When the trio of McGuigan brothers enter the coffee shop on Belfast’s Great Victoria Street, it is immediately apparent who is the most relaxed. It is the day before Shane will walk to the ring as the trainer of a world champion for the first time but, having just fed and watered his fighters post […]
The men’s ski jump record was broken last weekend: twice in quick succession in fact. At a world cup event in Norway, Slovenia’s Peter Prevc became the first man to fly unaided more than a quarter of a kilometre over a frozen strip of snow before, the following day, local lad Anders Fennemel went 1.5m […]
There was relative calm that night in Kiev, a year ago this weekend. An uneasy truce between the government and opposition saw Hrushevskoho Street partially cleared while the Maidan Nezalezhnosti protestors around the corner braced themselves for the violence they sensed was coming. The official beginning of the 2014 Ukranian Revolution was still three days […]
There will be no love lost inside Blackpool’s Winter Gardens this Valentine’s night as the latest instalment of the Prizefighter series hits England’s answer to Atlantic City. Barry Hearn’s innovative one night, eight man, twenty-one round shoot-out returns in its 35th incarnation and this time it will be a merry band of middleweights vying for […]
There are various sports that, when played at the highest level by protagonists approaching peak performance, can be legitimately described as beautiful or brutal. But it is perhaps only in the sport of boxing that the beauty and brutality arrive simultaneously: and even in the prize ring the occurrence is rare and fleeting. However, those […]
Imagine a world where at least four athletes walk away from each event in the Olympic Games with shiny gold medals. Where on a Sunday evening every April at Augusta National, four or five different golfers pull out of Magnolia Lane and head for home with a winners’ cheque tucked into the breast pocket of […]
Muhammad Ali’s star shone so brightly throughout the 1970s that it is easy to squint and blur the rest. And when other figures from that golden age in heavyweight boxing do come into focus, it is invariably on account of their orbit having brought them into close proximity with the GOAT rather than an acknowledgement […]
It was H.P. Lovecraft, that master of horror fiction, who first declared that the “oldest and strongest kind of fear is a fear of the unknown.” When we can neither see nor fully comprehend something, imaginations are free to run wild and create their own hyperbolised reality. That which may in fact be merely mildly […]
As 2014 draws to a close, two of the greatest boxers on the planet are strutting their stuff in the Far East. One, Guillermo Rigondeaux, is in Japan through necessity. As the most avoided fighter in world boxing today, he must set sail for whichever shores will yield an opponent willing to enter the same […]
We’re not sure exactly what James Whitcomb Riley had in mind when he very neatly illustrated the philosophy of inductive reasoning with his famous, if it walks, swims and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, line. While it may have been simply a flippant remark to end a tiresome debate on the intricacies of […]
Towards the end of his eye-opening/watering 2013 autobiography, Michael Gerard Tyson compares the merits of his own heart to that which beats in the chests of modern-day prize fighters and can’t help lamenting the paucity of passion burning within the new breed. “They spring from a milieu too meagre to comprehend my kind of reality” […]
Ireland was a great place to be back in the mid-1990s. World Cup qualification and Eurovision hegemony appeared a given, while the roar of a green, white and gold Celtic Tiger was ushering in an unparalleled, though ultimately arenaceous, period of economic growth and prosperity. Amidst the revelry, a Celtic Warrior rode the crest of […]
In Liverpool on the 22nd of this month, almost hidden within the stacked undercard of the Nathan Cleverly versus Tony Bellew rematch, George Groves will continue rebuilding his boxing world with a bout against the American super middleweight, Denis Douglin. It will be exactly one day short of a calendar year from the moment, 25 […]
Even by the standards of the traditionally harrowing backstories of rags-to-riches-to-rags prize fighters, the early years of the great light heavyweight, Matthew Saad Muhammad, are particularly heart-rending. He was a 27 year old man before someone told him his birth name, and recollections of his time on earth as Maxwell Antonio Loach remained hazy until […]
Round 9. If you are going to produce a series of articles based on Ring Magazine’s coveted Round of the Year award, there is really only one place to begin. Round 9. The fact that, even with the above headline and photograph removed, boxing aficionados would already know we are talking about the first Arturo […]
It takes no great time, effort nor Poirot-esque powers of deduction, to pinpoint Anto Connolly’s three priorities in life. In a very particular order they are as follows: family (partner Dee and young boys, Wyatt and Fionn), craft (professional boxer) and football team (Glasgow Celtic). The first literally screams out its presence to me from […]
Scott Quigg is a nice guy. The number of fighters, managers, promoters and pundits to preface an opinion on the Bury boxer with a comment on his affability means that, despite having never met the man, I take his genuine pleasantness as read. Pronouncements of his niceness from rival camps are, of course, more often […]
When I talk to Dublin’s Luke Keeler, he is just three days away from headlining a Friday fight night card in the Irish capital. In just his sixth bout of a fledgling professional career, this is a big moment for the middleweight prospect. Though in some respects just another step along the road, being the […]