Kevin McBride v Mike Tyson: Mike Tyson may believe he is coming up against a no-hoper, but Keith Duggan hears a radically different opinion of Kevin McBride's chances when he visits the Irish fighter's base in Massachusetts

Every day, in the solitude of Petronelli's fight house in Brockton, Massachusetts, Kevin McBride sweats hard and throws punches at a phantom Mike Tyson and echoes The Greatest when he promises: "I'm gonna shock the world." The Clones man claims that on the night of June 11th, when he fronts up to the snarling husk of humanity that the boxing fraternity markets as Mike Tyson, all his prayers will have been answered.

When McBride was a big, clunky teenager walking the streets of the struggling Monaghan market town, Barry McGuigan was the unlikely saviour of Clones and the land in general. All of Ireland, damp with recession, basked in the vicarious glamour of McGuigan's feats and daring. The child McBride turned up for the homecoming nights in the market square with his school friends and marvelled at Wee Barry's charisma and affability, the way it seemed as if he had known Terry Wogan his entire life. The way he spoke of fighting in Vegas as if it were the next town over from Castleblaney.

And it pleased McBride to learn his art on the same expense of canvas as McGuigan, a bone fide champion whose name resonated across the globe.

But all the while, McBride's ear was cocked for any word on the BBC or on the radio about the unprecedented and terrifying phenomenon reaping such devastating and gleeful damage on the heavyweight circuit. From his early teens, Kevin McBride was in thrall to Mike Tyson. The short, perfect frame and the dark, sleek power, the gold-glimmering smile and the delicate, lisping pronouncements impressed and thrilled the Monaghan teenager as much as they did the jaded emissaries of the fight world who had despaired of encountering another Muhammad Ali.

As Iron Mike, the orphanage boy with a pit-bull fighting instinct and a weepy, sentimental nature, made mincemeat of Trevor Berbick, outpointed James "Bonecrusher" Smith and Tony Tucker, and toyed and punished the gallant, ageing Larry Holmes on a baleful winter's night in Atlantic City, McBride dreamed big.

"My father used to feed me a pound of steak every day, because he was a butcher," he said after one of his daily afternoon sessions in Petronelli's. He wore jeans and a Monaghan football jersey and sat on a wooden bench with his great hands joined together as if he were attending Mass.

"He'd tell me he'd have to put a sod on my head to stop me from growing. He was the first man to show me how to make a fist. And even shortly before he died, I says to him that I would love to fight Tyson some day. And you know, he said that if I dream hard enough and work for it, then it would happen. That's why I'll have his name on my shorts in the ring. Kevin Senior. I want to dedicate this fight to him."

PETRONELLI'S GYM is the Irish man's theatre of dreams and it is appropriate. A gorgeous, old redbrick pile on a quiet side street in Brockton, it always traded in fantasy, originally as a movie hall when Goody Petronelli was growing up and you had to compete with Cary Grant for the affections of your girl. Now the cool, broad staircase that once led up to the plush seats of the balconies ushers people directly into the uncomplicated splendour of Petronelli's gym, where two boxing rings are lit by sunlight and hundreds of posters advertising forgotten fights are pasted to the walls.

The walls are like museum pieces, with discoloured newspaper clippings and inspirational phrases like "When in Doubt, Jab Out", and many, many posters and photographs of Marvin Hagler in full, 1980s glossy mode. At the rear of the gym, Goody Petronelli's office is cloaked in similar memorabilia. Framed above a heavy metal radiator is a photograph taken at ringside on the night Hagler and the fresh English world champion Alan Minter went at it in Wembley in September, 1980. The American's victory created a hail of fired beer cans and racist abuse from the sons of Thatcher's England that evening, but, in the photograph, Hagler is on his stool, young and in repose and Goody is working on his face in serene concentration. They are happiness itself.

"Now that's a fighter," Goody declared when a small crowd gathered in his office, pointing at a sketch of Mother Theresa. "That's a fighter right there."

The holy woman is in rare company. Not far away, the chiselled, moustached face of Magnum, PI beams out. He has his arms around Goody and Marvin Hagler after some fight or other. With his brother Pat, Goody travelled the world with Hagler, the Brockton boy who apprenticed under the Petronellis before declaring himself Marvellous Marvin and becoming the pre-eminent middleweight of the modern era.

Boxing held allure then and the glamorous and moneyed were addicted to the smell of liniment and the sweat and the danger. Goody met them all and was pleasant and grounded enough to become genuinely friendly with several. From another picture frame smiles Kirk Douglas. Goody remembered when it was taken, out in Palm Springs. He chuckled as he recalled something. The entourage ended up in Douglas's place late after the fight, watching a re-run on videotape. Goody arrived late to find Marvin sprawled on one couch, his brother Pat lazing across another and Kirk Douglas stretched out on a huge bed.

"Where the hell am I gonna sit?" Goody demanded, and the movie star instantly moved over so the corner man could lay out and enjoy the fight. A while later he nudged him and said: "Hey Goody, better not tell anyone you were in bed with Kirk Douglas. I got a reputation to uphold."

