4.7.04
The Observer
STREETFIGHTING MAN
Four months ago, as he was preparing for a world title fight, Irish boxer Eamonn Magee was brutally beaten and had his legs broken in a street attack. Jamie Jackson met him in Belfast, where he talked about his violent life, his troubles with the IRA and his plans for an unlikely comeback
Jamie Jackson
Sunday July 4, 2004
The Observer
Hobbling on a crutch, his left foot in plaster, Eamonn Magee enters the 32 Degrees pub on the Ardoyne estate in north Belfast. He wears sunglasses, a pinstriped shirt and suit trousers. His nose is broken and he is accompanied by his minder, James, whose face is deeply scarred and who nowadays goes nearly everywhere Magee goes in Belfast. On the wall by the bar is a photograph of the 32 Degrees pub taken during the riots three years ago when Catholic parents were stoned by Protestants as they collected their children from the Holy Cross primary school on Ardoyne Road. 'I went to the Holy Cross as a young kid,' says Magee, as he drinks a pint of iced cider. 'Growing up in the Ardoyne, you become used to the violence. It was a normal part of life. You're young and, in a funny way, you enjoyed it. It was a crack. The kids who couldn't take it wouldn't have been out on the street. That's how hard it was.'
Magee could take it all right, and, more recently, has taken much worse on the street. On 29 February, just two months before he was due to fight Sharmba Mitchell for the International Boxing Federation Intermediary world title, one of the most important fights of his erratic 29-bout professional career, he alleges he was attacked in Blacks Road, Belfast. Whatever the truth (at the time of writing, the trial has yet to come to the courts), Magee suffered a broken left leg, fractured left knee, a punctured lung and underwent surgery to have muscle grafted on to his shattered limb.
Magee says that he was dragged from his car on Blacks Road and beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat. The accused, charged with grievous bodily harm, possession of a weapon and causing damage to a vehicle, denies any involvement.
At the time of the attack, Magee announced that he would never box again. But now, three months since his operation, he is confidently talking not only of a comeback but also of fighting before the end of the year.
'I'm three months ahead of where the doctor thought I would be,' he tells me. 'The two shins bone are healing - they were broken completely in half. The doctor said my cage [cast] would be on my leg for five months, but it was only on for two. The doctor is amazed by my progress. To be honest, I'm amazed as well. I put my rapid recovery down to being so fit.'
Eamonn Magee was born in Belfast on 13 July, 1971. He was five years old when he entered the gym at Sacred Hearts Parochial Hall on the Ardoyne in Belfast; he was seven when he had his first supervised fight, which he won. His maternal grandfather was a boxer and his three elder brothers were, in varying degrees, talented pugilists. But Magee was the truly gifted one: of his 29 professional fights to date, he has lost only four. He won both the Commonwealth and European light welterweight titles and became World Boxing Union welterweight champion last December.
'Eamonn was on the fringes of being world class,' says former World Boxing Association featherweight champion and fellow Irish boxer, Barry McGuigan. 'Magee is a southpaw, his style is all about slick counterpunching. He draws his opponents on and then nails them. He's fast-handed, a sharp but not a devastating puncher. But he's certainly a forceful hitter, as he proved against Ricky Hatton.'
Hatton, who last month made his 13th defence of his WBU light-welterweight title, knows all about the Belfast man's strength and ability. Magee knocked the flat-nosed Mancunian down for the first time in 28 fights when they met on 1 June, 2002. (Hatton hung on and the fight went the distance, Magee losing on points). It was an impressive performance from Magee, especially when one considers his unorthodox training regime, his irregular diet and his drinking and his smoking.
'I would say Eamonn Magee is the most gifted Irish boxer ever,' says his trainer John Breen, with forgivable loyalty. 'The trouble is, Eamonn never really prepares properly for fights. The only way you will ever get him to train properly is to put him in a monastery for eight weeks. A month before the Hatton fight I found out he was skipping his roadwork, that he was drinking. He's not dedicated. He could have beaten Ricky Hatton but he just didn't try hard enough.'
McGuigan agrees that Magee lacks the unswerving commitment to the cause that all true champions require. 'He's had many good fights in the past but he just hasn't made it work in the ones that matter,' McGuigan says. 'He didn't go for the kill against Oktay Urkal [Magee lost a unanimous decision to the Turkish fighter for the European light welterweight title in Germany in June 2003] and he didn't kill off Hatton when he had the chance.
