Making Ireland punch above its weight

BOXING: TOM HUMPHRIEStalks to Ireland's High Performance Head Coach about his labour of love – the hard, daily grind of preparing Ireland's finest boxers

ANOTHER DAY, another cold morning. The High Performance Unit of the IABA cranks into life slowly on a crooked elbow of the South Circular Road. It is quiet today. Most of the boys are away with their clubs preparing for the National Championships.

Next week will be different.

For now, Billy Walsh has just changed into his black shirt and trousers to head to his office, but Katie Taylor is here with her dad, Pete, and she needs some work on the pads. Well. Ten minutes later he is in the ring again, talking the girl genius through various combinations and dances.

Katie is one of two boxers in different stages of recovery from setbacks who have come here today to be ministered by Billy Walsh. Kenny Egan has just left, tanned and no longer in denial. His days are about boxing again. And about making his AA meetings.

Katie Taylor has just got here. She was beaten, well, robbed, at the weekend in Bulgaria but here she is today back to work. Proof of the creed of this place. The focus is on performance not outcome.

Watch and learn. Katie Taylor’s punches have the speed of the cobra’s bite but a different percussion. Breathtaking and scientific at once as she and Billy circle the ring. After every flurry though she stands and listens as Billy plays what was a blur of movement back in slow motion through his head. Knees more bent. Right a little higher. Work up from the crouch. And so on.

You watch Billy Walsh and he is completely absorbed in the forensics of each Taylor punch. And Katie Taylor is open to every scrap of guidance which comes from a great teacher. If boxing is a sport of violence, this is an act of love.

This is a place of nurture.

The High Performance Unit sits in a building which was once an armoury. This seems fitting not just because of the big guns who come in and out of here every day but because of the bullets which those who run Ireland’s most successful coaching unit have to dodge.

You will remember that, having sent one boxer to each of the Olympiads in Sydney and Athens, the High Performance Unit swung into force and sent five boxers to Beijing . Three of them came home with medals. The same number as Russia.

You will recall the bullets too. Gary Keegan the HPU’s director not being given a credential for Beijing. Keegan moving on after Beijing leaving a gap which for 20 months his brother in arms, Billy Walsh, filled for no extra pay.

Just for love. And then when it came down to appointing a new High Performance Director? Billy Walsh got a flip of the high hat and the IABA’s own president, Dominic O’Rourke, got the job of High Performance Director.

You may recall too that the Irish Sports Council then declined to fund this appointment. And finally some sort of frosty detente was reached with O’Rourke becoming Director of Boxing and Billy becoming High Performance Head Coach.

Just over a year away from the London Olympics, Billy is keen to leave it all behind. When asked about “the job” he rolls his eyes with an eloquence which says “don’t mention the war” and then adds “ I am, where I am”.

Where he is now as we talk is in the office which overlooks the three rings and weights area of the High Performance Unit. Fitting that he should be afforded this panorama because this is his domain and his kingdom and the place has his passion, his blood, his sweat and his tears in every square inch.

The walls are red and yellow in the livery of a fast food change to subliminally remind boxers to be fast in and fast out. The walls have boards upon them which the World, European or Olympic champions have been given in order to write their favourite motivational quote. Katie Taylor has a psalm. Eamon O’Kane has “don’t follow your dreams, chase them”.

The end wall, where the weights are, is blue. Restful. Conducive to concentration. Red, yellow, blue, motivational quotes. These are the details, just some of them, which the High Performance Unit deals in.

The week before last Billy Walsh was sick. He stayed home in Wexford in his house near Wexford Park. An ardent Wexford man, with a deep love of his home place, even he was surprised at how much he enjoyed being about the place, taking rambles, heading down to his GAA club (Faythe Harriers), meeting friends.

He is so seldom there he had forgotten those things. Two months of the year at least are spent on the road, in training camps. In November for instance he was 11 days in Checkov, outside Moscow with an elite team of 12. Not a luxury trip one imagines, but then nothing here is about luxury.

At the opposite end of the old angle-roofed building on the South Circular is a room with a bed in it. Billy sleeps there as often as is necessary, two, three nights a week in order to keep the place ticking over. Love. And belief.

Billy’s is the conviction which fuels this place. Facing the door when you come in to the gym is a big sign which should be attributed to Billy Walsh even if he never said it: “Welcome to High Performance, Where Champions Achieve Because They Believe.”

