Egan still fighting his inner demons

SOBER-AGAIN boxer Kenny Egan has admitted his toughest battle is still outside the ring as he is tormented by urges to hit the bottle.

In a frank interview, the recovering alcoholic spoke of his shame at allowing his life to spiral out of control when he returned home to Dublin a national hero after winning a silver medal at the Beijing Olympics in August 2008.

Unable to handle the pressures of his overnight fame, he spent the next two years on marathon drinking sessions.

His behaviour became so erratic and addiction to booze so chronic, that his mother barely slept during the period, fearing the gardaí would knock on her front door to let her know her son had been found dead. The 29-year-old has since turned his life round and, with the help from daily AA meetings, hasn’t touched a drink for 15 months.

But in an honest TV interview, the Dublin boxing hero, who is training harder than ever to qualify for next year’s Olympics in London, admitted he still has to fight off his inner demons every day to remain sober.

“I do miss the booze. I get urges, I won’t lie. I have the devil on my shoulder saying, ‘Head off down the country somewhere and check into a B&B and get pissed for a week on your own. You’ll have great craic in your own company. But then I’ll say to myself, ‘It’s not worth it’,” he admitted on RTÉ’s The Saturday Night Show.

“I haven’t laughed the same as I laughed when I was drinking, when you’re really in stitches, with tears coming out of your eyes through the laughter. I know that’s induced by alcohol, but I haven’t laughed like that since I came off it. But if that’s all I’m missing, it’s not too bad. But I don’t miss the fear, the nightmares, all that kind of stuff, not being able to talk to people and the hiding. But it’s a day at a time. I have to deal with this one day at a time.”

He has since written a new book, ‘Kenny Egan: My Hell’, which gives a more graphic but no less frank account of the full extent of his slide to rock bottom, including hiring hookers while at boxing tournaments, engaging in threesomes, countless one-night-stands, an addiction to porn and sleeping rough while on benders abroad. But he told presenter Brendan O’Connor that his biggest regret was the hurt and pain he caused his family, not least the time he slipped away to Spain on a marathon drinking session as his father, Tony, underwent open heart surgery in hospital.

He started to change his ways when his heartbroken mother, Maura, who he still lives with, showed him the graves of two of his brothers who died in early childhood and warned him not to break her heart for a third time.

Maura, who was part of the studio audience, spoke poignantly about the hurt her son had caused, admitted she had grown to despise his Olympic medal because of the monster it had turned him into.

She said: “The worst thing for me was waiting for the police to knock on the door to say they’d found him dead somewhere. I was waiting for that blue light to shine outside and for there to be a knock and I’d be told, ‘Right, we’ve found him’. That now knowing where he is. It wasn’t just one night, it was every night.

Now sober, Egan plans to move down to his preferred light-heavyweight division — the same weight at which he bagged a silver medal in Beijing — to grab one of the three spots up for grabs in next April’s European qualifying tournament in Istanbul, if he’s to realise his dream of Olympic gold.

*Kenny Egan: My Story, by Ewan MacKenna is available now and costs €12.99.