London calling

INTERVIEW:Joe Ward is Ireland's most precocious boxer in generations. Olympic qualification is not assured, but the Moate teenager is driven by fatherhood and a deep desire to make it, he tells JOHNNY WATTERSON

THERE’S A HINT of wariness about Joe Ward. He shuffles into his front room, tie askew, the sticking-up parts of his hair licked down. Ward, who is suited up today, has plunged us all into an Olympic tease. A little burlesque number with lots of shoulder. For over a year now, we have all wanted more.

He’s the boxer with the potential to carry us all to London, a Traveller and a fighter who could, with a few sweet swings of his south paw, thrust us all into patriotic overload this summer.

Ripe for an Olympic medal, or the heaviest fall of his life, the most precocious boxer Ireland has had in generations, Joe Ward, hasn’t yet qualified for London 2012.

In his routines around Europe, Ward has always held that veneer of promise. A wrecking ball ability when he needs it. A mother who pushed and cajoled him when the mood for training waned. Ward’s short journey so far has taken him to two world titles at underage level and also to the seat of Europe.

A child champion, at 17 Ward won the European light heavyweight crown, a benchmark that far outstrips the career graph of any other promising amateur boxer.

Ward is an only child. “They had to put it all into one, know what I mean?” he explains. Theresa was the only parent. The two, mother and son, criss-crossed Ireland to weigh-ins, tournaments and training sessions. The narrative was predictable. Ward would fight and win.

“Boxing has been my life from when I was very young. I remember my first ever fight. I put a head guard on and a pair of boxing gloves. I walked into the ring. I got this feeling inside me. Everyone used to tell me how good I was. Sometimes, though, you get it in one ear and it goes out the other. You hear it but you don’t feel it.

“I was in there, I stopped your man in one or two rounds. When I went back to my corner I could feel the buzz of how good I could be and what I can be and what I can achieve in my life.

“People would tell me I could be Olympic champion if I put my mind to it. Even at 11 or 12. Every time I get into that ring there is a buzz, it’s like addiction. You can’t get away from it.”

Hometown Moate in Co Westmeath is a rolling drive by the scenic route, through Rochfortbridge, Tyrrellspass and Kinnegad, where you heave a little; a nostalgic queasiness for the apocalyptic summer jams of the 1980s and 10,000 cars having to make a right turn in the village.

This is bypassed Ireland, where once proud towns idle and rust. Milltownpass even has an indifferent cat licking its coat in the middle of what was the main Dublin to Galway road. In quadruple parking, car-loving main street Moate, they all know Ward.

It is here, four months ago, that Ward became Big Joe, as Little Joe came into the world. Not long after his 17th birthday – when most of his age group were wondering about cheap drink and parties – Big Joe straddled the pregnancy of his partner, Julianne, and the World Championships in boxing.

Perhaps for the first time in his career, Ward faltered and failed in the ring. Four months on, and Little Joe has the dark hair of his father. Little Joe has the shape and the look. There is a face in there.

Here in the estate, in the house of the Joes, Julianne bounces Little Joe on her knee. Their home is in the hinterland of where Big Joe grew up, on the outskirts of town. From here, he can see the Olympic Games. He always could.

“It’s good. Very good. He’s really good. Sometimes you mightn’t get your sleep. He’s something different. It’s a wonderful thing to be a father,” says Ward.

These days he appears older, almost weary. Maybe fatherhood. Maybe in the Travelling community they grow older more quickly or are asked to meet life’s demands and strike out early. His father left when he was small and didn’t return. Ward wants to leave it there. It was just himself and his mother.

“Looking at him growing up now motivates you more to go and do something for him and for yourself,” he says. “Make your family happier and better. It really motivates you to push yourself. I’m looking at him growing and getting bigger every day.

“It’s difficult to go away and leave your kid that’s four months old. But I have to. I have to go do this for him and for myself. Little Joe. Yeah, I called him after myself.”

BLESSED WITH AN ABILITY that Ireland is happy to inflate and funnel towards a podium finish in London some time in August, Ward is a serial championship winner. Like the other supersized candidate, Katie Taylor, he must go through a qualification tournament in Turkey this week or be known as a “mere” European champion.

For most teenagers that would be astounding. But Ward sits in his front room with his crystal vases and plates, mapping out the victory march of his career, its concentration and speed of accumulation unmatched by any boxer that has come before him.

There is a hasty pace about the accelerated career, but not about the man himself. Ward occasionally holds a lazy squint, but behind that, the cogs are whirring and ticking.

A year ago he was too gauche and callow to understand that the speed of his rise would ever slow down. He beat Olympic silver medallist Ken Egan for the Irish title last year at 17. He was dismissed as a one-off, but he came back this year and demolished him.

Ward brought to an end the 10-year light heavyweight reign of Egan in 2010 in only the second senior fight of his life. The European triumph was his 10th ever senior contest. Ridiculous.