“You only achieve what you believe. We put our hands together after every training session and say that.”

Can it only be seven, eight years that this place has been in existence? We have become so accustomed to the sequence of excellence seeping from the South Circular that we have forgotten the bad days.

Billy doesn’t forget. They were back in Checkov with the Russians last November. On the final day of camp the Irish team of 12 had bouts with their Russian counterparts. No scores were kept but the evidence was obvious.

Through Zuor Antia, a Georgian who washed up in Bray and is the Technical and Tactical Director here, the Irish first got access to the Russian system back in 2003. Another November. Another training camp. An old mindset. They brought an experienced team with them so as not to be embarrassed.

Hugely experienced. Andy Murray, Paul McCloskey, James Moore, Andy Lee, Kenny Egan and Alan Reynolds.

They got destroyed.

Humiliated.

The Irish came back and tore up the training manual. They had been embarrassed by their own lack of intensity, by the limits of their technique. They began again.

They learned as aptly and readily as Katie Taylor is learning this morning. Five years later before the Olympics in Beijing, the Irish trained with the Russians in Vladivostok. Then they won the same amount of Olympic medals as the Russians did. The invites slowed for a while.

In November they were back where they started though. This time the Irish noticed that the Russians have had 50 years to become set in their ways. A system needs to be nimble.

“It was so heartening to go back seven years later with a 17-year- old, a couple of 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds and hold our own. We were doing better than the Russians in some instances.

“Technically we have evolved with the younger group and we could compete very well with them. Our guys used to be in awe going over there. Now they look and see that their own coaching is as good as anything out there. Our strength and conditioning was probably better than the Russians. We were as good in sparring and in training We started with a blank page, we had to build a system. “

Of those who comprised the youthful team which went to Russia in November, last night’s national finals were the starting bell in the race for the London Olympics. Kids like the 17-year-old light heavyweight Joe Ward of Moate look set to be part of the family here on the South Circular for some time to come.

For Billy Walsh though every day is about performance. What outcomes accrue is down to something else. The ring is a simple place where almost everything is scientific enough to be explainable. The world outside is the trouble. Beijing was a massive achievement but the aftermath hurt. The death of Darren Sutherland. Kenny Egan’s troubles. The Job.

He talks of Egan as a man would speak of a son. When Egan spoke recently about his struggles with alcoholism, Billy breathed a huge sigh. “I’ve been living that life with him since Beijing. We have had many a conversation and many a tear shed between us. Many a walk together.”

When Kenny Egan spoke to his mother, Maura, who took him to the graveyard and the grave where she had buried two of her children and pleaded with her son to stop drinking, it was Billy whom Kenny came to later.

“He came to me that night and we walked in the rain up on Sundrive Road for an hour and we both cried. I had been telling him he had this problem for quite a while. He came to me that night and said to me that, yes, he had the problem.

“Thankfully. He needed to tell people. His friends were the guys who were calling for him. They didn’t have to twist his arm but they were encouraging him.

“For Kenny to come to that decision to stop he had to let everybody know. I said to him just this morning, ‘how are you keeping’ and he said it’s going well, he’s going to the meetings. His mates don’t call on him now to go for a drink.

“They know he has an issue with it and he’s not drinking. A happy day hearing that from him. He’s in great shape. Mentally the best I have ever seen him. Hopefully that will continue for another couple of years.”

Kenny is still here. So too, oddly, is Darren Sutherland. His photographs are on the walls, his grin is in the memories, his quote is on the wall, his presence is about the place. His loss focused the people in this building on what was important, drew them tighter together than ever.

“The effects that Darren’s passing had on everybody are still here. At the European championships we dedicated our medals to him. He was with us every day for so long. A special kid. I still believe that if he was with us here he would be still alive. He was catered for and listened to here. Not isolated.

“We are a big family in here. We have a great bond between all of us. We go through it all together. We get very emotional and very wrapped up in what we do. There is such sadness even when a fella falls off the team.

“They are all personalities and it is tough to tell them after seeing the effort that they aren’t making the squad. You can imagine Darren’s loss in comparison to that.”

There’s a terrible equation at work here. To achieve funding you have to have some sort of national success. To get more funding you need more success. The fighters in here have a grant income ranging from €5,000 a year at the bottom of the scale to €40,000 at the top. Nobody is getting rich. Even comfortable.

