The Kieran Shannon Interview: Paddy Barnes
HE just read the news today, oh boy. About a man who made the grade, or at least enough to go to the States but not enough to be kept at home.
Paddy Barnes received Billy Walsh’s farewell text a couple of hours before meeting me here in the offices of a Dublin PR company, and though the news was rather sad, well, he’d feared as much when he hadn’t seen Billy laugh.
“He told me before the world championships that by the end of them he had to make a decision. And I thought, ‘Right, if someone wins gold, he’ll stay.’ We won gold, and two more medals. I thought, ‘He’s staying.’ But I seen him at the homecoming at the airport and he didn’t seem happy. It got me thinking, ‘He’s going to leave.”
And now he has. How does that leave Barnes? With mixed thoughts and feelings.
Walsh, he says, is going to be “a big loss”, “a hard void to fill”.
Then he reflects: it can be filled. Zaur Antia, he says, is the best technical coach in world boxing. He name-checks “top” coaches like Eddie Bolger and John Conlan that can also maintain the culture Walsh established. Irish boxing should be fine. Barnes should be fine. The only way he can see himself being affected is that Walsh was “great to plan things”, like the optimum countdown to Rio. Barnes pauses: maybe that’ll be enough to affect him.
“I don’t know,” he sighs. “It’s all a bit up in the air now.” It’s all a bit too soon to say right now. How did the pair of them get on? A bit like Barnes’ own personality. It could be quite edgy and heated but that meant there was a warmth to it as well.
“We’d fight all the time,” he says, “but we were friends all the time. You fight with your mates all the time.”
Pro debut! Heavyweight! pic.twitter.com/0JmSB3F8Mj
— Paddy Barnes OLY (@paddyb_ireland) November 6, 2015
A classic case in point: 2007. A key point of contention for Walsh with the IABA was having the final say over selection for tournaments. It was a right any de facto high performance director should have been granted as a rule, but there would be one occasion when even Walsh was glad that he was overruled. Ahead of that year’s world championships, Walsh had originally omitted a then 20-year-old Barnes from his seven-man team.
“I was going mad!” says Barnes. “It was a joke.
“Before that, I’d gone to my first tournament in Croatia and I was dying with the flu. I ended up drawing a French guy, an Olympian. I remember sitting on the stool before the third round, saying, ‘Billy, I just want to survive. I’m sick.’ I end up losing, fair enough, then went back to bed for the week.
“A few weeks later there was another tournament in Poland. Billy called me up. I said ‘Billy, I’m still sick. I can’t go.’ He said ‘If you can’t go, you might as well as leave the team. That’s you off the team.’
“I said to him, ‘I’m off the team?! I am the f***in’ team!” And I just hung up on him!”
Shortly afterwards, Barnes was competing for a Northern Ireland team in Liverpool. In his first fight he stopped a Tanzanian. In the final he faced a world junior champion from India.
“He was a tank. I remember looking at him and saying to my coach, ‘I’m going to get knocked out here. I’m going to get killed.’ I ended up boxing the head off him. Gave him a standing count and everything.
“Yet when I went back to Dublin, Billy sat me down in the office and said I wasn’t going to the world championships, that I still wasn’t good enough. I said, ‘I just beat the world junior champion!’ He said senior was completely different.
“But anyway, my coaches got me picked in the end.”
And the rest is Irish sporting history. At those world championships in Chicago with Walsh in his corner, Barnes would become the first boxer to qualify for the Beijing Olympics. Three boxers would medal at those Olympics, including Barnes. And the medals would just continue to keep on coming for Ireland.
And yet what makes Barnes’ story such a triumph is that starting out as a kid all he did was lose. He lost his first 12 fights. Repeat: He lost his first 12 fights.
The first fight was when he was 11, against a lad called Eamonn Finnegan. They remain friendly to this day through a mutual Belfast friend. Finnegan has long forgotten that fight, Barnes remembers it well. He’d only taken up the sport a few days earlier. He’d been playing football on the street when it started raining and a pal suggested he come down to the boxing club nearby.
“It was a Wednesday night and I’ll never forget it. I just thought, ‘This is brilliant,’ sparring and all. Then that Sunday I had a fight. And I lost. Ah, but I didn’t even care. I just loved doing it.
