James
The Mightey
Quinn
Mc
Donagh
To pass the time they were playing a game of toss. I joined in, just to keep myself busy more than anything else. Heads and harps, we used to call it before the Euro came in. When I was 12 years old I’d see men out in Cara Park, in Dublin, tossing coins on a Thursday, when ‘the labour’ paid out in the morning. They’d lose all the money they’d just been given to feed their families for the rest of the week: forty, fifty pounds gone, just on the chance that the coin would keep coming up heads. They’d have three or four small kids and they’d have to go back to their wives and family with their dole gone, lost in the toss pit. They’d struggle on for the following week, and then go straight out to gamble again.
If the coin turned up harps, then the other guy would step in. I’ve seen men walk away from the toss pit with up to IR£800 in their hands. I’ve lost six hundred in an afternoon myself, all on the toss of a coin. I had a run of luck that day that didn’t help. It was at my brother Michael’s wedding, and I had to borrow two hundred from someone else just to have some spending money for the rest of the evening. I felt bad about that but it helped me when it came to a fight – I knew what it was like to lose money, and didn’t want to lose the purse. I knew how bad I felt after losing a few hundred, so how bad would it be if I was to lose ten, twenty, or even thirty grand?
I won a little bit and lost a little bit of money that day at the wedding. I didn’t take that as any kind of omen at all – it was just something that relaxed me. Playing toss meant I didn’t go into fight mode too early. Trying to get myself up too soon would just make me tense and tired. It was only when I was on my way to the fight that I’d get into character. That may sound funny, but it’s true. I’m not a violent man; to take up the challenge of these fights was something I did for our family name. The character the rival clans – the Joyces, the Nevins – thought I was, some kind of tough guy – they’d created that. I hadn’t. I had no interest in fighting other than defending the name of the Quinn McDonaghs, and winning that purse.
Soon there were well over a hundred people around me. The Quinn McDonaghs were out in force because I was fighting for our name and they’d come to support me. My uncle Chappy – one of the nicest people I know – came over, and he was riled up by the fight. He gripped my arm with his hand. ‘James, you listen to me. You see them people’ – he waved south, in the direction of where the fight would take place, and I nodded as he continued – ‘all them Joyces and all them Nevins. They’ve never beaten you. Now you’ve done your training, you know what you’re doing. Come back here and do not lose. I’m telling you straight: do not lose this, you make sure that you beat him, and if you beat him you’ve them all beat.’ That’s how much it meant to everyone, that even someone like Chappy could get worked up by the fight. If I beat the Lurcher, then, as Chappy told me, ‘That’s them people gone for ever.’ Big Joe Joyce had said the same to me when he called to arrange the day and time of the fight. ‘You’re fighting the best man of the Joyces. If you beat him, there’ll be no more. We’ll leave you alone,’ he’d said, although I didn’t think for a moment they would. The only hope I had of making sure they didn’t send for me again was if I really hurt the Lurcher. That might be the only way of stopping further fights.
I knew, too, what it would mean if I lost this fight. Then every Joyce and Nevin would be queuing up to take a shot at the Quinn McDonaghs. The other clans had pushed me up onto this place where I was their target, so if one of them managed to knock me down, then in their eyes they would have knocked down the whole Quinn McDonagh clan. To them that’s what this fight meant.
A reporter had shown up who’d heard about the fight and wanted to come and talk to me and then put some pictures of the fight in the paper. I told him why we were fighting. ‘There’s bad blood between the two families, and it’s been going on for years.’ My dad added, ‘Fifty years.’ The reporter also asked about the purse and if the fight was really about that. I smiled but explained that all that meant was ‘a few quid for Christmas too’.
What the reporter didn’t understand was that if I did win, I wasn’t winning £20,000. When we got the money at the end of the fight we’d first give each referee £500. And then I hadn’t put up £10,000 on my own; my family and I had gone to uncles and cousins and everyone would put in a little, a few hundred or maybe more. That way, if I lost, no one lost a lot of money, and if I won, then everyone would get a little share. Winning the fight wouldn’t make me a rich man, but I didn’t tell the reporter that.
The rest of my cousins and uncles then came over to offer me a few words of praise, encouragement and advice. Back-seat drivers, I call them; people with great beer guts who lived in the pub and had never trained in their lives telling me what to do, how to put myself about – and I was the one who’d put in about fourteen weeks’ training for this. So I smiled and thanked them but I didn’t really listen. Once I was standing there in front of Paddy the Lurcher, I’d be the only one who was there to fight him.
I didn’t know what sort of fighter he was going to be, because I’d never seen him fight, although he would have seen the videos of my fights. I didn’t even know what he looked like now, as I hadn’t seen him since the London days nearly fourteen years ago. I’d had some feedback from someone who’d seen him train, and the report said he’d bust the punch-bag hanging in Big Joe’s shed during training.
Hang on a second; how can you bust a punch-bag? Muhammad Ali didn’t bust a punch-bag. What bag was the Lurcher boxing now? A paper bag? A plastic bag? The man is an animal, I was told. He’s breaking the bags off the wall. You’re better off calling the fight off. Was this a game plan of the Joyces? I wondered. There was an awful lot of money riding on this fight and if I refused to fight him I’d lose it all. Was I being fed some line here? Was this meant to get back to me to upset me in my training?
That wasn’t for me to worry about; if anything, it inspired me to train harder. I kept a clear head; I’d fought before, and each time the fight had been out in the open air. This man hadn’t, and his record was one of bullying people, and all the tales I’d heard – of him beating this man, beating that – didn’t worry me because I had no way of knowing if they were people he knew he could beat before a fight, if they were no match for him. There were no tapes to watch, so they could have been what we call ‘fair fights’, or they might not have been. I wasn’t going to give him a chance, and I figured that if I kept my concentration, stuck to my plans, changed from one plan to another if necessary when I was fighting, I’d be OK. I knew I was fit enough.
When I was a kid growing up, I’d trained to be a boxer, I’d learned the basic moves. Left hand slightly out, right hand just above the chin, left leg out, back leg secure. From the age of 16, though, I had no training and the moves that I’d learned before I’d now refined into my own style. Come out, step forward, hit, step off. I’d sparred with people the Lurcher’s size, as far as I could tell, and I’d prepared myself to move quickly so he wouldn’t be able use his height and weight against me.
While I was fighting I’d keep my left arm out in front of me, feeling my way, my fist close to whoever I was fighting so my opponent couldn’t see me clearly enough. If he tried to slap my left arm away, the next minute my right would be sitting in his face. ‘The fishing pole’, the Joyces and the Nevins called it. They didn’t like it one bit. It disturbed my opponents, and broke their concentration. All my trainers when I was in boxing clubs as a young teenager told me not to use my left arm like that, but it was a tactic that always worked for me. I wasn’t going to change it, because it kept me at arm’s length from danger, I’d tell everyone. It was a shield to protect me. I could use it like a poker, jabbing at someone’s eye.
Ned Stokes, my referee, and two of his sons drove into the site about half-eleven. We shook hands. ‘I wish you luck, James. I hope it goes well for you,’ he said. I took a phone call off