Bullied schoolboy beats biggest boxing bully of them all

IT took Kevin McBride less than half-an-hour to write his name into boxing legend as the man who sent the once great Mike Tyson spiralling into retirement a broken fighter.

The great Tyson ruse was well and truly exposed when the sitting duck stood up and hit back twice as hard.

Better fighters than Kevin McBride have been battered by the gloved fists of Tyson.

Indeed, McBride ranks among the worst fighters ever to climb into a ring with Tyson - and still the former world champion's threat that he would gut McBride "like a fish" today looks preposterous.

20 years ago McBride, who stands 6ft 6in tall and weighs in as a heavyweight, was the target of school bullies in his home town of Clones.

That same year - across the Atlantic - the young punk on the heavyweight block, Tyson, was carving his way through the division on an unstoppable march to the world crown. Tyson the teenager was a savage; McBride the schoolboy more of a timid sort.

That remained the case until he enrolled at the Clones Amateur Boxing Club aged 12 - just months after Barry McGuigan, the home town hero, slayed Eusebio Pedroza in London to claim the world featherweight title.

McBride wanted to hold his own against the bullies who were making his life a misery, but 20 years on he has ruined the career of the ultimate sporting tyrant - a man who forgot how to play fair some time midway through his career.

It should have been a no-contest. McBride was ranked 154th in the world before being plunged into combat with Tyson, who despite having lost two of his previous three fights was a firm favourite.

One American reporter described McBride as "the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow" for Tyson.

It should have been an easy pay day; pick up e4.5 million and move on to the next mug.

All Tyson would need to do was maintain a certain level of physical fitness and keep knocking off the training horses. The dollar signs were in his eyes.

Perhaps 32-year-old McBride now has designs on a belt, but that seems rather fanciful.

Since moving Stateside in 1998 - on the advice of Steve Collins, the former WBO super middleweight champion - McBride has made steady progress under the tutelage of Goody Petronelli.

Not only did Petronelli train Collins but Marvin Hagler too, the former undisputed world middleweight champion.

The improvement has not been so dramatic as to lift McBride any higher than 27th in the world, still his top ranking. But it put him high on the list of potential opponents for Tyson.

Whether that suggests promoters see him as champion in the making or fodder for a fading force is arguable.

But what cannot be disputed now is that McBride - after eight wins in a row, capped by victory over the man whose 'Iron Mike' tag no longer sits so well - is the new toast of Clones.

They call him 'the Clones Colossus', McGuigan having been 'the Clones Cyclone', and his pre-fight promise that "it will be the whole of Ireland hitting him on the chin" carried more threat than Tyson had cared to give it.

McBride was a pretender before last night's fight, and he obviously remains so, because to venture further in the world of heavyweight will see him face hungrier men, with more to prove.

But at least he showed last night where the real pretence lay, and that was in the supposition that Mike Tyson at 38 could ever be taken seriously again.