“I’ve never taken a drug in my life. But see there when I’m in that ring? It’s just pure ecstasy. It’s unbelievable, the feeling you get when you put punches together and some land on his face and you’re hurting somebody. I don’t know, it’s just addictive. It was addictive from the start.”
At weekends when his family would visit relatives in the Down fishing village of Ardglass, he’d go with his cousins to the gym which his uncle Jim Linden ran, to the point he’d join and fight for his club outright. In midweek he’d train in some Belfast gym: sometimes the Kronk, other times Saints, Dockers or Holy Family.
He was getting better. Fighting more. Still losing, but only fights, never his resolve.
“I wasn’t getting hammered. There were close fights. There were fights I thought I should have won and I’d be crying my eyes out and all. But people would be coming up to me and saying, ‘Ah, you fought well, kid, he’s a cracker but so are you.’ I thought that was brilliant, so I used to think I was brilliant as well.”
Then along came Fight 13. He’d a sense that it could be lucky 13. He forgets the name of his opponent but not the nickname he christened him.
“I said to my cousin, ‘I’m going to win.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said ‘Look at him! He has a wee face!’ That’s what I called him. Wee Face. And I ended up beating Wee Face, so I was Armagh-Down champion. I thought I was a legend.”
Within a few years he was winning fights in Belfast, one of the best fight towns of them all. But there was still one kid his own age he’d trouble trying to beat. A boy called Carl Frampton. He’d become Barnes’ biggest obstacle and best friend. They’d spar together, fight each other, the two best boxers their weight in their age in the country. Frampton was making him better in the ring and constantly laughing outside it but he was stopping him from being Antrim champion. That meant Barnes couldn’t even make it to the Irish championships.
“We fought each other four times and I always make sure to tell him it should be two-each,” Barnes smiles, “but he got the verdict, so 3-1 it is. Then when he turned 16 he moved up a weight so I went down [to Dublin for the nationals] and ended up winning it.”
For some reason shortly after that, Uncle Jim closed the club in Ardglass; maybe his dream was to train an All Ireland champion. Jim’s nephew’s career and friendship with Frampton though was only starting.
Barnes would join the Holy Family club where he’d been training regularly anyway under Gerry Storey and Frampton would come under the same tutelage. The two kids were from opposite sides of the community, Frampton from the loyalist Tiger’s Bay neighbourhood, Barnes from the nationalist Cliftonville area, but boxing was the altar they both worshipped at.
With Irish teams they’d travel together, room together. When Frampton married Christine, Barnes was best man. When Paddy’s fiancée Mari gave birth to Eireann last year, Frampton was chosen as her godfather. Even the night before this interview, they were on the phone with each other, Frampton texting Barnes a link to a fight he’d been at in Scotland that weekend.
Barnes is shy by nature.
“If a teacher asked me a question, I’d start crying.” In secondary school alright, he admits, he “got cheeky, messed about”, but he was never a thug or a bully, more a rogue, invariably of the loveable variety.
There is no filter with Paddy Barnes. His candour is disarming, refreshing. If he’s cocky about something, he’ll tell you. If he’s been scared or sometimes silly, he’ll tell you. His motives, dreams, fears, goals, belief, it’s an open book with him.
Take those seminal 2007 world championships in Chicago. He didn’t know or care that he’d won a golden ticket to the Olympics. He only saw a cheque. As someone who up to then was on no funding at all, that’s what mattered.
“Growing up, even through my teens, I didn’t even know what the Olympic Games were!” he volunteers.
“When the World Cup was on, I’d watch it, but I’d never watched the Olympics in my life! So when I won through to the [world championships] quarter-final, I thought ‘Yes! Brilliant!’ Because making a quarter-final meant you’d get €20,000 funding a year. People were talking to me about the Olympics but I was saying, ‘F*** the Olympics! I don’t care! It’s money!’
“Then after the tournament had ended and I was the only boxer who had qualified, I thought, ‘God, being in Beijing, on my own? F*** that! Unless boys qualify, I’m not going! There’s no way I’m going to the Olympics on my own. With all these coaches?! It would do my head in! No chance!’ I just couldn’t have hacked that there. I was really unhappy about the idea of going to Beijing.
