O'Sullivan first victory in four years a result - if not a performance - that delivers some momentum
Gary O'Sullivan has beaten Pawlowski on points for his first victory since 2021. Picture: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho
Spike O’Sullivan has a secret and it's hiding in plain sight. The 41-year old’s bare torso is already glistening as he dances and boxes at shadows and steps into the National Stadium ring for his fight with Mateusz Pawlowski.
The Pole is 12 years his junior.
The old arena is throbbing, the crowd constantly on the move like a colony of independent ants as the six-and-a-half hour, 15-bout pro show peels off its layers one after another. The smell of hot dogs and stale sweat fill the air. Steps are slippy with spilled beers.
This isn’t Wembley, or the O2, or Madison Square Garden, all of them graced by O’Sullivan in the past. Pawlowski isn’t Chris Eubank Jr, or David Lemieux. This is a six-round fight a few hours down the card and, truth be told, the injury wouldn’t have allowed him any more.
Ambitions of a tilt at a world title still bloom inside his head on this autumn evening. It’s almost 18 years since his debut against Peter Dunn at Neptune Stadium but Cork’s finest has fed off the energy of a youthful training camp under the familiar eye of Pascal Collins.
The legendary Eddie Futch once said there are certain things, “like the elastic in your socks,” that an aging fighter can’t get back. O’Sullivan has a plaque at home declaring ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’. His sports science guy says he has the profile of a twentysomething.
Everything was primed for this, his first fight since St Patrick’s Day of last year, except for the history repeating itself. O’Sullivan carried a rib injury into that narrow defeat to Sofiane Khati in Castlebar last March. This time it’s a partially torn bicep.
It happened in sparring two weeks ago.
Medication and physio could only do so much so accommodation has to be made in the war room of his mind. This is his 38th fight and the crowd is about to see something different. There will be no Spike on the front foot chasing the KO.
He picks his moments, his experience obvious in the way he stands and evades some combinations, but nature and muscle memory and the elemental nature of his profession draw the two together for the obligatory flurries and grapples.
Sometimes it’s unavoidable. There isn’t a single flinch.
The idea is to do enough to get the win on points. So it goes. It’s not razzamatazz but when the verdict comes it's 58-56 in his favour and O’Sullivan is soon hoisted onto a set of shoulders. The delight on his face is probably flushed by a touch of relief.
It’s only then, with the adrenaline pouring out, that the real pain kicks in. He’s still in the ring when someone grabs the damaged bicep by the arm in pure excitement. Turns out it’s a friend - an actual doctor - who knew all about the injury but got lost in the moment.
The giddy exit from the arena takes twice as long as the fight itself, and proves twice as painful. Time and again the troubled appendage is pinched or pushed or prodded by a pointed finger, each one landing like a right from Mike Tyson.
“I need to take a painkiller and get a pint of Guinness ASAP,” he says outside.
“I had no choice but to hold back in there, like. It's hard to jab in there. My jab has been key for me through my career. I'm gonna spend a couple of months, I don't know… I need to get it looked at there, get an MRI in it, see what the damage is.”
O’Sullivan has 21 KOs in his career and reckons 16 of them were delivered with that left. This was a cannon with a spiked (forgive the pun) barrel but it’s a first win since May of 2021 and a result, if not a performance, that delivers some momentum.
He didn’t have to go ahead with it. An injury of that nature was more than enough grounds for pulling out but Pawlowski’s purse and flights were already in play and an army of supporters had long been mobilised back in Cork.
“I didn’t want to let people down but if you look at the pictures of the [pre-fight] press conference, when I put up my bicep, the difference between my right bicep and my left, the left bicep is fallen down.
“I actually didn't even try to sell tickets at all because of it but I was gonna help out the fighters too, so I sold a couple for them. I ended up selling over 10k worth, just people asking me to get them tickets to see me.
“Like, it's an expensive trip for people who come from Cork, and farther afield. Some people came from Belfast, they were telling me on social media, and all those people have the expense of travel and tickets and everything else.”
The deeper question is why go through with any of this all these years later.
O’Sullivan has voiced more than a few motivations. This was only the second time his kids Ashley and Tommy were getting to see him fight. To see, as he put it himself last year, how their dad puts the bread and Nutella on the table.
There are financial considerations too. Post-ring plans haven’t progressed to a stage where there is a path with anything like the singular focus and end point he would follow and find for his climb through the ropes on Friday night.
And cooking underneath all this are the usual competitive juices. Boil it all down and there is a Walter White in every aging athlete. Real and vital though all the other reasons are, there is a large part of them that simply wants to keep doing this for themselves.
“I really feel like I’ve still got it. Like, I wouldn't bother continuing if I didn't, because the higher level of the sport that I intend to compete at, you can't be getting in there if you're not fully ready.”
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