So every now and then a talented fledgling will fly the coop and turn pro. When they turn pro they leave this nurture behind. It’s a quite traumatic sundering.

“Darren was in here six weeks before his passing. We probably should have flagged some of the things. He was talking to us about how lucky we were here, having each other. He said about how he was on his own. We thought it was Darren having an old moan. We slagged him. ‘Your choice son, you went for the money.’ Joking.

“It makes me so sad. The structure he went into. There is nothing there to look after those guys. The pros take them over and they don’t know them. I met the pro people the night of Darren’s debut fight in DCU and they were complimenting us, saying he was well-schooled and a great kid.

“Strange thing is nobody asked any of us what he was like, what were his likes, his dislikes, what made him tick, what sort of environment he would thrive in. It can take years to find that out. And they never asked. They call it professional but they don’t have half the excellence that this system has around the team here.”

Billy is passionate now. Intensely proud of what has been wrought in those draughty old buildings. The video analysis. The biomechanics. The pages of performance breakdowns. The iPods upon which each fighter has a video of his best moments set against his favourite inspirational tune. The monitoring. The camps. The sense of purpose and patriotism.

Next week it starts again. The sessions twice a day. In the morning, the runs to Sundrive Park or the weights sessions. In the evening times always the boxing work. All so that they can leave everything in the ring after that nine minutes. It’s a house of pain and sacrifice far beyond the ole, ole, ole chorus we will reward them with.

The people here have been together a long time. After London, Billy sees some of the older guys drop off. He hopes Egan’s experience and his talents as a communicator will make him a shoo-in for a coaching job here. But like all boxers, Billy knows caution first. This is a man who for all his adult life virtually has found it hard to talk about his own heartbreaking Olympic defeat in Seoul in 1988. He never looks at the outcome, just the next piece of performance.

“Nobody has even got to London. We have this talent here but nobody has qualified. We have to get that right first. Without it there is no Olympic games.”

And without Billy’s love affair with this corner of the South Circular Road there wouldn’t even be daydreams.

National Championships Ward ends Egan's 10-year reign

A FULL HOUSE at the National Stadium had prepared to rise to Ken Egan's redrawing of the amateur boxing history books last night. Instead they were treated to one of the biggest upsets in the championship's 100-year history as the charming rogue from Neilstown, an Olympic medallist at light heavyweight, lost to Joe Ward a 17-year-old from Moate.

"He was the greatest and I'm the latest," declared a delighted Ward afterwards.

Egan was chasing his 11th National Senior title in succession but his defeat to a boxer eight years his junior continued the fall of champions and international medal winners over the last three weeks. The southpaw, who won silver in Beijing, had never been beaten in the Elite Championships since winning his first title in 2001. But Ward went into last night's frenzied fight with a lack of respect that only a teenager could bring.

From the outset the World Junior champion, waded into Egan with aggression and intent. Egan didn't panic and settled into the blizzard trying to pick off points. But the no-respect attitude of Ward had him 2-1 ahead after the first round.

There was still time for Egan to reclaim ground but the second round was to be the champion's undoing. At 2-2 with Egan trying keep his nerve under the intensity of Ward's aggression, referee Sadie Duffy, warned him twice for use of the head, which gave Ward four points, the round drawing to a close at 4-4.

Egan could still have won it but four points in one fight was a mountainous disadvantage and, to compound the champion's problems, Ward caught him with a left hook and Egan hit the canvas forcing a standing count. While he waved his hand to indicate he had slipped, the crowd roared on the youngster.

But the drama continued and a doctor was called to examine a cut in the corner of Ward's eye. It didn't change anything. The bell finally ended the battle, Ward 11-6 ahead, Egan the great champion finally crushed.

Earlier, Paddy Barnes was on a mission for a fifth successive Irish senior title and he duly delivered in convincing fashion with a 9-1 victory over Evan Metcalfe, the current under 21 and Intermediate champion.

The wiry ball of muscle Barnes, a bronze medallist at the Beijing Olympics, who also won gold at the European Championships in Moscow last year and gold again in the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, has already set his sights on another Olympic medal next year.

Barnes did fall behind 1-0 but his watertight guard and controlled points-scoring patiently build up a lead from mid first round, by the end he was landing combinations and inevitably heading towards the title. At 4-1 up after round one he moved to 6-1 after two and efficiently finished the fight 9-1.