From Dundalk it was just under half an hour’s drive on the M1. As he drove Ned Stokes talked about nothing in particular, a pleasant chat designed to take my mind off what the next couple of hours would bring. Once we came off the motorway and into Drogheda I had to find somewhere to wind myself up and get myself into fight mode. My phone would still have been ringing if I hadn’t switched it off. Having a moment to yourself is a rare thing for any traveller, and as for myself I found that there were some days when my house felt like Piccadilly Circus. I needed some time alone now. ‘Pull into this McDonald’s, will you, Ned,’ I said. ‘I need to use the toilet.’
Above the washbasins in the toilet was a mirror. I stared into it and spoke to myself. ‘This is your day, pal. Are you going to do it?’ I hadn’t planned to talk to myself, it just came to me at that moment. I thought of what those lads, my supporters, had been telling me to do; good things, advising me, encouraging me, telling me that the Lurcher was no good and that he couldn’t fight, and trying to get me worked up. But they weren’t here now, I told myself. I was the one who’d have to go out and fight for them all, for the Quinn McDonagh name. The weight of that lay heavily on my shoulders and on some days that pressure told on me, but today wasn’t one of those days. I was strong and fit and determined, and I wanted to go and fight Paddy. I wanted to hit him, to hurt him. To do that now meant I had to hate him. I remembered seeing him in London years ago, watching him bully people, and I focused on that as it helped me create that hatred. This was part of what I had to do – slipping into the role of James the fighter, James Quinn, son of Jimmy Quinn, a role I only have because it’s been forced on me.
It wasn’t hard to find reasons to hate Paddy Lurch; for the past few months I’d neglected so much of my life as I concentrated on this fight, what with the training and the dieting. If I didn’t work, I didn’t earn any money. I’d not spent time with my family. Instead I’d been in the gym, in that boxing ring, day after day for weeks on end. I’d not been to the pub to enjoy myself. I’d had to stop almost everything I was doing so that I could be ready for today. Paddy was the cause of that and the more I thought about what I’d had to stop and what I’d missed out on, the angrier I became. I wanted him to feel the pain that I’d felt for those endless weeks, the pain I’d felt in my muscles and joints as I trained, the aches I’d had those early mornings as I pulled myself out of bed to go jogging. I’d used every moment of the last few weeks to focus my anger on him. No spare time, no drink. No work, no money. All because of the Lurcher.
I needed to get angry because I had to stand in front of Paddy and try to hurt him. I had to be ready to cut his face, to cause him to get stitches under his eyes. Ready to knock him down, ready to give him concussion. Ready to disfigure him with a blow to the nose or the cheek. Ready to hit him hard enough on the head to give him a haemorrhage. Did I care? No. I hadn’t asked for this fight. He had. He was the one who’d made us do this, not me, and I used that to get myself more angry, to really start to hate the man and all those in his clan who’d put him up to fight me. We were here because of him, we were both risking our health and maybe even our lives because of him, and that made me angrier still.
A travelling man’s life is shorter than a settled man’s; the average life expectancy for a travelling man is sixty-seven years. That’s twenty years less than for a settled man. We Quinn McDonaghs have a high rate of heart disease and cancer; there’s heart problems in many of my uncles as well as my mother and father. So why was I adding to the problem by going out to maybe end this man’s life or maybe – if I took a blow in a bad way – my own? The anger boiled hotter.
Good. It was working. I looked into the mirror and repeated, ‘Today, James, you can do it.’
I had been provoked into this fight, and I had no choice but to win it. I had to succeed because if I didn’t hit him, hurt him, knock him down and keep him there, he’d do exactly that to me. I didn’t want to do this. I’m not someone who seeks fights; I’ve never looked for a scuffle in a pub on a Saturday night. I wasn’t proud that I was going to be doing this, I wasn’t happy; but this is what the fights were about. If I was going to win it was because I was ready to do everything I had to. I hated the Lurcher with a vengeance. I had to, otherwise I wasn’t going to win my fight. If I hadn’t hated him, I’d have felt sorry for him, I’d have felt pity – but I didn’t. I didn’t feel sorrow or pity, or compassion. I felt hatred. I wanted to get stuck in, hurt and maim that person. Hurting him badly would make another man think twice before challenging me, and that meant no more fights. So the hatred drove my aggression, and I needed that. That person has upset my whole life, I was thinking, and he’s getting me a name that I don’t like.
The name. It was all about the name.
I left the toilet and got back into the front car. While I’d been inside, Ned had taken the call telling us which location to go to, so with one of his sons in the car behind we set off again. The location was only five minutes away. I held my hands out to the lads in the back and they went to work, running bandages over my hands, thumbs and wrists.
As soon as we arrived at the site I wasn’t happy. I climbed out of the car and looked around but I knew we weren’t going to stay. There was nothing wrong with the place itself; it was the number of people already there to watch the fight I wasn’t pleased to see. I had deliberately left my family behind, and nobody had come with me except the referee, who was independent anyway, and his two sons; a cameraman, to tape the fight so that it could be seen by everyone back in Dundalk later on; and my second, who I needed to tie up my bandages. I’d expected Paddy Lurch to have the same around him too. Instead there was a gang of about fifteen or so there, hanging about waiting for the fight to start. I recognised some faces right away, people I’d fought in the past, Chaps Patrick, Ditsy Nevin, and a dozen or so other Nevins hanging around with them both. There is no doubt whose side they’d all be on when the fight started and I didn’t think that made it fair at all. No wonder Paddy Lurch had suggested this place for the fight. He might as well have said we’d fight at his house.
I got back into the car. ‘I ain’t fighting here,’ I said to Ned. He said, ‘Yes, the agreement we made was none of them people were coming to the fight, there was no other spectators.’ Patrick McGinley had come over to talk to Ned and had his head in through the driver’s window and he heard what Ned was saying. ‘That’s all right, James,’ Patrick said. ‘If you don’t want to fight here, then we won’t fight here.’
The Nevins didn’t like it when they saw me get back into the car. Chaps Patrick, though, came up and said, ‘Would you mind, James, if me and the lad come to the fight?’ He had his young son with him, a boy of about 7 or 8. Why he wanted to bring a kid to watch two men knock lumps out of each other I don’t know. ‘That’s all right, I don’t mind if you two come but’ – I pointed at the Nevins lined up alongside Ditsy – ‘I don’t want those others there.’
This set Ditsy off. Ned was turning the car round and Ditsy started yelling at me, ‘Get out and fucking fight, you cowardly fuck, yer. Get out and fight yer man here.’ I turned to Ned and said, ‘Now you see why I don’t want them there.’ Ned said, ‘James, I understand 100 per cent,’ and we drove away, Ditsy still gesturing and yelling at the car as we left him behind.
Ned drove to the end of a quiet back lane outside Drogheda, and the car with his boys and one with Chaps Patrick followed on. The bandages on my fists were tightened and checked by my second and I pulled off my sweatshirt and started to walk back up the lane to where we were going to fight. It was a grey November day, probably cold, but I didn’t notice, as I’d started to block out what was going on around me. I was narrowing my focus on the things that mattered now, because concentration would win me the fight. One moment when I was not looking at my opponent, where his fists were, what his feet were doing, and – most importantly – where his eyes were looking to, and it could all be over. I’d learned that; fighting someone, their eyes would look where they wanted to go to next, where they wanted to aim for, where they were planning to hit me. It never failed, this; I knew I had a moment to strike back before they could hit me if their eyes led the way. I never took my gaze off my opponent’s face; if I had to hit him on his chin, I knew it was