The Warriors

Derek Owens visits Darren Sutherland’s old club, St Saviour’s, to catch a glimpse of the tough, close-knit world of Dublin boxing

When Bernard Dunne marched in to ‘O Fortuna’, the 02 erupted, and an up-to-then subdued atmosphere gained a certain spark. The WBA Super Bantamweight world champion and local hero was the slight favourite to win in his first title defence, and seemed confident. “You’ll see what I’ll do,” he told The Dubliner before the fight. “It’s the toughest fight of my career. I’m looking forward to it.” Worries about Dunne’s alleged glass jaw, fears of the aggressive Thai Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym, didn’t show on the Clondalkin native’s face. He looked older than 29, though, and gaunt next to the challenger, who resembled a short, muscular image of the ideal fighter.

Nevertheless, it started well. Poonsawat, whose bullying style had earned him 37 wins and a single loss, lunged at Dunne. When the champion dodged, the crowd applauded like he’d landed an uppercut. After all, if Dunne stayed clear of the challenger – had a boxing match rather than a fight – the advantage would be with him. “Boxing’s not just a brute sport, just beating up your opponent,” he told us beforehand. “There’s thinking behind it, there’s logic behind all your movement and footwork.” Dunne’s own footwork was impeccable as he kept Poonsawat at a distance and finished round one strongly.

“You have to be looking for weaknesses in your opponent. But you also can’t get too involved in your opponent’s style. You concentrate on yourself.” Perhaps this explains why he took his chance in the second round to land a few punches on the relentless Poonsawat. But the challenger kept coming, brushing jabs off, landing punches to Dunne’s body and making him miss. Dunne stood his ground and punched him back. The crowd loved it – but Dunne’s coaches didn’t, and told him so after the round ended.

“You’ve got your corner men in there to help you between rounds, but they can’t take a punch for you, and they can’t throw a punch for you. And that’s the beauty of the sport: there’s absolutely no hiding place.” Dunne’s words again provided the perfect commentary for the fight.He didn’t even look for a hiding place in the third round. Dunne stood solid, letting Poonsawat come at him and trading punches with the shorter, bulkier fighter. When he fell first, it looked like he’d slipped – only TV replays showed a vicious left hook that would have made anyone crumple. Bleeding, looking angry rather than dazed, he came at the Thai fighter, who floored him again with a smart jab after 40 seconds. Poonsawat ran in to finish it – Dunne, leaning against his opponent and taking punches straight to the head, swung wildly and slowly fell again. 

Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym was the new champion (courtesy of a WBA rule that declared a fighter knocked out if he fell three times in one round) and one of the country’s sporting heroes had lost in emphatic fashion. Add to this the death of Darren Sutherland – another fantastic fighter with the potential to go far, who took his own life in his Bromley flat – and September was truly a mensis horribilis for Irish boxing.

‘It’s terrible really. You become very despondent. You’re after working all those years, training to reach your goal. And when you get there, you want to stay as long as possible. To be beaten in your first outing is sad.” Dubliner Pat McCormack saw Dunne’s defeat and has some idea how he’s feeling now. Having boxed in England as an amateur and a pro throughout the 1960s, McCormack won the light welterweight championship of Great Britain, only to lose after 11 rounds in his first title defence. “I was too small for a light welterweight,” he says. When McCormack and his brother John (an accomplished middleweight and former Great Britain champion) retired, the pair followed the route of many former boxers, returning to Ireland and helping to open St Saviour’s Olympic Boxing Academy in 1976.

St Saviour’s on Dorset Street is half an hour’s walk and a million miles away from the revamped 02. The walls of the old fire station smell of sweat from three nights of gruelling training a week, and a small regiment of young boxers (we counted at least 16 young men and one woman) work on conditioning, punching and footwork in close proximity to each other. When they take to the ring and shadow box, it looks initially as if all hell is breaking loose. But there’s a strange sense of order in the club – everyone is following a set pattern, even if it’s impossible for an outsider to work out quite what that is.