'I don't think his temperament has done him any favours. He's a surly, truculent guy, [but] he's a good thinker in the ring, he has a good boxing brain. If he hadn't such a tendency to hold back, then he might have had more success in the important fights.'
If there is a strong sense among the boxing community that Magee has wasted his talent, the boxer himself candidly admits to some 'lost years'. In 1992, for instance, on the eve of the Barcelona Olympics, he quit boxing. Informed by the Irish selectors that, if he wanted to go to Barcelona, he had to fight an opponent he had already defeated, Magee, with characteristic restraint, told them to 'stick it up their arse.' Having won silver at the world junior championships three years earlier, Magee knows he was capable of a good performance in Barcelona: 'I was on top of my game then, flying, who knows what I could've done?' Like so much in his blighted life, it was not to be.
The Irish selectors, however, were not the only reason he walked away from the ring. 'Back then, I was with the wrong crowd, going off the rails, doing all sorts,' he says. In 1994, Magee was involved in a bar brawl in Belfast. 'It was after watching a Celtic-Rangers match one day on TV,' he tells me. 'There was five of us and five Rangers supporters in a city centre bar. There were bottles, chairs, fists flying. The whole thing was caught on CCTV and we were all prosecuted. I was charged with affray.'
Magee is an edgy character, who frequently appears anxious during the time we spend together in Belfast. His stories seem tailored to impress, yet for all that, he appears to skirt around the truth and, I think, is not always straight-forward. In October 1989, he nearly died following a street fight. 'Some guys asked me for a cigarette outside a pizza place on the Ardoyne Road. I knew they wanted trouble. Then, suddenly, they started on me. I was hit by a broken bottle in the throat. I pushed my four fingers down deep into the wound to stem the bleeding. It was only a quarter inch away from my jugular. If they'd hit that, I would have been gone.'
Three years later, in 1992, Magee was pinned to the ground by IRA activists and shot in the thigh. The reasons for 'punishment' attacks such as these are well known in Belfast. Repeated burglary, joy riding, drug dealing and stealing cars are all high on the list of punishable misdemeanours. But when I ask him about the IRA attack, Magee will say only that he was 'up to no good,' as if he feels that he deserved such an attack.
Close to ruin, he returned to boxing in 1995, at the age of 23. His brother Noel took him to Barney Eastwood's gym in Belfast to meet Mike Callahan, Breen's father-in-law. Callahan was impressed by his raw talent and agreed to become his manager. 'For Mike to trust me I had to train for nine months until he got me my first fight,' Magee says. 'It was hard work, but I had to do it if I wanted to box seriously.'
In November 1995, in Dublin, Magee knocked out Pete Roberts in his first professional fight. When, three years later, he met Paul Burke to contest the Commonwealth light welterweight title at Bowlers Arena, Manchester, he had fought 13 times, losing once. Burke beat him on a controversial points decision that night. But Magee gained his revenge in September 1999, at York Hall in London, stopping the former Commonwealth champion in the sixth round to win his first major title.
When I arrive in Belfast, Magee is there to meet me at the airport. It is 10.30 in the morning but he smells strongly of beer. 'We had a bit of a charity do last night,' he says, smiling. On the way into Belfast he drives fast and keeps the music loud. He offers to take me to the family home on the Ardoyne. On the way, we pass through Ballysil, a loyalist stronghold of fluttering Union Jacks and police checkpoints. We reach Ardoyne, a Catholic estate that has a fierce sense of community. This is reinforced by its location: it is hemmed in on all sides by Protestant enclaves.
'Ballysil is a bad place,' Magee says. 'But I don't care about religion. It has never affected my point of view once. I say this to most people; it is not my fault where my dad put his cock. It is not my problem. If I was born in England, I'd be English. If I was born in Canada, I'd be Canadian. I class myself as Irish, yes, but it's an accident of birth. Whether someone is Protestant or Catholic doesn't matter to me. The sooner people get that into their heads the better.'
It was while growing up on the Ardoyne estate, during the hunger strikes of the early 1980s, that Magee first realised he had the talent to escape, that boxing could offer him a potential way out from a life of crime and poverty. 'I box because it's the only thing I know how to do,' he says now. 'It's the only thing I can make a real living from. And until I got out of here through boxing, I never realised there was a world away from the violence of the street. But, let me tell you, boxing is the fucking hardest game in the world, and the one with the lowest wages. It controls your life, and the lives of your wife and kids, too. They all have to look after you, mood swings and all. When you're trying to make the weight before a fight you are not a happy person.'
