When there was just one king of the ring
His own people in faraway America could have known little more about him and his career than we did. Those were the lamplit days in the 1950s when the battered copy of The Ring magazine reposed on top of the local paper and the latest copies of the Sacred Heart Messenger and the Far East in the cubbyholes below the priceless old battery radios that throbbed with staticated passion once or twice a year in the small hours of the morning when the champion defended his title.
Once upon a simpler time in Ireland those heavyweight battles from Madison Square Gardens and elsewhere were only slightly less compulsive listening than the All-Ireland finals.! They were the topic of discussion for weeks beforehand. In an era when not every house boasted a radio, the audience around the open hearth would always include a neighbour or two, just like the All-Ireland broadcasts. And the ornate old radios would have been readied for 15 rounds in the days ahead of the bout.