John McCormack understands the pattern. In just over 30 years as head trainer of the club, he’s coached Steve Collins, Deirdre Gogarty (a former professional lightweight in Louisiana), and the late Darren Sutherland. Up to ten per cent of the kids who enter the gym, he says, go on to have a pro fight. Most enter St Saviour’s when they’re between ten and 12 years old, spending roughly a decade under him.

“Around the 20 years-of-age mark, they’d be making signs and move on. A lot of them would get married, meet girls,” he says. “As they get bigger, they’ll go to the pub or get another outlet.”

McCormack points to Jake, an 11-year-old wandering around the boxing ring throwing playful punches at the others. “He’s having a laugh, he’s okay. We leave him alone, let him have fun. Then slowly, down the line, we bring him into the fold.”

Together with Derek Ahearn, Colm Byrne is responsible for that developmental job in St Saviour’s, and begins working with children as young as nine. “It’s not boxing as such – what we do is we teach them coordination, balance. Kids that age are naturally fit, so we get them in here and play games. It’s all constructive, but slowly we introduce the technique of boxing in the training sessions,” he explains.

“We bring them along, we let them find their own feet and don’t put pressure on them. Then, slowly but surely, they want to get in there, get the gloves on and get boxing. Then you know you’ve got another one,” adds Byrne, who says the signs of a potential talent crop up at a young age. “You see co-ordination, technique, very early on. It’s like how some people can dance and some people can’t.”

There’s an added ingredient, though: “Boxing is like going out in the rain – if you go out in the rain, you’re going to get wet. If you go in the ring, you’re going to get hit. It’s about taking a punch as well, a bit of punishment. Some kids do and some kids don’t. So when we see a kid with a little bit of talent who gets up after being knocked down, we say ‘We can work with him,’” says Byrne. Jake, for example, “would go to the wall.”

Having boxed until he was 18, before giving up the sport to work for his family business, Byrne enjoys acting as a mentor. “You can’t put a value or a price on this. I’ve worked with kids here – I’ve seen them win titles, I’ve seen them lose. I’ve seen them walk out that door. I’ve seen them come back the next day as if nothing happened. And that’s very rewarding, because you know the kids are trying. A lot of them will give something back to the game as well.”

Giving something back is a theme that keeps cropping up in conversations with any former or present boxers. Bernard Dunne, who won’t reveal any plans of retirement or life after that, will only say that he plans to give back to boxing, and enjoys helping out at his father’s gym in Ballyfermot. Billy Roche, another coach at St Saviour’s who gave up boxing only to return later in life (one of his charges today, in fact, is his daughter Emma) talks fondly of the “circulation” in the sport as older heads teach a new crop of boxers every year.

Leo McCurtin, who boxed for Ireland in the 1950s, has seen a steady stream of boxers (including both Dunne and Sutherland) visit his Walkinstown barber shop. Despite a short pro career (Leo says he “wasn’t good enough,” although his boxing matches helped pay for his house) he keeps in touch with the network of former fighters and coaches. The array of photos on the walls of the shop – most of them largely forgotten Irish boxers, all of them remembered as “great fellahs” or “gentlemen” by Leo – illustrates just how many heroes the sport has made over the years.

Meanwhile, new kids are coming through the doors of St Saviour’s (which is planning to stage a tournament soon in memory of Sutherland, the club’s most famous recent alumnus) every day. Some of them are highly promising: Colm Byrne cites Tommy McDonnell as “one to watch out for,” while we notice a young teenager in a Darren Sutherland t-shirt punching pads with exceptional speed and fury. Of course, early promise doesn’t necessarily translate into success and, while naming Sutherland as the single best boxer he’s seen, Billy Roche is able to name two kids with the same talent who simply stopped showing up at St Saviour’s.

When asked who the most exciting prospect in Irish boxing is right now, though, Pat McCormack is emphatic. “We just lost him,” he says.

Still, there are more than enough kids to fill St Saviour’s today, and enough heroes for newer kids at the club to follow. “They all want to be better than the other kid, and they all have a hero to look up to,” says John McCormack, pointing at the mass of young boxers training. “Everyone likes to be someone else. Everyone wants to be like Muhammad Ali, and even Muhammad Ali wanted to be like someone else. They’re all emulating someone.”