Twenty years later, Petronelli shook with laughter at the idea of a boxing man and a macho movie star sharing a crib. "He had a sense of humour, Kirk. He was a good man, a great fight man. Ah, we have our memories, if nothing else."

And it was as if the graceful boxing man was speaking for all those who still care about the demoralised world of boxing. Above all sports, boxing seems to trade on nostalgia and on its past. When Goody was a boy, his first trainer was an Irish man called O'Shaughnessy. Brockton was an immigrant town that acquired its prestige from manufacturing the expensive shoes that ended up in the boutique windows of Delancy Street and Mulberry Street.

Gradually, the industry relocated and Brockton, no more than Clones with the closure of the railway, lost its grandeur. It was reduced to another Boston satellite town, a tough place that produced good grid-iron ball players and, freakishly, two all-time boxing champions, Rocky Marciano and Hagler.

And, in Petronelli's, it had a gym and a couple of trainers whose names resonate through some of the fight game's most electric moments. Goody has seen hundreds of fighters come and go and more than most has witnessed the cruelty at the heart of boxing. But the abiding romance of it, the mere prospect of an Irish outsider like McBride squaring up to the distorted, cartoon cult villain that Tyson has become, it excites him.

GOODY KNOWS TYSON. A local boy he trained named Kilbert Pierce Junior met him one night in Freeport Hall in Dorchester in 1984. Tyson was just gathering the dark, motivational tools then and Cus D'Amato, his arch-protector, was still at ringside, so the unconscious rage which powered Tyson after D'Amato's death was not on show. But still.

"This guy came in like an animal," Goody told the newspaper men that night.

If Tyson remembers that night at all, it must be as a small chapter in the most heavenly phase of his life, when Cus warded off the demons and they would study flickering films of the heavyweight past masters and plot Mike's coronation as the greatest of that lineage.

"Boxing," Goody said, placing a finger tip to his temple. "Ninety per cent of it is up here. I mean, these guys that Tyson fought over the years, they were beaten before they ever got to the ring. Larry Holmes was beaten before he got to the ring. Soa fighter has to get his head straight. He has gotta think that the other guy is just flesh and bones, two hands and two feet, and think he is gonna go in and beat him. And Kevin has that, believe it or not. He has that confidence. I see it in the gym.

"He is busting his hump out there and Packie Collins is right there on his case. They are running at 6am every day and training and resting, and it is showing. Look, the best fighter in the world has got to take it on the chin. With Tyson, you know what is coming. You know his style. He comes at you, he bobs and weaves, he attacks. He has to get close. Kevin is tall, he is 6ft 6in, he has good, strong hands and he has nice feet now. He has to keep Tyson at the end of those punches, he has to catch Tyson comin' in and get outa range, tie him up, work him again. I feel comfortable he can do that."

And this is the message communicated to McBride. Garrulous by nature, the big Monaghan man has been living like a hermit these past two months. Pascal Collins has become his shadow, as small and watchful as McBride is towering and easy-going.

Together they run through the sombre park on the outskirts of Brockton, before the sun comes up and streetlights are extinguished, literally running in Marciano's footsteps. And for six to 10 miles, they fixate and obsess upon the noisy, feral night in Washington, when the Paddies in the crowd want romance and the rest want blood on the canvas and it comes down to McBride and the most fearsome and controversial sportsman in modern lore.

It was Pascal's brother Steve who advised McBride to ship out to America and look up the Petronelli brothers. They had the knowledge and wisdom, Collins told him. And so McBride became the biggest Irishman in Dorchester, sometimes fighting and sometimes partying too much. He met a girl in the Kells bar. "Went for walks and things, started seeing each other." Now they have two children, Daniel and seven-month "Gráinne Niamh McBride, a good Irish name".

And he developed a reputation around the Irish hubs of Boston as a charming, old-fashioned slugger with a steadfast and fatalistic ambition of getting his shot. "I want to show the world I am a contender, not a pretender," McBride often says, like an alter-ego of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. When word went out a few months ago that he had suddenly gained a place on a card with Tyson, the expatriates wanted to soak the contender in goodwill.

"Kevin is too nice a guy, too obliging," sighed Packie Collins. "We had to get him out of Dorchester. Here, he is left alone. He is sparring hard, eating carefully. And he is going to be in the shape of his life. Kevin is training to win this fight.

"The word coming out of the Tyson camp is that this is another Peter McNeely. There is no way Mike Tyson is training hard. But either way, Peter McNeely wasn't half the size Kevin is coming into this fight."

As is often the way in friendships between men of differing physical sizes, Packie coaxes and bosses the bigger man and keeps him focused. On this day in Petronelli's, a photographer and an advertising crew arrived to take posed snaps of big McBride looming frighteningly over a classical, puny fall-guy. They found a pale and comically weedy actor to play the part of McBride's foe, scarcely strong enough to hold his gloves up.

