Darren O’Neill hesitates before speaking. “Good question. I don’t know the answer,” he says. In a week he will remember for more than just an eighth Irish title, his sport of boxing also, officially, burned itself to the ground.
At 36-years-old and on a whim, he signed up for the Irish boxing championships less than 24 hours before the deadline. At 36-years-old he was taking a leap. At 36-years-old and out of the ring for four years but never losing contact, lockdown had left him in a place where he could permit harmless fantasies, conduct conversations with himself.
The consultation he had with Darren the boxer was frank and rational. There was nothing high minded or dangerously ambitious, although stepping back through the ropes again would always come with common sense caution. But O’Neill, captain of one of Ireland’s finest boxing teams that raided the London 2012 Olympics for four medals, felt the gnawing.
“I’m looking in and thinking ‘Christ I might have enough to compete in that,’” he says. “We’ve coped with the last two years being shut down. I just happened to be in good enough shape and said ‘why not, I won’t be able to do it forever.’
“You miss the buzz. You miss the atmosphere, the whole competitive nature. I was training by myself all through Covid. But I’d been down home. I said to dad ‘come on down and do a few pads,’ which I hadn’t done in a long time. It went very well.
“So I came back my house that evening did a heap of sprints to see what the fitness was like. The fitness wasn’t bad. I was tired. But I got through. I went down on the Tuesday night and hit the bag again and thought ‘Christ I’m not in bad shape here.’ So I rang my dad that evening and said ‘listen the deadline for the elites is tomorrow let’s put my name down.’ He said ‘yeah let’s go for it.’ That was it. Completely unplanned.”
Not at all like the career that had come before, where he hung with Olympic, World and European champions Katie Taylor, Michael Conlan, Paddy Barnes, John Joe Nevin and Joe Ward.
But last week O’Neill found the stadium again redolent. The spare painted walls of the cramped changing rooms, the voices he could pick out from all of the others above the din, their pitch ingrained.
“It has always been dad and the brother that I can hear,” he says.
The voices were those of his father Ollie and brother Aidan in his corner. Then the sweet and unforeseen unanimous points win over Faolain Rahill in the final. The oldest boxer to ever win the Irish cruiserweight title, he could live with that.
Hurling heartland
Afterwards, in some moments of reflection, O’Neill and his family briefly paused to mark a quarter of a century in the sport. Ollie pointed out that it had been 25 years since he had first driven up to the National Stadium in Dublin from the hurling heartland of Paulstown in Kilkenny with his 11-year-old son to watch him win his first national title. Last weekend it was also eleven years after a middleweight silver medal at the 2010 European Championships in Moscow.
Married to Alison in September, the decision of the former Kilkenny under-21 hurler to resume boxing and take the blows could have been one of their first big item conversations. But it never got out of the preliminaries to make the breakfast table. Alison rowed in with the idea. It was settled as more a challenging adventure and less a risk.
“We’d both be of the opinion that it’s great that I can do it,” he says. “Boxing has been at the forefront of everything I was doing for a long, long time. Afterwards, I felt little to no difference to be honest. The fact I was out of the ring for so long, it was just timing.
“I got caught with one or two shots that wouldn’t have caught me before. Other than that I felt great. I felt sharp. There is still a little bit in the tank. I kind of knew I had it going into the last round so I did take my foot off the pedal a little bit.
“Probably shouldn’t have. But there was more there if I needed it. That was nice to know. But priorities change. I’m clear on that.”
The priorities are mundane. It breaks towards job, work, mortgage and time. There is also a World Championships later this month in Belgrade. Job, work, mortgage and time. But without sweating it too much, he has rolled over the idea in his head.
He knows it’s out of his hands. As Irish champion, O’Neill is not guaranteed a place in the squad. High performance picks the final Irish team.
He understands too that Belgrade will be regraded with vigilance and circumspection by all those boxers who travel. The souring of last week arrived days before O’Neill lit up the stadium, when the first McLaren report into governance, finance and corruption in boxing detonated.
The former President Wu was named, the executive director Bouzidi was named, the highest ranking referees and judges were named as having conspired to manipulate bouts in Rio and numerous tournaments before that.
“Having the R&Js (referees and judges) that could be “bought” in place was the last piece of the puzzle that allowed for the execution of in-the-field bout manipulation. In order to assure the right outcome of a bout, it was vital that the corruptible R&Js were in place,” said McLaren.
The revelations shrouded everything else with a disbelieving public left to wonder what will happen next.
The World Championships are less than 20 days away and sick boxing is back in charge of tending to itself after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had it sectioned as being unable to look after itself for the Olympics.
While the IOC task force took charge of everything in Tokyo’s Kokugikan Arena, the World Championships is not an IOC tournament. What the athletes are left with is the smouldering wreckage after McLaren’s strafing Stuka dive and a governing body, AIBA, still unwilling to make the changes demanded by the Olympic movement.
Instead, layered over an unscrupulous and broken association, the remnants have decided to make Belgrade the first $2 million ticker tape parade with the recent announcement of cash prizes.
The fund for podium athletes has been set at $2.6 million. The winner of a gold medal will receive $100,000. Silver medallists will be awarded $50,000 and both bronze medallists in each weight category will receive $25,000.
Nobody is quite sure what to say or do. All praise AIBA president, Russia’s Umar Kremlev and the sponsorship of his country’s biggest petro chemical giant, Gazprom.
“What I even wonder is, are they resigning themselves to boxing being corrupt,” says O’Neill. “Because you are looking at these World Championships coming up and for the first time ever they are offering prize money.
“Are they looking at it and thinking ‘you know what, we are going to be kicked out of the Olympics, so let’s just make it lucrative for the boxers to stay here.’
“It is hard to know what they are thinking. It’s a strange move. It’s madness. And from an organisation that is struggling financially, it’s laughable.”
Official integrity
There is also a cheerless, miserable aspect to McLaren’s exposure of venality and the poverty of official integrity. And it’s characterised by the lack of real surprise, an absence of genuine shock in the boxing community as well as a hollow sense of imperfect victory felt by cheated athletes.
“From a general boxing perspective, we had known that was going on for a long time,” says a candid O’Neill. “We’d witnessed it right in front of our eyes. We experienced it. You go out and break your back training, sacrifice so much, go through pain and torture and then someone decides ‘ah we’ll give it to the blue corner’. It’s completely unjust.”
Still, his instinct to box on remains strong as ever. The impulse is to follow the intuition that has placed him centre stage in Ireland. If high performance takes a punt on his experience and the glorious re-entry into the Irish scene, his answer will be yes, he would again step in into the seedy world he knows.
Because the siren song, the one that lured him back is promising to make his boxing twilight a luminous month of madness; a 2021 title and a possible crack at Belgrade.
“Of course I am thinking of them,” he says wishfully of the World Championships. “Look, I wasn’t thinking of boxing in the Irish Championships until a few weeks back.
“Of course the thoughts are there. It would be fantastic to go to another one. But I have work commitments now. I’m not going to put myself under massive pressure emotionally, mentally or physically. Look, we’ll see.”
Then there’s a pause. “If it was a possibility…” There’s another pause. “I’d love to go…” Then another, imperceptible pause.
“Christ, why wouldn’t I?”