A medal in London won’t bring riches, but it will bring opportunity. It will ensure a top grant from the Irish Sports Council of €40,000 a year, as well as sponsorship. It will ensure that promoters jockey for position, keep offers tumbling through the door from the professional ranks.

“I think I have about five or six professional contracts already,” he says nonchalantly. “Just handed to you, to go professional and all that.” Money was laid at his feet to take part in the World Series of Boxing (WSB); a professional competition where amateurs are permitted to earn hard cash. No head guards, no vests, longer fights. Eddie Bolger, the trusted coach with whom he takes his long walks, and his agent, Frank Walsh, were consulted. They pushed the easy money back. Not in Olympic year.

Others said yes: John Joe Nevin, who has qualified for London, came back last month with a broken jaw.

“I said to myself: is this the right decision to go there? Fight for five rounds? No head guard? A lot of injuries are happening, a lot of eye cuts, clashes of heads. It was a big decision for me to make. There was good money in it.

“It is hard to turn yourself away from money, but I’m living a comfortable life, I don’t have to go out looking for money, I’m living easy.

Prominent on a table in his sitting room is a picture of his grandfather and grandmother with a younger Ward between beaming out, celebrating another trophy.

His grandfather Joe, a fearless, striking character featured in a recent documentary called Knuckle and has been prominent in the bare-knuckle fights that take place in car parks and country lanes. The tradition, captured on video and screened on television, drew vitriolic reaction.

There is a clear bond between them. Perhaps in a one-parent world, grandparents assume greater dimensions. It’s another area Ward is reluctant to discuss. He has already had calls from news outlets seeking his opinion.

Even at 18, he could see that whatever answer he gave would offend someone, either his family or the sensibilities of Sunday newspaper readers. For now he’s parking that issue. Not now anyway, not before he books his ticket to London.

Ward will never doubt himself in the ring, because that’s doubting his future and threatening those dreams that took wing as a child. Boxing defines him and not just shapes his future, but will make it. There is nothing else there to redeem the trappings of a comfortable life.

If you doubt yourself, he says, you lose. He believes in character and the energy of success. Win, he says, and you can realise yourself, you can achieve great things. He believes in himself.

“It was boxing that got me thinking about what I could have,” he says. “The gift I have is something not many people have. So you have to take it. The things I can achieve and what I can be like in five years’ time . . . I can achieve magnificent things.

“What I can have, you just dream about . . .”

He represents his family and himself. He doesn’t believe he should have to represent the Traveller culture but he is part of it and respects it. Growing up, he faced not so much full-blown prejudice but nuanced sleights, understated, deniable marginalising. Little things, he says, were different. When he twice won world titles at underage level, reaction was muted. The European senior title drew more attention but not the open-top bus.

Ward has learned to live off scarce resources, go the extra mile and always keep proving it. There is no malice or edge to his voice, no great hurt or sense of rejection.

He understands the world in which he belongs, the one that trumpeted Francis Barrett to the Atlanta Olympic Games, stuck a tricolour in his hand to lead the opening ceremony, then denied him entry to a nightclub in Galway.

Ward is a teenager in a hurry. He doesn’t see himself as the guy on the pavement giving some puffed-up bouncer the opportunity to send away another Traveller. He sees himself owning the club.

“At 18, it’s a time of life when you can go one road or the other road,” he says. “You can go on the highway or you can settle down, set targets for yourself. Set a name. That’s what I’ve done – settled down, realised that life is a short space of time. You have to go make the most of it or it will pass you by.

“Boxing has given me an easier life. Without boxing I probably wouldn’t be here now with my girlfriend and my kid. I’m getting well looked after. I think it has made me a lot wiser too. God knows what I’d be doing now. You’d see some of the guys I went to school with every weekend footless. I’m happy I’ve made a life for myself. It’s too short.”

LAST YEAR AT THE World Championships in Baku, uncertainty entered his life with a total systems failure. Ward doesn’t quite know what happened but, one bout away from qualifying for London, he lost. He was second-favourite for the tournament but was beaten by an Iranian, Ehsan Rouzbahani, in the third round.

“I don’t know what went wrong at all,” he says. “My mind was miles away. I wasn’t focused on boxing. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was my girlfriend being pregnant. It was around that time. My mind wasn’t set. It wasn’t set on the job, on what I had to go and do. My bag went missing . . . all my gear. But you learn.”

For a moment, Ward steps into life as an 18-year-old instead of the world shaper, the dreamer. Teenage Ward is unsure and has no answers. He is confused and tentative, open to how fragile confidence can be, even in a life of certainty and triumph.

But he’s rolling with it. The load he bears is fatherhood and an Olympic medal in the space of eight months. After July, who knows? But when he steps into the ring in Turkey this week it’s not just for London 2012. It’s for Little Joe. It’s for Julianne. There is no second act.