Fighting for peace of mind

Sitting back on the bench he swabs the perspiration from his face. A shorn head the lightest of carroty velvet. Fists that have blown a million times around the heavy bag are at peace on the champion's lap. He winds his head around in a wide circle and expels the last breath of the session. It's a hard, hard time, the days leading into a title fight.

Michael Carruth again has it all in front of him. Again. Not for the first time he has left part of himself in a pool on Steve Collins's gym floor. Now 31-years-old, the terrain is familiar but the feeling is that these pages have been turned before. Carruth has been here not once but twice previously. Twice in 16 professional outings he has been beaten and twice he has had to move on to a new chapter.

Carruth is the fighter we have all wanted to triumph, but have wondered what road he had wandered off in his professional career. Now, for the first time he will top the bill this weekend in his home town, Dublin. A poignant renaissance.

More in your face now. More the brash Steve Collins than the retiring Olympic champion, Carruth has learnt to perform for the recorder from the man who beat Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank. Talking up the fight for the World Athletic Association (WAA) title, his style now is the traditional Carruth melody with an abrasive Collins rap.

"Steve has brought more self-belief. He's a very confident person. He instils that into you and he doesn't let you forget about it. People think it's braggish and boisterous but you have to get it into your head that you're going to win. More importantly, you have to get it into your heart. He's showing me a few tricks. A bit more ring craft. Skulduggery is an awful word, so I'll say ring craft. He understands it."

But the WAA? We've never heard of it. "It's not one of the most nostalgic of belts. I mean, American belts like the WBA and the WBC don't recognise the WBO and you look at who the WBO champions are: Oscar de La Hoya, Herbie Hide, Prince Naseem, Steven Collins, Nigel Benn, Chris Eubank. Point is, it doesn't matter what associations say, it's about two fighters getting in to do a job and people wanting to watch."

A year ago in Aachen, Carruth lost to Micheal Loewe, a Romanian resident in Germany, in a WBO welterweight Championship world title fight. The Irishman claimed mutiny when the scoring was revealed. One judge scored him even, another that Loewe had won by a point and the third, Puerto Rican Tomas Vasquez, had given Loewe the fight by six points. Carruth claimed it was a homer.

"His hand went up in the air," he says. "But I won the fight." A second defeat in 16 professional outings and the most damaging, Carruth's head went down. Since then, September 20th, 1997, he has been sitting around waiting for his former promoter Frank Warren to get his career back up and running. Warren, he believes, has kept him waiting too long.

"No, I'm not satisfied about the way things have gone since the Olympics. Warren is to blame, obviously. Sixteen fights in four and a half years as a professional is ludicrous. This lad (Canadian Scott Dixon) has had more fights than me and he started after me. He's had 18 fights. But you have to get on with it. You can't be bitter. You've got to accept life. I don't dwell or live in the past."

Not unlike his current mentor, Collins, Carruth ultimately aims for the stars and a meeting with an American dream boy. Oscar de La Hoya fires his imagination just as Roy Jones junior is the only fighter who will bring Collins out of retirement. To round off the blessed Irish Trinity, Wayne McCullough's camp is also hounding British phenomenon Naseem Hamed and is perhaps closer than any of achieving what Carruth sums up as "super stardom if he beats Naseem or a very good pension if he loses".

"This fight I have to win. It's a door-die. You know with three defeats . . . although to me I still haven't been beaten, but they're on the record and you have to go with records. But I'm not going to lose. I've a good corner. This guy hasn't fought anyone of my calibre and he's going to be found out.

"Syl McClean came along with the Team Ireland idea. I knew it was a way to get back into the ring and let everybody know that I was still around. I'm not going to be remembered as a yesterday's man. I'm coming back to prove a point. "

Saturday's bout is also about evangelising boxing in the capital. Syl McClean, the promoter who is dipping his toe into these waters for the first time, has lined up local fare including Jim Rock, Cathal O'Grady and Paul Griffin. Paschal Collins, brother of Steve, was to fight but withdrew injured.

"Any association is as good as the boxers you have in it at any one time," says McClean on the WAA. "If Michael wins this we'll try and line him up with a bigger name. A gold medal should be worth at least £1 mil lion. He shouldn't have had to go a year without a fight."

If Chinese whispers had currency, Carruth would have stuck with the gold medal and lived off the good faith of Barcelona. Good enough for any fella. The country would have shouldered him along on the memories until his dotage, turned him out at the right occasions and asked his opinion next time an Olympic hero came along. But it's not like that. He doesn't look at the mountain and decide it's too big to climb but eyes the foothills first.

"You can't be bitter, you just can't be bitter. I can say, `I should be this and I should be world champion', but I'm not. The Loewe fight didn't discourage me. I remember after the fight I went into the dressing rooms. I got showered and did the interviews. Of course everyone was going to say, `He's going to hang up his boots and gloves and give it over'. At the hotel I walked out with the boxing gloves. You get to keep your gloves in world title fights. I came over to me da and I handed him the gloves. He didn't know what was going on. "He says, `What are they for?' He thought I was hanging them up. I turned to him and said, `I only keep the ones I win'.

"He just says, `Good boy'. He knew straight away. He knew then I wasn't ready to quit. He said, `Good lad'. That was it."

Carruth rejoices in his ordinariness. Loves it. Is comfortable with it. Wants it to stay that way. He goes out of his way to prove it.

"Those lads over there . . ." He points to a bench in the corner of the dressing room. "They were in the same class as me in school. I went to Barcelona a nobody - and I don't like that phrase `a nobody' - but I came back a household name. I've proven I can box. Nothing will be more important than the Olympics. Not a win here. Not a world title."

He has now moved to Co Kildare, opened his wings a little and rooted his family. In the mornings when he runs around Naas Rugby Club he understands what the sport has given him. Now he is asking for another chance. Personal ambition is one motive; what trappings it brings another.

"My daughter's only two and I spent the whole of last summer away getting ready for the fight against Loewe. I was away for about 14 weeks. Can't say it's all a bed of roses. Can't be away anymore without not seeing her grow up.

"She hasn't got a clue. Every bit of boxing she sees on telly she thinks it's her daddy. It's for her now what I'm doing, for Leah. Every fight I have it's for her. I'm fighting for her livelihood, to make her secure for the rest of her life. Sure, it's financial security. We all strive for it. We all do the lotto."

Two-year-old Leah doesn't sleep through the night just yet. Cry time is when the fighter needs his rest. So these days he has squirrelled himself away in the back bedroom, with his wife Paula and daughter in the front. He won his gold medal on the back of a three-week marriage. Hundreds of hotel rooms have passed by. Hardship comes in various guises.

"It is sometimes difficult. We had it tough but now I'm not under contract. It's fight by fight with Steve and Aussie, my da, in the corner. Maybe if I had a fault before it was I needed someone in my corner to give me an extra kick in the arse. Sometimes I tended to lose concentration in fights, looking out at who was in the audience rather than the fella in front of me. If I do that and go back to the corner, I dare say I'll be getting more slaps there than I will out in the ring. Steve's a hard taskmaster."

The organiser of the Team Ireland promotion hopes for almost 3,000 spectators in the basketball arena in Tallaght tonight. In the early hours this morning, De La Hoya, also an Olympic gold medallist, fights veteran Julio Cesar Chavez in Las Vegas in an absurd defence of his WBC welterweight title. Like he did in 1996, after four rounds De La Hoya will win. The WAA is not the WBC but Carruth and McClean are right. It is the names, not devalued belts, that generate the interest. The WAA may not open many doors and Tallaght is not Las Vegas. But victory for Carruth would be a significant triumph. One of the foothills again conquered.