Ahead of his professional debut in Detroit, great Irish middleweight prospect Andy Lee talks to Denis Staunton
In the crumbling, crime-ridden south-west of Detroit, surrounded by abandoned warehouses and derelict homes, stands the most famous boxing gym in the world.
From the outside, the Kronk Recreation Centre looks as if it has been abandoned too. There is little sign of life inside until you climb down the stairs to the red metal door of the gym with its message painted in yellow: "This Door has led Man to PAIN and FAME."
Inside the cramped, overheated basement, the paint is peeling, the punchbags battered out of shape and the canvas floor of the boxing ring worn and discoloured. The walls are covered in photographs and yellowing newspaper cuttings celebrating the achievements of more than 30 world champions trained here by legendary coach Emanuel Steward.
A few elderly men sit on wooden seats along one wall, a young fighter is performing sit-ups on a cracked leather bench in a corner and another is skipping at a furious pace, but most people are gathered around the ring.
They are watching Limerick middleweight Andy Lee sparring with Aaron Pryor Jr in preparation for Lee's long-awaited professional debut at Detroit's Joe Louis Arena next Friday.
"I haven't been this excited about a fighter for a long time. I think he can be an all-time-great fighter," says Steward as he watches Lee batter his opponent into the ropes.
At 58, Steward's former boxing protégés include Tommy Hearns, Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield, Oscar De La Hoya and "Prince" Naseem Hamed. Most of the biggest names in boxing have trained at the Kronk since he took charge there in 1971.
Next week's fight against American Anthony Gannon will be the first in a rapid succession of bouts that will see Lee fight at least seven times a year with the aim of challenging for a world title within 36 months.
"I feel very calm. I'm looking forward to it. I've pictured it and gone over it so many times in my head at this stage and I've been waiting so long for it. So I'm going to make the most of this," Lee says.
STEWARD, WHO SAYS he has given Lee a contract worth more than he has ever offered a fighter, first took an interest in the Limerick southpaw when he defeated American champion Jesus Gonzales in the semi-final of the world junior championships in Cuba three years ago.
He describes the 21-year-old as a tough fighter with remarkable coordination and rhythm who has become the "buzz" of the Kronk gym since he moved to Detroit last autumn.
"What's amazing is for him to come from Limerick, a small town, with no big professional fighters to learn from, and to keep going to tournaments, competing against these top Americans, Cubans, and holding up. I thought, if this kid ever goes to a gym where he was boxing with the best boxers, there's no telling what he can accomplish," Steward says.
The only Irish boxer to qualify for the Olympics in 2004, Lee planned until a few months ago to remain in Ireland as an amateur and train for Beijing in 2008. The Sports Council offered him one of the best deals available to any Irish athlete, but Lee found the prospect of training with Steward too tempting to pass up.
"If I stayed amateur I'd be back in Dublin now doing the same thing I did for the last four years," he says. "But now I'm here and I'm in a totally new world with a totally new challenge and hopefully a bright future ahead. And then, it wasn't just that I was turning pro like a lot of people turn pro. I was turning pro with Emanuel Steward and training in the Kronk gym, which is something I've always wanted to do and any boxer would love to do."
At 1.88m (6ft 2in), Lee is tall for a middleweight, with an easy smile and a gently solicitous manner. Outside the ring, it's hard to imagine him hitting anyone and he has never been involved in a street fight in his life.
He has known boxing success since childhood, winning almost every competition he entered since he started boxing at the age of eight, but he has always found himself a little apart from the crowd.
"I was born in London with Irish parents, so I was an outsider in London," he says. "Then I moved to Ireland and I was classed as English, fighting in the Irish team. It's just the way it's always been. Now I'm living in Detroit, a predominantly black city and I'm the white guy who hangs around with all the other boxers in the gym."
Lee's father, Tom, from Dublin, and mother Ann, from Limerick, left Ireland in the 1970s for London, where Lee and his three brothers and two sisters were born. They lived in a predominantly Irish community in London's East End and always planned to return home.
"We always viewed Ireland as home and every summer we'd spend in Limerick or Dublin. That's where most of our family, my grandparents and our cousins were," Lee says.
When Lee was 14, the family moved to Castleconnell, outside Limerick, a change that came as an unpleasant shock at first after the bustle of London. Instead of going to school, Lee helped in his father's tree surgery and landscaping business, training at St Francis Boxing Club every evening.
Soon he was winning national junior boxing titles, moving on to senior championships and emerging as a bright hope of Irish boxing in his late teens. He became Irish middleweight champion three times and was a European bronze medallist but the Athens Olympics ended in disappointment when a narrow defeat on points prevented his progress into the quarter-finals.
LEE HAS BEEN living at Steward's house since he moved to Detroit, training every day with a small group of professional fighters. Their hours are spent running, skipping, sparring, doing press-ups and sit-ups, shadow-boxing and pounding punchbags. They eat together, play pool against each other and usually go out as a group, but their conversation constantly returns to one subject.
"We all eat and drink and sleep boxing here, talk about it, watch it on TV," says Lee. "Some days we just get away from it, just hang out and don't talk about boxing. But it's always in our minds even if we're not talking about it. It really is all boxing here - boxing, boxing, boxing."
Each afternoon is spent at the Kronk gym, which Lee and the other professionals share with dozens of teenagers and children aged as young as eight years old. Owned by the city of Detroit, the gym is open to anyone for an annual fee of $35, one of the few alternatives in this blighted part of town to the drugs and violence of the streets. Detroit's population has been bleeding away for decades as the motor industry shrank, and in January the cash-starved city decided to close nine recreation centres, including the Kronk.
Steward has persuaded the mayor to keep the Kronk gym open for a few months while he tries to raise funds for a foundation that would share the cost of running it. Local stars Aretha Franklin, Mary Wilson and Eminem have pledged support, along with actor George Clooney and rapper 50 Cent, and the profits from Lee's fight next week will go to the foundation.
Steward says Kronk's importance goes far beyond its role as an incubator of champions, pointing out that many of the teenagers training there might otherwise be involved in crime. He started boxing at 14 at another of Detroit's municipal recreation centres after he kicked a boy in the head, putting him in hospital for four days, and was threatened with juvenile prison.
"It saved my whole life. I was on my way to becoming a professional killer," he says. "It was the boxing and these recreation centres that saved me."
Lee believes that he too could have gone astray if he had not taken up boxing, but he admits that, like most professional boxers, he avoids thinking about the dangers of fighting and the risk of serious injury.
"It's a thing a lot of boxers are in denial about and you don't worry about it until it happens," he says. "You hear horror stories and you think, 'I'm so happy that's not me'. But it's part of boxing. It's part of life too. Anything can go wrong in life. You just have to take a chance," he says.