Later, Magee and I visit Sacred Hearts, the brick building that houses the gym where he first began to box. Today, there is a group of girls taking an Irish dancing class there. On Ardoyne Avenue, we pass children in their Holy Communion outfits. Young girls in pretty white dresses walk along the streets past Republican murals painted onto buildings. 'Collusion is not an Illusion, it is murder,' reads one.
We arrive at Holmedene Gardens, the Ardoyne street on which Magee grew up. His mother, Isobel, welcomes us inside the small, neat house where she still lives and offers tea and biscuits.
Magee's 12-year-old daughter, Aine, is here, too, one of three children who, together with his wife, Mary, form Magee's loyal family. In the bedroom where Magee's trophies are kept hangs a signed poster of the Hatton fight: 'To Mrs Magee, love and best wishes, Ricky Hatton.'
'He gave it to me at the weigh-in,' Isobel says, with evident pride.
She attends all her son's fights, but cannot bear to watch him get hurt. 'I've seen the inside of a lot of toilets at fight venues, put it that way,' she says. 'But I'm not against boxing. I encouraged my boys to box, to go to the gym, because I wanted to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.'
Before I leave him, Magee takes me to see one of his old school friends, Paul Savate, who runs his own barbers shop, Savate's. Inside the shop there are photographs of Magee on the walls and all the punters, it seems, know him. He is nothing if not a local hero. Outside bored teenagers gather, drinking beer. One of the them walks into the shop, unbuckles his belt and attempts to urinate into a bin.
Will Eamonn Magee fight again? 'It's very sad what happened to him,' says Barry McGuigan. 'The unfortunate thing is he's the wrong side of thirty now. Time is not on his side, so it's going to be a tough battle for him to come back. And if he does, will he be as good?'
'It would kill me if I didn't come back,' Magee says, as we return to the 32 Degrees. 'I'd fight anyone, and I mean anyone, just to get back into the ring. I'm not going to let what happened stop me from boxing again. I love the fight game; and I think this is the first time I can ever say that I've missed the training in my life. I'm not going to end up in a mental hospital, as so many fighters have done.'
As I leave him, standing up at the bar, watched by his minder, James, he says, with a note of defiance: 'Other people couldn't handle it they way I have. They'd just crawl up in a corner and die. I'm not going to. I'm going to get back in the ring. I'll show them what I can do, that I can win again.'
STREETFIGHTING MAN
Four months ago, as he was preparing for a world title fight, Irish boxer Eamonn Magee was brutally beaten and had his legs broken in a street attack. Jamie Jackson met him in Belfast, where he talked about his violent life, his troubles with the IRA and his plans for an unlikely comeback
Jamie Jackson
Sunday July 4, 2004
The Observer
Hobbling on a crutch, his left foot in plaster, Eamonn Magee enters the 32 Degrees pub on the Ardoyne estate in north Belfast. He wears sunglasses, a pinstriped shirt and suit trousers. His nose is broken and he is accompanied by his minder, James, whose face is deeply scarred and who nowadays goes nearly everywhere Magee goes in Belfast. On the wall by the bar is a photograph of the 32 Degrees pub taken during the riots three years ago when Catholic parents were stoned by Protestants as they collected their children from the Holy Cross primary school on Ardoyne Road. 'I went to the Holy Cross as a young kid,' says Magee, as he drinks a pint of iced cider. 'Growing up in the Ardoyne, you become used to the violence. It was a normal part of life. You're young and, in a funny way, you enjoyed it. It was a crack. The kids who couldn't take it wouldn't have been out on the street. That's how hard it was.'
Magee could take it all right, and, more recently, has taken much worse on the street. On 29 February, just two months before he was due to fight Sharmba Mitchell for the International Boxing Federation Intermediary world title, one of the most important fights of his erratic 29-bout professional career, he alleges he was attacked in Blacks Road, Belfast. Whatever the truth (at the time of writing, the trial has yet to come to the courts), Magee suffered a broken left leg, fractured left knee, a punctured lung and underwent surgery to have muscle grafted on to his shattered limb.
Magee says that he was dragged from his car on Blacks Road and beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat. The accused, charged with grievous bodily harm, possession of a weapon and causing damage to a vehicle, denies any involvement.
At the time of the attack, Magee announced that he would never box again. But now, three months since his operation, he is confidently talking not only of a comeback but also of fighting before the end of the year.
'I'm three months ahead of where the doctor thought I would be,' he tells me. 'The two shins bone are healing - they were broken completely in half. The doctor said my cage [cast] would be on my leg for five months, but it was only on for two. The doctor is amazed by my progress. To be honest, I'm amazed as well. I put my rapid recovery down to being so fit.'
