It’s 30 years ago this month since I had my first cover story in a magazine. I was 24 and working as a journalist in the late, lamented Sunday Tribune. I had managed to land an exclusive interview with a 21-year-old world champion boxer from Sheffield, England, the young man they called the Prince: Naseem Hamed.
The reason I got the exclusive was because Hamed was trained by my uncle Brendan, a Dubliner. The story goes that Brendan first spotted the then seven-year-old Yemeni boy from the top deck of a bus, nimbly dodging bullies in the school playground. He trained Naseem for 17 years in the multicultural boxing gym/community centre he had founded across the road from his home in Wincobank, a deprived area of his adopted Sheffield.
Last Friday, I put the magazine in my backpack and brought it with me to the cinema to meet my friend and fellow Irish Times columnist Paul. We first worked together in the Tribune. He was a subeditor at the time and he went through the piece for errors and style mishaps, fixing my rookie mistakes.
We were in the Savoy Cinema to see Giant, the movie about my uncle Brendan and Prince Naseem, starring Pierce Brosnan as Brendan. I was worried. I’d heard terrible things about Brosnan’s accent and was concerned about how film-maker Rowan Athale might depict the acrimonious falling-out between boxer and trainer. Most of all, I hoped the film, with Sylvester Stallone as executive producer, would do justice to my uncle and all that he had achieved.
READ MORE
Brendan left his home – Margaret Place, Bath Avenue in Dublin – at the age of 17 for Sheffield, following my father Peter. He was one of 15 siblings. My grandfather Charles, a man way ahead of his time, had built a gym in his yard and many of the Ingle brothers who came to be known as The Fighting Ingles boxed competitively, including Brendan. At 17, my uncle Jimmy was the first Irish boxer to win a European amateur boxing title. Daddy eventually settled back in Dublin, but uncle Brendan, a steelworker, met Alma, raising five kids and devoting his life to the youth of the area.
In the cinema with Paul, we reminisced about our trips to London and Cardiff in the 1990s to watch exhilarating Naseem fights and about our joyful encounters with the fascinating, charismatic Brendan. His job, his whole life, was boxing and young people. St Thomas’s gym was not just a place where world champions were made – he trained seven in total including Naseem – but where young men were given skills for life. Brendan was as much a social worker as he was a trainer. It’s why he was awarded a MBE and why a road around the corner from the gym is now called Brendan Ingle Way.
It was a thrill and honour to be in my uncle’s gym 30 years ago, and to be reporting on the young man he called “the Nas fella”. I remember the sweaty stench and the pounding noises as small boys and big men of every colour and creed trained. I remember telling Prince Naseem Hamed about this thing called the internet, suggesting he should look into getting a promotional tool known as a website. He was full of swagger but charming with it. I liked him.
“I think of Brendan as my second dad,” Naseem told me as we stood ringside. “No matter how big I get, no matter how much money I make, he will always be there. I am the most loyal fighter he has.”
It didn’t turn out that way. The film depicts the deterioration of a bond, one based on a shared dream, between a young Arab boy and a seasoned Dubliner. That bond was corrupted and ultimately destroyed by money, ego, fame, vanity and greed.
Pierce Brosnan, I am delighted to report, is brilliant as Brendan, who I think would have been delighted to be played by the man who was James Bond. Brosnan manages to capture Brendan’s unique aura, his physicality, his passion. The jibes about his accent are unfair, I think. After years in England, Brendan’s accent was not pure Dublin.
There are a couple of things I wish came out more strongly in the film. The success of Brendan Ingle was not tied up in world titles or championship belts. Money was not his motivator, as countless young people who went through that gym will attest. One of them, Brian Anderson, said the magic of the gym was in the mix of people from all backgrounds. “We were living multiculturalism before it was even coined as a concept.”
Another thing I’d take issue with is the fact that my late aunt Alma is mostly confined to a domestic setting in the film. She was the first woman amateur boxing judge in Britain and the second woman to become a professional boxing promoter. Alma was often relegated to “wife of boxing legend Brendan”, but he always said he could not have done any of it without her. She does get the best line in the film: “Sharpen a knife, it will cut you too.” (Hamed was the knife.)
Naseem Hamed, now 51, has been interviewed a lot since the film came out, sometimes paying tribute to Brendan but sometimes sadly offering the same disingenuous, hurtful narrative he peddled back in the day, that Brendan was only in it for the money. Anyone who knew Brendan Ingle knows that is not true. He walked away in 1998 because he was devastated by Naseem’s inability to acknowledge him after 17 years, to give him any credit. He felt betrayed by the boy he had mentored since the age of seven.
Naseem says he tried to reach out to Brendan over the years. Brendan always said he’d meet him if he donated to the Brendan Ingle Foundation, his charity for the socially excluded. There’s an imagined, emotional scene at the end of Giant, where the pair are somewhat reconciled, but Hamed never donated and so that meeting never happened. When Brendan died in 2018, aged 78, the only person Alma did not want at the massive funeral was Naseem.
Giant has had mixed reviews, but Paul, a former sportswriter, agrees with me that it’s a fantastic film. I left the cinema proud to be an Ingle and proud to be the niece of such a unique, intelligent, compassionate man – one who left such a legacy. Go see Giant and remember Brendan Ingle, that giant of a Dubliner.
