They’re a breed apart, boxers. “I enjoyed the night,” Wladimir Klitschko beamed as he stood in the ring and chatted with the Wembley crowd, like he was reviewing a cracking evening on the town that began with some nosh at Le Gavroche and ended with a few scoops at The Dog and Duck.
Instead he’d endured 11 rounds with Anthony Joshua during which in or around 90,000 spectators roared their approval every time he was smacked, most loudly when a Joshua uppercut came close enough to sending his head in to the skies above the stadium. The squeamish among us will one day recover from watching the slow motion replay of the moment, but probably not any day soon.
And after the referee stepped in to end the assault, Klitschko and Joshua, as boxers tend to do after knocking lumps out of each other, hugged and shared some love, before Joshua, winking through an eye disappearing under the swelling, encouraged us all to take up the sport because it’s a doddle. “There’s nothing complicated about boxing, anyone can do this - just give it a go,” he said, like he’d just shown us how to make a vase on a pottery wheel.
A breed apart, indeed. And while you’d very much love for the pair of them, like all pugilists, to find a less hazardous way of making a living, you couldn’t but marvel at their mesmerising courage.
When Joshua was decked in the sixth round, the advice he got from world champion Deontay Wilder in the commentary box was “stay calm!”, when the rest of us were just thinking, ‘stay conscious’. Adam Smith, meanwhile, was licking his Sky Box Office lips only halfway through the fight with a rather unseemly “whatever happens here, I bet we’re heading for a re-match!” He deserved an uppercut himself for that.
It was quite an evening, then, one of the more memorable bits when 90,000 folk (who possibly had alcohol taken) gave us a rollicking rendition of Sweet Caroline, before Joshua took an age to get to the ring, his arrival delayed by pyrotechnics last seen at a Take That concert (eh, so we’ve been told) and him being lifted in to the heavens by a moving stage. “My voice is oozing with excitement,” said Deontay who, a bit like the sacred Wembley turf, had never seen anything like it.
Katie Taylor’s entrance earlier in the evening was no less memorable, although having been given the tea-time slot there was hardly anyone there to witness it. If they’d left the pubs in time they’d have seen her being serenaded in to the stadium by ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ which then broke in to AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’, a medley that was possibly a world boxing first.
Five fights, five wins and the WBA inter-continental lightweight belt thrown in, it’s been a decent first 22 weeks as a professional, Katie dubbing Wembley as “the greatest night of my career so far”, London 2012 a dim and distant amateur memory.
“These interviews between you and me are getting like groundhog day,” said Andy Scott after she had seen off Nina Meinke, the Sky man asking for the fifth time in 22 weeks ‘are you ready for a world title shot?’ Katie is no less impatient, you’d imagine. She looks ready.
Completing the week’s top three of finest performances by Irish sporting personalities are James McClean and Ted Walsh, McClean for his Football Focus interview on Saturday which provided further evidence that he’s the finest of young fellas. The best bit of any McClean interview is when he crunches his face in mystification when asked why he wouldn’t ditch his principles just to make life easier for himself. No more than the boxers, he’s a rare breed.
And Ted for his display during the latest round of #AskTed queries while he was on duty at Punchestown. Many of the submitted questions were, sadly, not put to him - like “How long more do you think Katy can take being locked up by Ciaran in Fair City?” and “How many shoes am I wearing, Ted?” - but Robert Hall did ask him for his favourite Kardashian.
“I never ate a Kardashian. What’s a Kardashian? I never heard of one in my life. It’s like something you’d get in a Chinese restaurant.”
You know, RTE could do worse than commission a season of ‘Keeping Up with the Walshes.’