Eamonn Magee was born in Belfast on 13 July, 1971. He was five years old when he entered the gym at Sacred Hearts Parochial Hall on the Ardoyne in Belfast; he was seven when he had his first supervised fight, which he won. His maternal grandfather was a boxer and his three elder brothers were, in varying degrees, talented pugilists. But Magee was the truly gifted one: of his 29 professional fights to date, he has lost only four. He won both the Commonwealth and European light welterweight titles and became World Boxing Union welterweight champion last December.
'Eamonn was on the fringes of being world class,' says former World Boxing Association featherweight champion and fellow Irish boxer, Barry McGuigan. 'Magee is a southpaw, his style is all about slick counterpunching. He draws his opponents on and then nails them. He's fast-handed, a sharp but not a devastating puncher. But he's certainly a forceful hitter, as he proved against Ricky Hatton.'
Hatton, who last month made his 13th defence of his WBU light-welterweight title, knows all about the Belfast man's strength and ability. Magee knocked the flat-nosed Mancunian down for the first time in 28 fights when they met on 1 June, 2002. (Hatton hung on and the fight went the distance, Magee losing on points). It was an impressive performance from Magee, especially when one considers his unorthodox training regime, his irregular diet and his drinking and his smoking.
'I would say Eamonn Magee is the most gifted Irish boxer ever,' says his trainer John Breen, with forgivable loyalty. 'The trouble is, Eamonn never really prepares properly for fights. The only way you will ever get him to train properly is to put him in a monastery for eight weeks. A month before the Hatton fight I found out he was skipping his roadwork, that he was drinking. He's not dedicated. He could have beaten Ricky Hatton but he just didn't try hard enough.'
McGuigan agrees that Magee lacks the unswerving commitment to the cause that all true champions require. 'He's had many good fights in the past but he just hasn't made it work in the ones that matter,' McGuigan says. 'He didn't go for the kill against Oktay Urkal [Magee lost a unanimous decision to the Turkish fighter for the European light welterweight title in Germany in June 2003] and he didn't kill off Hatton when he had the chance.
'I don't think his temperament has done him any favours. He's a surly, truculent guy, [but] he's a good thinker in the ring, he has a good boxing brain. If he hadn't such a tendency to hold back, then he might have had more success in the important fights.'
If there is a strong sense among the boxing community that Magee has wasted his talent, the boxer himself candidly admits to some 'lost years'. In 1992, for instance, on the eve of the Barcelona Olympics, he quit boxing. Informed by the Irish selectors that, if he wanted to go to Barcelona, he had to fight an opponent he had already defeated, Magee, with characteristic restraint, told them to 'stick it up their arse.' Having won silver at the world junior championships three years earlier, Magee knows he was capable of a good performance in Barcelona: 'I was on top of my game then, flying, who knows what I could've done?' Like so much in his blighted life, it was not to be.
The Irish selectors, however, were not the only reason he walked away from the ring. 'Back then, I was with the wrong crowd, going off the rails, doing all sorts,' he says. In 1994, Magee was involved in a bar brawl in Belfast. 'It was after watching a Celtic-Rangers match one day on TV,' he tells me. 'There was five of us and five Rangers supporters in a city centre bar. There were bottles, chairs, fists flying. The whole thing was caught on CCTV and we were all prosecuted. I was charged with affray.'
Magee is an edgy character, who frequently appears anxious during the time we spend together in Belfast. His stories seem tailored to impress, yet for all that, he appears to skirt around the truth and, I think, is not always straight-forward. In October 1989, he nearly died following a street fight. 'Some guys asked me for a cigarette outside a pizza place on the Ardoyne Road. I knew they wanted trouble. Then, suddenly, they started on me. I was hit by a broken bottle in the throat. I pushed my four fingers down deep into the wound to stem the bleeding. It was only a quarter inch away from my jugular. If they'd hit that, I would have been gone.'
Three years later, in 1992, Magee was pinned to the ground by IRA activists and shot in the thigh. The reasons for 'punishment' attacks such as these are well known in Belfast. Repeated burglary, joy riding, drug dealing and stealing cars are all high on the list of punishable misdemeanours. But when I ask him about the IRA attack, Magee will say only that he was 'up to no good,' as if he feels that he deserved such an attack.