“But then John Joe Nevin qualified. Bill says, ‘You’ve got company.’ Brilliant. A month later John Joe Joyce, Kenny Egan, Darren Sutherland [qualify as well]. That was me sorted then.”
There his boxing intelligence would shine through but in the athletes village among his team-mates so would his wider sporting ignorance. Rob Heffernan is someone he’d count as a friend now but back in the summer of 2008 the Corkman’s discipline was foreign in every sense.
“I was walking on my way up to the canteen and I seen these Mexicans go past, doing this funny walk. And I was pointing and laughing, ‘Look at them ones! F*** me, they’re walking like women!’ People were saying ‘That’s a sport.’ I was ‘What?! F*** off!’ I didn’t even know what it was. I’d never seen it before.”
Now he’s nine months out from another Olympics. A third consecutive Olympic medal would be an unprecedented achievement for an Irish athlete. But another bronze would have little attraction to Barnes. At this stage the goal, the plan, is get gold and then go pro.
He’ll be 29 by then but he points to the number of fighters in their mid-30s in his division. He’ll do fine there. He’ll be fast-tracked with his experience from the World Series of Boxing and the profile should be prominent too.
“I want to go pro straight after the Olympics when the media attention is high. After I win gold. Then I’ll go professional.” He wasn’t sure of medalling in 2008, even 2012. Now? He’s sure.
“I know for a fact that there’s no one in this world that trains as hard as I do. Whoever I fight in Rio, there’s no way he’s fitter than me, stronger than me, better than me. It’s impossible. And I’m training smart.”
He attributes a lot of that supposed edge to the S&C coaching he was exposed to the last couple of years by Ryan Whitley up in the Sports Institute Northern Ireland before Whitley joined the Cardiff Blues. Nutrition is another area he’s found huge gains in.
“Even for London, I was a proper amateur. I didn’t really look after my diet properly. I didn’t really do my strength and conditioning work. Now it’s a whole new regime. I see my nutritionist every week whereas before I might see the team one every two years. I feel if I had been training with Ryan before [London], I would have won gold. I was beaten in the semi-final on a countback. If I’d even one percent stronger, I’d have beaten that opponent.”
Sitting and missing out on last month’s world championships only further fuelled the desire and belief. He was ready for them, only he hadn’t been ready for the Europeans through injury and he’d have had to qualify through them.
“I was devastated I wasn’t there. Especially seeing the people in my weight who were winning. I’ve beaten them before. For me it would have been my time to win the world championships. I was actually jealous of the Irish team doing so well.”
The team won’t come back together until January, but until then he’ll train away under Michael Conlan’s dad, John, and finish a part-time sport psychology course he’s taking in Dublin Business School.
I'm at the #WebSummit2015 today, I have a diploma in digital marketing and social media, in other words I'm a brain box so come talk to me 😊
— Paddy Barnes OLY (@paddyb_ireland) November 3, 2015
He’s already picked up quite a bit from it. Like how it’s okay to experience the competitive anxiety that he does.
“Walking into the ring, no matter who it is, I’m shaking,” he says, again revealing his vulnerability.
“I put a front on, as if I’m not scared, but deep down I’m petrified. ‘What am I doing here? I could be in the house [back home], for f***’s sake.’ But then once that bell goes? [Clicks his fingers] Everything just fades away and it’s ‘Kill, kill, kill.”
He also has some shorthand for how his motivation has now changed.
For most of his career he was primarily intrinsically motivated. He just loved the thrill of throwing and rolling with the punches. The Olympics was just another tournament.
Now he’s more calculated, more extrinsic, even primal, in his motivation. Little Eireann. She’s changed everything, for the better.
“It’s unbelievable,” he says about fatherhood. “I want to have 10 kids now. Everything I now do is for family, for Eireann. If I’m earning money I’m putting it away so she can grow up to be something.
“I know what I have to do. I used to want to win medals.
“Now I need to win medals. Because of funding and money and to live. So it’s not about wanting to win at the Olympic Games. I need to win at the Olympic Games. Needing is different to wanting. When you need something, you make sure nothing stops you from getting it.” Try stopping him.
