BOXING/INTERVIEW WITH BILLY WALSH:The success of our boxers owes much to the life experiences and skills of a passionate son of Wexford, writes Tom Humphriesin Beijing

BILLY WALSH'S nose veers slightly to the left and just below his lower lip there is the track of half an inch worth of old scar. The blemishes are his passport and his resume. Five years as the head coach for Irish boxing's High Performance Unit - you have to know the early mornings, the aches of monastic abstinence and the feel of having your face reconfigured. And then you start learning.

The road to Beijing. Maybe it started in Wexford years ago when he was at the Christian Brothers and had more energy and devilment in him than the average seven-year-old's day permitted him to spend. So his father had him conscripted into the CBS boxing club and, lo, young Billy stayed and fell in love with the glove.

He's a boxing man and a GAA man. His grandfather fought. His father followed the fights. His aunt Theresa Shiel won an All-Ireland camogie medal for Wexford in 1968. Billy wore the purple and gold all through his youth.

There was a time before burnout had been invented as an ailment when he had many plates spinning. He won his first Irish national title as a 14-year-old. He was playing under-14 hurling for Wexford that year and marked Christy Heffernan's brother Ray in Croke Park. He was playing under-14 football for the county too. And under-15 soccer.

Too much energy to burn, too many talents to waste.

But back to Beijing. The road to here. What led to the rousing choreography of this week: fighters, be they winners or losers, coming to Billy in the Irish corner and hugging him with taped hands and muscled arms as if he were a father. Maybe it was Wexford and the brothers that pushed him. Or maybe the ghosts of Seoul chased him here.

When he got involved with the High Performance Unit Gary Keegan, the technical director, would encourage Billy to tell his story to the young lads. He'd thought about it every goddamn day since 1988 but telling it aloud? That was sports-shrink territory. Boxers were tough, boxers were war horses. No need for talk.

But he sat down one day and tried to tell it, tried to unbottle it - and he couldn't get through it without crying. Still can't. You give that much of yourself to the ring. You don't think the canvas and rope will ever come and claim even more of you.

Look. He was playing minor hurling in Croke Park one day. He was a tough, stringy wing back for the county hurlers (captain and centre back for the footballers), and the game had unravelled as it often does against the stripey cats of Kilkenny. Wexford had been five points up with six minutes to go. They got beaten by a point. Billy Walsh remembers coming off the field throwing his stick down in anger.

"I just said, f*** this, I'm going to the Olympics. I'm not depending on 14 other fellas anymore."

He stopped playing hurling and football for a couple of years but to his dismay even as national champion he didn't get selected for Los Angeles. He was a bit naive, he thinks. He was a country boy and the voodoo politics of selection as practised by the blazers on the South Circular Road didn't work well for him.

He was 20 and he'd been slapped back and put in his place.

He returned to the GAA and played under-21 for Wexford in both codes. His club career blossomed. Sarsfields in football. Faythe Harriers in hurling. The county senior footballers came looking for him.

The Olympics never left his bloodstream though. By Seoul in 1988 he was on board. Captain of the six-man team. And, god, he loved it. Seoul was the dream with extras and trimmings.

ROOMING WITH his great buddy Michael Carruth. Seoul was such a different culture. He had been all around the direst spots in Eastern Europe as a boxer but Seoul blew him away.

"Now people go away for a year and travel around the world. At that time we went to Rosslare for a couple of weeks. I was brought up in a working class area but nobody in the street was working. My da was a butcher - the only man in the street who was working. Seoul, it was fantastic. Eye-opening."

He remembers rubbing shoulders in the dining area with Gabriela Sabatini, Steffi Graf and his hero Carl Lewis. Chatting to Ed Moses, for God's sake. Billy's chin scraping along the ground.

He shared a taxi one night with Roger Kingdom, the 100-metre hurdles gold medallist in 1984 and 1988. Every time Kingdom would see Billy Walsh afterwards he would thank him for picking up the fare in the cab. Thanking Billy? Billy would have paid 10 times that just to be allowed into the cab. And the excitement built as the boxing got going. One, two, three, four, five out of five successful first-round bouts.

Billy was last in. Against a South Korean he had beaten handily in the run-up to the Games. Just had to knock it safe for six out of six. Instead, the Korean cut him up and it was stopped in the third.

He was broken-hearted. He cried for a week. Brooded on it for a decade and a half.

"We didn't have texts. Telegrams in those days. I think a pigeon flew out with them. Every day from the mother at home in Wexford was a telegram. Please ring home. Please ring home. I wouldn't. I couldn't. I was ashamed of myself. I am a proud Wexford man. I felt I had let everyone down. I was devastated. It took me a long, long time to get over it on the inside. It was only when I started with this programme that I got over it."