Close to ruin, he returned to boxing in 1995, at the age of 23. His brother Noel took him to Barney Eastwood's gym in Belfast to meet Mike Callahan, Breen's father-in-law. Callahan was impressed by his raw talent and agreed to become his manager. 'For Mike to trust me I had to train for nine months until he got me my first fight,' Magee says. 'It was hard work, but I had to do it if I wanted to box seriously.'
In November 1995, in Dublin, Magee knocked out Pete Roberts in his first professional fight. When, three years later, he met Paul Burke to contest the Commonwealth light welterweight title at Bowlers Arena, Manchester, he had fought 13 times, losing once. Burke beat him on a controversial points decision that night. But Magee gained his revenge in September 1999, at York Hall in London, stopping the former Commonwealth champion in the sixth round to win his first major title.
When I arrive in Belfast, Magee is there to meet me at the airport. It is 10.30 in the morning but he smells strongly of beer. 'We had a bit of a charity do last night,' he says, smiling. On the way into Belfast he drives fast and keeps the music loud. He offers to take me to the family home on the Ardoyne. On the way, we pass through Ballysil, a loyalist stronghold of fluttering Union Jacks and police checkpoints. We reach Ardoyne, a Catholic estate that has a fierce sense of community. This is reinforced by its location: it is hemmed in on all sides by Protestant enclaves.
'Ballysil is a bad place,' Magee says. 'But I don't care about religion. It has never affected my point of view once. I say this to most people; it is not my fault where my dad put his cock. It is not my problem. If I was born in England, I'd be English. If I was born in Canada, I'd be Canadian. I class myself as Irish, yes, but it's an accident of birth. Whether someone is Protestant or Catholic doesn't matter to me. The sooner people get that into their heads the better.'
It was while growing up on the Ardoyne estate, during the hunger strikes of the early 1980s, that Magee first realised he had the talent to escape, that boxing could offer him a potential way out from a life of crime and poverty. 'I box because it's the only thing I know how to do,' he says now. 'It's the only thing I can make a real living from. And until I got out of here through boxing, I never realised there was a world away from the violence of the street. But, let me tell you, boxing is the fucking hardest game in the world, and the one with the lowest wages. It controls your life, and the lives of your wife and kids, too. They all have to look after you, mood swings and all. When you're trying to make the weight before a fight you are not a happy person.'
Later, Magee and I visit Sacred Hearts, the brick building that houses the gym where he first began to box. Today, there is a group of girls taking an Irish dancing class there. On Ardoyne Avenue, we pass children in their Holy Communion outfits. Young girls in pretty white dresses walk along the streets past Republican murals painted onto buildings. 'Collusion is not an Illusion, it is murder,' reads one.
We arrive at Holmedene Gardens, the Ardoyne street on which Magee grew up. His mother, Isobel, welcomes us inside the small, neat house where she still lives and offers tea and biscuits.
Magee's 12-year-old daughter, Aine, is here, too, one of three children who, together with his wife, Mary, form Magee's loyal family. In the bedroom where Magee's trophies are kept hangs a signed poster of the Hatton fight: 'To Mrs Magee, love and best wishes, Ricky Hatton.'
'He gave it to me at the weigh-in,' Isobel says, with evident pride.
She attends all her son's fights, but cannot bear to watch him get hurt. 'I've seen the inside of a lot of toilets at fight venues, put it that way,' she says. 'But I'm not against boxing. I encouraged my boys to box, to go to the gym, because I wanted to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.'
Before I leave him, Magee takes me to see one of his old school friends, Paul Savate, who runs his own barbers shop, Savate's. Inside the shop there are photographs of Magee on the walls and all the punters, it seems, know him. He is nothing if not a local hero. Outside bored teenagers gather, drinking beer. One of the them walks into the shop, unbuckles his belt and attempts to urinate into a bin.
Will Eamonn Magee fight again? 'It's very sad what happened to him,' says Barry McGuigan. 'The unfortunate thing is he's the wrong side of thirty now. Time is not on his side, so it's going to be a tough battle for him to come back. And if he does, will he be as good?'
'It would kill me if I didn't come back,' Magee says, as we return to the 32 Degrees. 'I'd fight anyone, and I mean anyone, just to get back into the ring. I'm not going to let what happened stop me from boxing again. I love the fight game; and I think this is the first time I can ever say that I've missed the training in my life. I'm not going to end up in a mental hospital, as so many fighters have done.'
As I leave him, standing up at the bar, watched by his minder, James, he says, with a note of defiance: 'Other people couldn't handle it they way I have. They'd just crawl up in a corner and die. I'm not going to. I'm going to get back in the ring. I'll show them what I can do, that I can win again.'
