Hungry to mix it with the best

He trains, he sleeps at night. For the moment that's his lot. A boxer hungry for a fight, an amateur seeking his professional licence. Cathal O'Grady is at the bottom of the flesh and blood pyramid looking up towards the glitzy apex where heavyweight champions catch the eye and sparkle like chrome knuckle dusters.

Ask him and he'll fearlessly defend his dreams. He'll tell you that's where he belongs - at the top, the very top. Raw-boned and callow, O'Grady will explain how he can get there. He believes it. Maybe you have to in the fighting game.

A smile breaks across his ruddy face in the telling, his hopes and ambitions spilling out into full spate. There is no stemming the want in the 20-year-old heavyweight. A boxer starting out, not yet bitten or soured. Not yet caught up in the contractual row or the shadow boxing of fight politics. Unmarked by the unseemly backroom manoeuvres of the sport or the grind of late fights and drunken abuse at the butt end of a card.

No rabbit punches have yet been sprung over percentage takes or twelfth-hour opponents. Bright-eyed to the days ahead in the buffalo division of boxing. The yellow brick road is there, in front of O'Grady. All he has to do is take it.

Red bricks front the Francis Xaviour Hall sandwiched between rows of flats on Dorset street, Dublin. The pain of the gym hits you at the entrance. The door is a sheet of metal, inside a windowless sweat-room full of evaporated fluids and humming canvas. To the uninitiated it is a chamber of horrors, a place of thirst, a reminder to the sinew and tendon fighters of their lightweight limits.

The dull thump, thump, thump of somebody's feet, the hiss of punches slamming the pads and the lick of the rope on the wooden floor beat out a high tempo. O'Grady is on the heavy bag stewing around.

Six feet tall. A small heavyweight but bigger than Mike Tyson. That's important.

"It's going well," he says. "I'm after taking down 24lbs in the last six weeks. My body fat is after halving now. It's down as low as it can go. Now I don't eat anything bad. I wouldn't even eat a sweet. Coffee is the only thing; I'm allowed one vice."

O'Grady stands straight like a pillar, the natural strength of the land in his muscles. The dairy farming in Kildare is now largely in the background but the years of lugging machinery and livestock have bestowed him with an impressive meat-and-three-veg muscularity. This strength is his anchor point.

"I was always strong . . . always a puncher . . . so I've worked fast . . . everything has to be nice and fast . . . speed is power-you know. That's what I'm working on . . . I'm working on a few moves too . . . different combinations . . . you didn't see me on the pads with Jimmy . . . he's working on combinations."

It has been a year now since O'Grady walked away from Atlanta with his head down. He'd thought about the games since he was 10 years old. He knew then that in 1996 the Olympics would be there waiting for him and he would be 19. So he aimed for them and he got them. They offered him little more than an early exit.

"It still hurts now. It hurt then and when I think of it anytime it still hurts. But what can you do? I'm the kind of fighter who fights with a little bit of . . . reckless abandon. Sometimes I tend not to be as defensive as I should be and I got caught. I went down, slipped and hit my head heavily on the canvas. I couldn't box on.

"I said to the the guy `the best of luck in your next fight, and I shook his hand. He was lucky that day. I'll have my lucky days too. He was beaten in his next fight so it didn't stay with him too long."

O'Grady was a teenager at the games and fighting as a heavyweight. He had already won the European Amateur Boxing under-19 title, the first Irishman ever to do so.

He had taken the National Senior Championship that year to add to his collection of 10 national titles. He is the best Irish amateur heavyweight but in professional terms still a green shoot where teak toughness only arrives in the late 20s.

On September 26th he will follow the same trail as Wayne McCullough, Michael Carruth and Steve Collins. He will sign up to become a professional. He will have the tools - a manager, Brian Peters, and a promoter, Frank Maloney. Then he will start at the bottom.

"It will take a couple of years with all the setbacks and all, broken hands, broken arms, things you can't take into account now. It's a case of getting guys who suit my style. There are some boxers I'll never look good beating. The thing at the beginning is to make me look good in all the fights. So I'm expected to win because they are pretty much chosen opponents with an odd tough guy thrown in." In the Dorset Street gym they whisper, "we're hoping Xaviour's will have their third World Champion - Steve (Collins), Deirdre (Gogarty) and Cathal."

The great white hope. It's there waiting for him if he can wade his way through the shallows of the first few years. Understanding that boxing now is an interbreeding of vaudeville, marketing, being able to fight and hype, he doesn't mind. There is no reason why O'Grady should become the champion of the world. There is no reason why he should not. It's too early to say.

His journey towards recognition will be more difficult than those who left the Olympics with gold or silver medals, Ali, Oscar De La Hoya, Lennox Lewis, Roy Jones Jnr, Michael Carruth . . . Carruth? Even a gold medal is no shoe-horn into boxing super riches.

"I don't have any fears. Not conscious anyway. The last thing I think about is losing and if it happens we'll deal with it. If I'm going to have a go at it, isn't it better to try than not to try. I don't think I'll fail. I think I'll be okay. I think I'll be world champion. That's the truth. It sounds cocky but it's big time or nothing or me. Anything that's worth doing is going to be hard. I know that."

Big talk. But O'Grady has been over to talk to McCullough in Las Vegas. He has spent time in Jersey with Collins, who brought him over, gave him some advice and paid the bill for the stay. O'Grady remembers little things like that. He remembers his brother Sean Og stepping into the ring with him on a number of occasions and sparring. Last Christmas the brother broke his hand on Cathal's head.

"When I make it big time," says O'Grady, "I'll feather his nest. I don't like sparring him. Brothers shouldn't really spar, know what I mean. But what can you do when there is no-one else. In fairness to him he always comes in. They don't be easy spars for me or for him. They'd be hard," he says.

For the cheapest sparring partners, £400 a week with flights and accommodation on top just about covers the cost.

"You bring in sparring partners, you beat them up and they want to go home. And if you go too hard on them they'll go home. That's no good. You wouldn't knock your sparring partner out but you'd go hard on him."

There just aren't the heavy weights in Ireland for the job, although O'Grady will likely start out his pro career at the lighter cruiserweight. He's 187 lbs now, 3lbs off the cruiserweight limit. "Plenty of room for two or three pounds more of muscle," he says.

For the summer it is the morning runs around the roads of Kildare with `Ginger' the family red setter. It's running past the sleepy-eyed early morning commuters at the bus stop and saying to himself "yeh, I feel good, so good I can beat anyone. It's travelling up to Dublin to the gym and getting on the pads with Jimmy Halpin. Mostly though it's dreaming of the first few years. In his mind O'Grady has already travelled the yellow brick road. He's not unaware of the potholes, but impatient to begin the journey.

"I think I'd go down well in Boston," he says. "I'm an allaction fighter. I either kill or be killed.

"Know what I mean."