SPECTATOR SPORT
One heck of a night
Frank Keating
I WATCHED the England rugby team's musclebound plod of a victory over Scotland on television at the Aghadoe Heights hotel which is perched over the breathtaking lakes of Killarney. The decision to skip Twick was a good one. Well, it is not every day you can be one of a throng of 8,000 attending a world championship prize-fight staged in a village with a population of less than 1,500. Millstreet is plonked down a meandering, potholed lane in the horsy country of north Cork M the shallow triangle between Mal- low, Macroom and Killarney. The esteemed editor of Boxing News, Harry Mullan, reckons that till Saturday night Shelby, Montana, had probably been the most unlikely venue for a world title boxing match. That oil-boom hicksville attempted to put itself on the map in 1923 by bringing in Jack Dempsey to fight Tom Gibbons — but the venture bankrupted four local banks after big Jack's notorious manager, Doc Kearns, did a moonlight flit with $60,000 of gate-money in two canvas sacks, and bribed a railroad driver with $500 to smuggle him up to Great Falls, where he spent the next day counting the loot in the cellar of a barbershop.
I'd bet that every one of Millstreet's 14 pubs (in just 500 yards of its only sloping street) each made more in profits last weekend than the contents of the Doc's two sacks. It was a heck of a fistfight which went the full distance — but the heck of a night went much further. Certainly the hooley which celebrated the victory by Ireland's Steve Collins over the English champion Chris Eubank was still in full jubilant spate when I staggered away for the Sunday afternoon plane from Cork. What with the Cheltenham races and the rugby victory over Wales, it capped a grand week for Irish sport. Cheltenham's champion jockey, Norman Williamson, is a Mallow man.
The last time I was in this precise and glorious neck of the woods was a dozen years ago when I came over to Millstreet's nearest town, Kanturk, to do a piece on Ire- land's oldest surviving Olympic gold medal- list, Dr Pat O'Callaghan, who had won the hammer throw at the 1932 Los Angeles games. In the 1984 Olympics in LA, I watched with Dr Pat, then almost 80, in the Californian sunshine as his strapping suc- cessor at the event with the shamrock at his breast, Declan Hegarty, attempted to out- distance O'Callaghan's ancient mark. Declan did not.
The big fellow, who had taken up the event after winning the All-Ireland Welly- throwing title at Offaly only three years before, was a left-hander, which makes for some hammer-throwing difficulties. He had three throws. Three times with increasing fury, he whirred and whirred around the cage; whirred and whirred, and then with an almighty aaagh! let loose the great wired ballcock. Three times he demolished the wire-mesh cage. Then he limped sadly away, eliminated.
Till Saturday, Jack Doyle was Cork's most famous boxer. Dear Jack, a famous charmer, but in the ring he never quite gave as good as he got. But win or lose, he would stand up in the ring afterwards and sing `Mother Machree'. Once, during the pugilist's lilting refrain, his grizzled old sec- ond was heard to mutter into his bucket and sponge, 'He might be able to sing her — but if only he could fight her for the title!'
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