A Tough Fighter With a Grand Gift of Making Peace

I rish prizefighter used to be a redundant term in this country--like German soldier, French lover or Italian singer.

There was the mighty John L. Sullivan, who bragged that he could lick any man in the house and whose name became a universal synonym for fistic violence.

There were the elegant James J. Corbett, the original Jack Sharkey. Jack Dempsey was part Irish, part Indian and all American. Jimmy McLarnin was a darling of the bootleg era, and so was Mickey Walker.

Mike McTigue and Tommy Loughran had their brief vogue. Billy Graham fought in Garden mains, but the breed sort of died out with Billy Conn, the last of the great Irish pugs.

They all ministered to group esteem, and the Irish kids swaggered a little bit extra on the nights when they fought--and won. They came along at a time when “Micks” and “red-necks” and “mackerel snappers” were popular epithets in this country and “No Irish Need Apply” signs were hung in storefronts.

So, they had their historic and political importance the way Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali were later to have for black America, or Rocky Marciano and Benny Leonard for their ethnic counterparts.

Americans revere athletic prowess as few societies have since the ancient Greeks, and the prize ring was an especial showcase for racial pride and courage and skill.

Given all that, it’s doubtful if any prizefighter, indeed, any athlete, ever meant more to a troubled, beset people than the Irish fighter of the ‘80s, Barry McGuigan.

Unlike most of his predecessors, he is not a transplanted Irishman. He’s the real, home-grown article.

He’s not your dime-novel, larger-than-life, wide-screen, Rambo type of hero. Barry is almost leprechaun-sized, something you’d expect to find at the end of a rainbow with his shoes curled and a clay pipe in his mouth.

He’s the featherweight boxing champion of all the world, or at least that part of it controlled by the World Boxing Council, and when his name comes up in Erin, it’s not only like a morn in spring, it’s a signal to stop the killing for a day and let Irish eyes be smiling and Irish hearts be happy.

Ireland is a country that has historically raised its sons--and daughters--for export only. So, its pride is immense when a home-grown wins a gold medal in the Olympics--or a title in the prize ring.

Barry McGuigan grew up in the strife-torn Ireland of the ‘70s in the market town of Clones (pronounced CLOW-ness) on the border of the war zone, a place where the weapons of terror were smuggled into the embattled counties of Northern Ireland.

Mum and Da ran a grocery store there, but the area’s economy was crippled by the artifacts of hate--in this case, roads deliberately torn up by the Royal Ulster Constabulary to interrupt the crimson river of arms and explosives to the arsenals of the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

It was not a happy Ireland the young McGuigan grew up in. It was a land of sad songs and melancholy rhymes. The sun went down on Galway Bay stained with blood.

Barry was not a particularly combative young boy. Dad was a music hall singer of some note whose career had taken him clear to New York in his day, and young Barry took to boxing more as an outlet for youthful energy than with an eye to a career.

“I found I had a poonch,” he says, considerably to his astonishment even today. “I wasn’t Joe Looie but I must have weighed six stone (84 pounds) and here I was knocking down these bigger blokes only half trying.”

McGuigan made it to the Moscow Olympics in 1980, but three rounds of standup fighting were not enough for his brash, brawling style, which concentrated more on landing one damaging blow than the cluster of stinging ones.

“I copied me style from the American fighters,” he said. “We brought the sparring partners from the gyms of New York and Philadelphia.”

He came under the tutelage of the canny Belfast bookmaker, Barney Eastwood, and the word soon spread throughout the land of his birth from the vales of Tralee to the slopes of Bulben that Ireland had a gladiator the likes of which it hadn’t seen since Brian Boru.

As a symbol of all Ireland, Barry had a tight wire to walk. A Catholic whose wife was Protestant, a Republic of Ireland citizen who was raised just across a hedge from Ulster, Barry was a walking demilitarized zone.

His role as a peacemaker was exaggerated, perhaps, in the foreign press--it was more hopeful than actual--but it was true that no bombs flashed the nights McGuigan did battle.

All Ireland was united for once the night he fought for the featherweight title of the world in London, and his adoring public spoke both in the harsh glottal accents of the north and the lilt of Killarney to the south.

Dad sang “Danny Boy” at the introductions, a neutral ballad as acceptable to the Ireland of the RUC as the IRA.

McGuigan won 29 of 30 fights, including the featherweight title from Eusebio Pedroza in London in 1985. He avenged his only loss by flattening Peter Ewbanks in eight in a rematch.

Twenty-four of his fights ended in knockouts. One ended in death. Young Ali hemorrhaged to death after their fight in June 1982.

He’s not fast, he’s not a picture boxer. But you have to shut him out. If he lands, so do you.

He will complete his education as the pride of Ireland June 23, when he fights in the U.S. for the first time.

He’ll be headlining a tripleheader card at Caesar’s Palace that night when he shares a spotlight with Thomas Hearns and his personal idol, Roberto Duran. (In Ireland, he says, it’s Robert O’Duran.)

He will fight Fernando Sosa of Argentina, but the nice part of it is that the only fighting of any interest to Ireland on that night will be taking place in a parking lot in Las Vegas, instead of at a roadblock in Ulster.