"Hey, astronauts, playboys, dancers, I have played them all," the actor said cheerfully before raising his feeble dukes to McBride, who was tickled pink by the confrontation. A light buffet of a punch from the Irishman, no more than a pat, sent the actor tottering across the ring, much to general amusement. Packie Collins sighed and smiled like a vexed parent. "Kevin has too good a nature. He would stand there posing all day if it made people happy."

LATER, McBRIDE would encourage people to stand behind the heavy bag while he delivers "a bit of a punch. Just so you know what I'll be hitting Mike Tyson with. He is goin' to feel like the whole of Ireland is punching him when I do."

"Easy, Kevin, easy," said Collins. "You'll do someone damage. Tomorrow's another day."

But the big man was in expansive mood, enjoying the break from routine, the chance to let off some steam. For almost an hour, he had worked othe floor under Goody Petronelli's tutelage. The elderly man danced lightly, never breaking sweat, skinny as a marathon runner, but with the sinewy, leathery skin and muscle of a man who has put thousands of hours into training the young optimists who come and go in boxing.

He would instruct McBride to issue a combination of punches at his extended, gloved palms, making the boxer work to reach, and then would confer in McBride's ear, like a horse trainer whispering incantations to his prize.

"Goody is a legend," McBride said later. "He tells me he is going to be 43 next birthday, but he could be twice that for all we know. Who knows, right? Hey Goody. Ya tired?"

"Hell, no," Petronelli shot back. "I've done this a few times."

After McBride had showered and the crowd had gone away and he pulled on his Monaghan GAA jersey, the Irishman was more reflective. A few years have passed since he last visited Clones, but he rings home most evenings. His mother and sister are flying into Washington for the fight and half of Clones is coming with them.

When McBride was 19, he became the youngest ever fighter to qualify for the Olympic Games at super-heavyweight. He qualified for the last 16 in Barcelona and took home a commemorative medal as a memento.

"I never thought too much about the medal, but then when my father died I put it in the coffin with him," he said. "I was proud to wear the Irish vest then and to qualify for the Olympics with only six fights behind me. I feel like I will be fighting for Ireland again now. I know they call me a journeyman and the boxing writers don't give me a chance against Tyson, but I fought guys with knockout punches before.

"My last seven fights were won on knockouts or stopped short. Before, I was taking fights on short notice and wasn't in great shape. Not now, though. I want to retire Mike Tyson and I want a shot at the world title. I'd love to fight Johnny Ruiz in Boston and make it a great Irish-Puerto Rican night.

"I know Ruiz back from when I was in camp with him and Lennox Lewis, and he has an awkward, rough style and I knew he would be in there in the mix. But the world champions now, they can all be beaten, and all the heavyweights in the world would still love to fight Tyson. And this is my chance. I dreamed this fight."

The fight academics predict a short, furious onslaught by Tyson for two or three rounds and the inevitable sight of the tall, pale man crashing indecorously to the canvas. Iron Mike will take $6.6 million for his work and spiral on to the next desperate episode of his disappearing fight life.

That is the conventional script, but nobody is willing to absolutely verify it. After all, Buster Douglas was a 42 to 1 outsider when he felled and defeated Tyson in Tokyo way back in 1990, and Tyson's punishing velocity and power have been greatly diminished by time, prison and personal instability since.

And McBride talks like an evangelist who has seen the light. There is word of a "secret weapon", as Packie Collins puts it, a mental strength coach to sharpen the Irishman's focus into something as piercing and intimidating as Tyson's famous shark-eyed stare.

"I met Mike Tyson at our conference and I looked in his eyes and he tried to stare me out of it. I idolised the man growing up. But I have been in this game since I was nine years old and I don't fear no man. The Man Above I fear, because he is going to judge me. I train six days a week and I go to chapel on Sunday. He has given me this opportunity.

"(Tyson) is going to know he is in a fight. No disrespect to Peter McNeely, but he brought towels to his fight. My corner isn't going to bring towels to the corner because there are only two ways I am coming out of that ring. Either as champion or they'll carry me out on a stretcher. It is do or die for me."

HE TALKS OF the night like a kid going to his debutantes' ball. The Washington arena draped in tricolours and that chant from his youth, Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé. He will have bagpipes. A U2 soundtrack by which to make his entrance. Pride (In the Name of Love), or maybe that fourth song from the new album. Clones boys on the tear, the Boston crowd doing the capital for the weekend.

Tyson, all 38 years of him, drawing him in with that fathomless look of his, a look that, for all the lectures and denunciations, is still a box-office gold standard turn-on. Iron Mike, with his instinctive admiration for mean and maligned Sonny Liston, with his criminal fall from grace and his worldwide infamy and his ghetto advisers, Iron Mike mixing it with the butcher's boy from Clones. It is all he ever wanted, a night to tell his grandchildren about.

"It will be a beautiful thing," McBride promised with a big, generous smile, before disappearing into the back of a Cadillac with black-tinted windows and cruising down Brockton's quiet and empty Avenue of Champions.

Kevin McBride v Mike Tyson
MCI Centre, Washington
Saturday night, June 11th

On TV: Setanta Pay Per View 1 and Sky Channel 438 will be showing the fight live