It's not easy to talk about still. They didn't know the idea of pressure back then. They were fighters. Tough guys. They didn't need psychology. Not the warhorses.

"I was trying too hard. I wanted to win too much. I didn't control my emotions. I wanted to put them all into my performance, just throw it all at him.

He remembers falling into the arms of Carruth. Inconsolable. His wife, Christine, was there, two months pregnant with their first and on the trip of a lifetime and it was like Billy had got assassinated so surely did the life go out of him. And Eddie Byrne, his coach from the age of seven, was there too.

They gave him a great welcome back in Wexford when he went home. It made him feel more ashamed and guilty than ever.

He kept fighting but thought his shots at the Games were gone. He did a few weeks' training in 1989 and won the national title. To get to Seoul he had given up work and lived on the equivalent of €50 a week from the dole. Now he was back at work in an engineering firm and needed to be.

When he came home from the 1989 championship win his boss, Mick Miller, asked him about his intentions. Billy said work was the priority. He wouldn't be touring America in a few weeks with the other champions. Mick said 'go and I'll pay you and you can make up the hours when you come back', and the generosity got him another four-year lease on ring life.

In 1991 he dropped down a weight from light-middle to welter. His best pal Carruth went up a weight from light-welter to welter. Eddie Fisher, the national champion, stayed at welterweight. That year's championship at welterweight featured three national senior title-holders. First out of the draw: B Walsh v M Carruth.

Billy won. A year later Carruth reversed things. Went to Barcelona and made history. Every time Billy looked over his own shoulder the ghosts of Seoul were cackling at him.

He bought into a milk business and the business bought into his time and boxing got left behind. When the IABA came with an offer five years ago, however, he knew before he spoke to Christine what he wanted.

He takes Sundays and Mondays off. Sundays for going to GAA games with his buddies. Monday morning for recovering with a lie-in. He travels up to Dublin on a Tuesday, getting to the South Circular Road for 10am. The boxers are coming in from all over the country by then. They start work at 11 and train twice a day. Through the week.

If Billy is in Ireland he gets home on Saturday night.

Lots of countries whose names end with the letters S-T-A-N. Lots of towns that would need 10-year development plans before they could aspire to being the sweaty underbelly of the particular nowhere they inhabit.

He recalls one week that began in the heat of Cyprus with one team in heat of 23 or so above. The scene shifted two days later to Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, where it was 20 below.

"We pushed these boys to their limits. We brought them everywhere they didn't want to go. They have become mentally strong. A tough process."

THE BOYS came through it all. Billy Walsh is in their ear always about having one chance and taking it. When Darren Sutherland came through to the mixed zone yesterday grinning from ear to ear despite his loss to James DeGale - a fighter he was expected to beat - Darren's face made a counterpoint to Walsh's glower. He knows the cost of not taking your shot.

This has been a good and redemptive week for Irish amateur boxing but when it is over Billy Walsh is looking forward to a break and to watching the Wexford footballers.

He keeps contact with Mattie Forde and before the Armagh game he texted the team captain, Colm Morris, wishing the boys well. He was thrilled when the game was over to get a text back with the result and best wishes to the boys in Beijing.

Wexford. The brotherhood of sport. Comradeship. Things that mean a lot. When it is over he has things he is looking forward to and things he wants to say. He is furious still that Keegan, who has guided Walsh and the boxers through five years, isn't accredited here. Keegan it was who recruited Zaur Antia from Georgia as technical coach and, at a time when the Irish couldn't get into a training camp anywhere in the world because of their bad reputation, persisted and cajoled till first the Irish got in and now other countries seek the favour of their company and excellence at training camps.

"Every day Gary Keegan has thrown down the challenges of excellence to us for five years," says Billy. "I worked with Nicolas Cruz for five years as captain and he was great but when Nicolas went there was nothing left after Nicolas Cruz. No legacy. We had to build a system. Gary Keegan put that system in place and here he is in Beijing on the outside looking in."

The whole team, says Billy, are as thoroughly disgusted as he himself is.

"Gary has not let it be an issue for us. But day to day at home he picks up the pieces around me. He sees the things I miss. He sees issues. He sees guys' moods. Brilliant at seeing the small things I may have missed. I have been able to cover some of these things while we are here but it is hard trying to cover every issue. All this because certain people hate each other. It's a crying shame and it has to stop. For the sake of Irish sport it has to stop."

For now though he stops himself and pulls this punches. He will have more to say about it all when the fighting is done and before the open-top buses are hijacked. For now though it is about the boys. And the one chance. And making sure no ghosts follow them from Beijing like the wraiths that dogged him after Seoul.