Just about every sport I was rubbish at; so when I realised that I could throw out my two hands well, I was pleased. I don’t know whether people were happy for me that I’d found something I could do, or if they were just being polite, when they said, ‘You know, James, you’re not bad at that boxing there,’ but that motivated me. I’d finally found something that I enjoyed and that people liked seeing me doing. It would be big-headed of me to say I was good at boxing right from the start, but I’d found something that I was better at than most other people. I only took it up in the first place because I could do it and because I thought that if I was any good I could use it to stop being bullied – I had no idea where it would take me in the end. I just wanted to be able to look after myself in years to come.
My father never had a fist-fight in his life. His brother Chappy was known as a man to have had a few fights, but not my father. If my father got into trouble, Chappy would step in and take his place or go and sort it out. He had done a bit of boxing – or a bit of fighting, shall I say – but no training. So I’m not sure why my brother Paddy and I took to it so well. I just know we did.
When I was 10 and Paddy a year or so older, we were given boxing gloves for Christmas. Paddy loved boxing from the moment he started; he still loves it to this day, and although he’s a bit old to do the training now, he still has the head for it and knows what he’s doing. As Paddy’s sparring partner, it took me a while to do more than just stand there and block his punches. But eventually I did, and that’s when people noticed I could box quite well. So I was sent along to a club to train and learn to box properly.
Paddy started to box regularly at a local gym in Dundalk. When he went for his training sessions I would sometimes go down there with him. At first I felt out of place – the other boys seemed more powerful than me and I was long and skinny then – but after a while I got to like it. I started feeling fitter from all the training I did and once I had learned to protect myself properly I really started to enjoy the boxing itself.
I joined the Dealgan Boxing Club and I trained there for about a year and a half before we moved too far away for me to travel there easily. Then, when we moved to Cara Park, I carried on my training at the Darndale Boxing Club in Coolock, where they produced great boxers like Joe Lawler, who fought in the 1986 Olympics. There I learned how to move when boxing, how to breathe – not as simple as it sounds – and it was there I would have my first fights. The first thing the trainer, Joe Russell, taught me at Darndale was to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth. ‘James,’ Joe said, ‘every chance you get, hold back, get the breath in your body. Stand off a little, not so far he notices but far enough to give you a little time to breathe. Take every chance you can. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Don’t show you’re breathing, like this’ – he would breathe heavily and fast through his mouth – ‘don’t let them know. Just step back and be on your foot, be on your back foot, be on your toe.’ Joe would demonstrate by standing tall and breathing deeply through his nose. ‘Side step. When you feel tired, you know, just step back a little bit. Drop the hand. Let the blood flow back in. If you hold it up for five minutes it gets tired. So you have to just pull it back in and relax.’ Now Joe was talking about fighting in a ring, where there are breaks to let you recover your breath and lower your guard. Years later, when I was fighting out in the air with no ropes and no breaks, his advice was still the best I’d been given. Rest, and breathe, whenever you can.
The boxing club itself was a place I liked to go to, because the people there had an attitude towards us travellers that was completely different from what we’d encountered at school. Schools hadn’t been very good to us, whereas the boxing club welcomed us in. Having someone teach me who encouraged me to improve every time I came in – a new experience after my years at school – meant not only that I started to enjoy my boxing, but that learning came easily to me. In addition, the training did a lot for my strength and my physique. I found aggression that I didn’t have outside in the world would come to me when I was in the ring. At first I wondered where this came from, because outside the ring I thought I was a normal person, but when I stepped into the ring it was a different story. Perhaps it was because with the gloves on and someone in front of me wanting to hit me, I became a different person.
Young traveller lads on the sites we stayed on were often keen to take up the sport because it meant they could say to themselves and their friends, ‘I can handle myself, I can box.’ Sometimes boxing clubs would have as many as ten or twelve travellers as members, but as usual they would come and go, depending on where their families were living and working and whether or not they could keep up the training. Me and Paddy were the most persistent two in the club; we stuck it out for a good few years, Paddy longer than I did. My younger brother Dave joined us in the club and he too was a good boxer, but he never kept it up the way Paddy did, or went out onto the street with it the way I did.
At the club I made good progress and was paired up with Joe Lawler as my sparring partner. He was about my age but a lot lighter than me and a lot smaller too. To be honest, Joe was my biggest nightmare there. He had a right-hand punch that I couldn’t seem to avoid, and when he hit me with it I was always taken by surprise because it was phenomenally hard. He would jump up slightly and sling his hand forward, and I’d see it coming at me, riding over the top of his reach until it connected with my head – bam. I don’t think he’d be allowed to use it now, but he’d just sink it on my head and I’d feel my brain pounding. Joe was brilliant: I watched him win nearly fifty fights with a knock-out, and in all of them that right hand of his made the difference. I used to dream about that punch, it preyed on my mind so much.
The first time I stepped into the ring for a competitive fight I wasn’t successful, but as it was my first fight I hadn’t had any experience, so I wasn’t disappointed that I lost that one, and besides I knew I’d fought very well. But the next fights went my way: I won every one of the following thirteen, both club and competition fights. Ten boxers would be picked from each club and put into the ring to fight each other. The biggest fights for me were when I fought for Dublin against Galway, Cork and Limerick in the under-18 County League as a little scrawny ten-stone welterweight.
I didn’t win my last County League fight, though, against a guy from Omagh, in County Tyrone. A Northern Ireland champion, he was four years older than me, bigger than me, stronger than me; and at that age those four years can make a lot of difference. But everyone said I had balls to go into the ring with the guy and so I felt some confidence before the fight. And I went into the ring and fought well; although I lost I didn’t embarrass myself. My trainer said, ‘James, well, you know you lost, though to me it was a fifty/fifty fight but the judges went against you.’ I knew he was trying to pick me back up, but the feeling of losing that fight was pretty bad. But at least I knew I’d been beaten by someone bigger, stronger and more experienced. If I’d lost to someone I didn’t feel had those advantages over me, I’d have been almost suicidal. I understood then how much I didn’t like losing, and it was something I hadn’t realised until it happened.
I didn’t yet think I could make anything of myself as a boxer. I enjoyed it and wanted to carry on but at that time it wasn’t something I thought I could carry on for ever. This was down to my family life; I knew that at any moment we might move away from Dublin and I’d no longer be coming into the gym. I had a couple of competitive fights coming up, one in Dublin and then – if that went well – a tournament in Leeds where I’d be representing Ireland – when my father told me we were leaving the city.
We had been living in a little traveller housing scheme in Coolock, but my father told me he needed to move again in his hunt for work, because there was none anywhere in the Dublin area. I didn’t know it at the time, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to me then, but Ireland was going through a deep recession. Back then most travellers didn’t know what a recession was. Now they can see that a recession affects all walks of life, but at that time, like most people, they didn’t know anything about politics or economics; all they knew was about surviving, day-to-day living. My father decided that we’d try our luck in England again, so my time in the