Two Wexford men included in new book on major Irish boxing figures

Two Wexford men will be included in a new book on major Irish boxing figures of the last 50 years...

Fight of My Life, written by journalist Owen Ryan and published by Hero Books, features interviews with 25 of the country’s top fighters and coaches, including Wexford’s Billy Walsh and Niall Kennedy.

Also included are professional world champions Barry McGuigan, Wayne McCullough, and Deirdre Gogarty, Ireland’s first female professional world champion, long before Katie Taylor. Also included are Olympic medallists Michael Carruth, Kenneth Egan, Paddy Barnes and Aidan Walsh.

In his interview, Billy Walsh speaks about witnessing the night he won his first National Senior title, on which he also witnessed the IRA murder of prison officer Austin Stack.

Walsh was also named best boxer of the night, when he won that first title in 1983, but all delight was put into context when he saw the murder as he walked towards the Headline Bar to meet his supporters.

“I was thrilled, obviously, and I was heading to meet up with them. I walked out of the Stadium, turned to my right, headed towards the Headline and on one of the side streets I witnessed a man being shot.”

“A motorbike revved up, pulled up beside him… I saw the guy shoot him, the bike sped past me and drove off,” Walsh said.

Mr Stack was murdered by the IRA because of his role as a prison officer in Portlaoise, and Walsh says he has never forgotten the horrific killing:

“They found the bike in the Canal but they never got anybody for it. For a few reasons that fight and that night was a very memorable one. It was over 40 years ago and I still remember that poor man.”

“Sometimes you think could it have been me, if I was anywhere closer. Obviously he was targeted , but if you were close to him you could have been shot as well. It’s small margins isn’t it? This is a man who was working voluntarily for Irish amateur boxing, doing his job in Portlaoise. Then to be taken out…”

Walsh says that he almost finished with boxing in May of 1984, after being overlooked for the Olympics, and only hearing about his omission from the Irish team on the radio, while he was training.

“I walked out of the gym, cried obviously. Never went back to the gym until October or something, I went back playing hurling and football. It nearly finished me… I was very close to finishing with boxing.”

Now head coach of USA boxing, he was appalled with many of the decisions at the 2024 Olympics and says AI must be used to improve the judging.

“Three or four years ago I saw a presentation on AI scoring and I think that’s maybe a route we need to take,” Walsh said.

He said that he is thinking of retiring after the next Olympics, and that there would be a nice symmetry to finishing in LA:

“For me, it’d be nice to go to LA, 44 years after not being selected, as a coach with a different nation… And I could finish up there.”

Niall Kennedy said that boxing had been a huge help to him in managing his mental health, and that retirement from the sport he loved had been very difficult.

“It took longer to get over retirement than anything else. I didn’t retire on my own terms. The brain scans came back bad and the BUI wouldn’t give me a licence. I was ten days away from fighting and I wasn’t expecting it at all. I was flying fit, and at the level I was at in boxing, you put all the money into your camp yourself and you don’t get anything back unless you fight. I lost a lot of money in the lead up to the fight, not that that matters so much. It just left a sour taste, and then this is all I’d done since I was seven years of age, and now I wasn’t allowed to box. I struggled with it, massively.

“I have to be busy; my head has to be busy. I wish I had dedicated myself as an amateur, but when I turned pro in 2015 I completely turned it on, really trained hard, did everything as well as I could. I had seven years as a pro boxer and the next thing to be told you can’t do it anymore; that was a bit hard.”

A member of the Gardai, he said he had set up his own operation NBK Survival Training, to help people with mental health challenges.

“Basically, I’ll come out and talk a bit about my own story and my own journey with bipolar. I lost my best friend, a gifted sportsman, Colm Bolger, to suicide when I was 19 and I talk about that. I do a little bit about addiction, a bit about the cognitive behavioural triangle and a little bit about the effect of bullying on people. There’s a thing called mirroring, we have to be aware of the people we pal around with, sometimes we fall into toxic circles or toxic environments. I talk about that too.”

“It’s a pretty heavy talk, but what I’m trying to do is to show people we all have the skills and knowledge to improve our mental health. I bring them out, do an own-body-weight training session, a little bit of meditation and breath work, have a bit of craic and show them they can completely change their humour,” Kennedy said.

Fight of My Life is published by Hero Books and is solely available to purchase on Amazon. For further information please contact Owen Ryan on 086 3269317