Fantasy fight night swaps fedora for Abercrombie and Fitch

THEY say every man thinks less of himself if he has never been a soldier.

The sportswriting equivalent must be the sweet science: every sports journalist thinks less of himself if he isn’t a boxing writer.

Or at least a boxing writer in the New York of the Thirties and Forties, chewing the fat in Stilman’s Gym before hitting the Garden on a Friday night to throw an eye over the next up-and-comer from Brooklyn or beyond.

That was in your columnist’s mind on Saturday night at the Cork footballers’ boxing tournament in the Rochestown Park Hotel, because no matter what happens in boxing politics, the allure of the square ring never seems to dim.

There weren’t any snap-brim fedoras or large suited gentlemen making deals at the hotel door, and the Rochestown Road doesn’t bear any resemblance to Fifth Avenue, but still: Saturday night at the fights.

Not all the traditional accoutrements remain, of course. Recent legislation meant there was no blue haze of cigarette and cheroot smoke hanging over the ring, and the sensitivities of the 21st century meant no bikini-ed, high-heeled lovelies tottered across the canvas between rounds holding giant numbers.

There were, in fact, two girls who alternated ring-number duties, but you couldn’t exactly view either as victims of male stereotyping when one was chanting her pal’s name encouragingly when off-duty (“Am-y! Am-y!”).

Come to think of it, there weren’t many examples of what Hazlitt called ‘the fancy’ around either — sporting types known around the scene in the great essayist’s 18th century heyday: put another way, superfly dudes kitted in cutting-edge menswear if you were in Caesar’s Palace for a unification bout.

There were, though, a great deal of young lads in their twenties who looked like clubmates and contemporaries of the fighters; the cutting-edge menswear on offer was Hollister/Abercrombie and Fitch). No matter. The participants were game, the cause was a worthy one and the crowd was enthusiastic. The Cork senior footballers were sparring for Breaking The Silence, a Cobh-based charity focused on suicide prevention through education programmes (for more information, try [e-mail]).

The ring itself was like all of its brethren you’ve ever seen, bigger in life than it seems on the screen, though the ropes and canvas shrink in area pretty quickly. The great cliche about boxing is that there’s nowhere to hide, but on Saturday you could have tweaked that a little. When the bell rang for the rounds to start, the corner-men hopping out quickly between the ropes left the boxers suddenly alone: nowhere to hide, and no-one to hide with.

When the fights began one thing became apparent pretty quickly to this observer — Dan Lane of Rylane Boxing Club, the man who trained the footballers, had matched his men extremely well.

There were 14 bouts — not so much an undercard, then, as a beyondercard — and Lane had put fighters together who were pretty well equal in terms of ability.

Given that most of those on show were senior inter-county footballers, there wasn’t much call for my favourite line from John D Sheridan, also on boxing. I’ll throw it in for the sake of general entertainment. “Before the bell rang for the first round,” wrote Sheridan, “The two boxers looked like a couple of chaps I’d push away from the number 16 bus without a second thought; when the bell rang for the end of the first round I was thinking of how many narrow escapes I’d had pushing chaps away from the No 16 bus.”

As a collection of hefty, fit individuals the energy levels were high. Yours truly wouldn’t count himself technically accomplished enough to evaluate the potential among the non-boxers, but to use a wholly unscientific method of measuring the level of competition, the punches sounded plenty real from where I was sitting.

The second bout, for instance, featured attackers Paul Kerrigan and Colm O’Neill, who didn’t hold back but went toe to toe almost from the opening bell: both men looked as though they were going for the knock-out (full-forwards, eh?).

The good news there for manager Conor Counihan was that O’Neill looked fit and healthy after last year’s cruciate knee injury; not-so-good was that one of O’Neill’s teammates was trying to batter him around the ring. To conclude with the American theme, the great baseball hitter Ted Williams used to say that the hardest thing in sport was trying to hit a baseball in the major leagues.

It’s difficult, presumably, but surely not as hard as standing in your vest and shorts within punching distance of someone your own weight who will, given the slightest chance, break your nose.

Afterwards your columnist considered going on somewhere late, in keeping with the Forties Manhattan theme, but thought better of it.

You’re out without a fedora, you’re only half-dressed.

Contact: [e-mail] Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx