What got you interested in boxing?

I remember it like it was yesterday . I was just a young kid with a big cock and the thing that appealed to me in boxing was that the win/loss records unlike in other professional sports don't just get erased and forgotten at the end of the season .

 

Mike Tyson... I was aware of boxing before him of course... anybody my age knew of Sugar Ray Leonard, Boom Boom Mancini etc but he exploded onto the scene when I was just old enough to be really interested

 

Same for me except it was Hamed, he was one of the first crossover stars in the UK for my generation. Obviously people knew Tyson and stuff but I was really young when he was in his 80s prime.

 

Tyson and Chavez were the first I knew of when I was a youngster, and then it grew from there.

 

As a young kid my parents used to always talk about Muhammad Ali so he was my first introduction to the sport. Then in the early 80s all anyone was talking about was Sugar Ray Leonard and so I became a huge Leonard fan. But I still wasn’t a hardcore fan. I became a die hard fan in the late 80s with Mike Tyson’s sudden appearance and the Leonard Hagler fight. Then I was hooked.

 

The holyfield qawi fight

 

Tyson

 

First pro bout I ever saw was Holyfield vs Douglas. For long, it was my only boxing tape too, so I have watched it like 50 times or so

 

Holmes when I was super young. Remember being real young and watching Dokes/Weaver, and wondering why the hell it was over so quickly. But hoping Dokes would face Holmes.

 

First fights I watched I remember but not that interested:
* Ali - Dunn
* Norton - Bobick
* Ali - Spinks II
* Weaver - Coetzee
They'd show these fights on Saturday afternoon sports shows.

The fights that got me totally interested were all from 1980 and I watched live: Hagler - Minter, Leonard - Green (actually this was live on the radio at night) and then Durán - Leonard I and the fact Durán was often referred to as 'Hands of Stone'...it appealed in the way of some invincible martial arts character.

 

But I do believe first fight that got me interested was Golota vs Nicholson in early 1996... but then I don't remember being into into it after that....but then Golota Bowe 1 got me really interested in boxing.... and now I'm semi into boxing. Definitely more into mma than boxing at the moment .

 

Same here.

 

Barry McGuigan in 1985 when I was 7 and then Carruth and McCullough at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 when they came up against the Cubans.

An Irish guy beating a Cuban in the Olympics was pretty mad stuff.

Irelands last legitimate Gold medals in the Olympics are in boxing.

 

Big Fight Live most Saturday nights on ITV. In the era of only four TV channels, live boxing was on pretty much most weeks and there wasn't anything else worth watching beside it. ITV took boxing seriously back then. They had preview shows during the week, and on the morning before, big fights...it was great. I was about nine when Benn, Watson and Eubanks started to near kill one another and those fights were absolutely front page news in the UK when they happened. I loved it and have loved boxing since.

MTF

 

I saw Leonard-Hearns and a few early Tyson fights. I didn’t become a big fan until the mid nineties when I started watching ESPN fights and started to see and learn the little things about watching a boxing match that only hardcore fans understand. From there a couple of my first favorite fighters were Johnny Tapia and the second beefy iteration of Pazienza.

After I joined the Air Force I was stationed in Germany and started a subscription to Ring Magazine and 3 other sister publications. There was an ad in the back where guys sold boxing tapes and that’s how I got to see most of the present day fights from back then as well as a few earlier ones.

At my next base I asked a guy how he knew so much about cars and he told me about a car message board he frequented. After learning what a message board was I looked for one about boxing and found Boxing.com, and the rest is history.

 

I know I’m not the only one who felt this way, but one of the best things about first discovering boxing message boards was it was the first time I got to actually talk and debate boxing with real fans who knew as much (and on those rare occasions) or more than I did.

In a way, it was almost cool that boxing wasn’t really mainstream because being a hardcore boxing fan made you feel like you were part of a small fraternity that only a select few had the patience and intellect for.

 

Oh yeah? What are you doing here then?

 

Tyson as a kid, Duran as an adult - to put it simply.

 

Sean Mannion vs McCallum, remember going with my dad out to Connemara in Galway to welcome Mannion back, with bonfires lit all along the route. He seemed to do better when I watched it then, saw it recently, ouch.

Second moment is watching Bruno vs Witherspoon live on ITV, poor Frank.

 

Reminds of the Christle brothers who were at Trinity College Dublin and were very good college amateurs.

Terry Christle fought Dave Tiberi to a draw many fights before Tiberi went on to arguably beat James Toney.

 

I think Sean Mannion might well be the only boxer in whose very very hometown I ever spent an appreciable period of time, namely 3 weeks in Rosmuc in the Gaeltacht in 1993.

 

Was Mannion an Irish speaker?

 

I just can't get into MMA. I've tried but it doesn't hold my interest at all

 

Almost certainly, and a rarity at that, a fluent native speaker, a guy who would have been speaking Irish maybe even better than English and doing it since infancy.

His name isn't even Sean Mannion, it's "Sean Mainin", {pr. "Maneen"} .

An Irish guy who had to Anglicize his name so to appeal to Irish people. Figure that one out.

Where he's from is literally in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by water on three sides, bashed by the Atlantic, with roads that look like they were made by some shitty firm that got kicked out of Ancient Rome by the Better Business Bureau.



This is one of the top google images results for "Rosmuc".............that must be the gym on the left.

In Rosmuc, you have to build the road first before you do road work.

 

Very cool

Place reminds me of what I saw on Achill Island which is also a Gaeltacht

Ireland has the census for 1901 and 1911 online in the national archives (there's not more censuses available because the RA bombed the records building during the civil war), you should check it out its very cool, look for your family... I was pleasantly surprised to see many of my direct relatives also spoke the language at that time

 

2 little historical notes

1. The IRA men who went into the Customs House in 1921 were armed with 4 rounds of ammunition each.

2. The World Light-Heavyweight Title was fought for in 1923 in Dublin during the Irish Civil War.

Mike McTigue decisioned Battling Siki, himself a WW1 Veteran, over 20 Rounds. Siki tried to say afterwards that the artillery in Dublin had unsettled him but as a WW1 veteran that seems to be a lame excuse.

Siki had initially refused to fight an Irishman in Ireland on St Patricks day, so the modern-day BS fighters go on with about dates and places isn't really all that new.

 

A lot of contemporary observers thought Siki got robbed there

Siki was a lunatic... he was a war hero in France ... he had a pet lion that he used to march around Paris with while wearing a top hat and tux... he had a pair of Great Danes that he trained to do tricks in response to him firing revolvers into the air, like Jack Johnson he loved white women which made him a lot of enemies and he was a favorite sex fetish of several high society Parisian women

He married an American girl but people said he had a wife already back in Paris... he would engage in barroom brawls and beat people up in the street ... eventually somebody shot him dead in Manhattan

 

No shortage of people in the Lower East Side quite happy to put a bullet in somebody for $5 back in the day I am sure.

 

No doubt... I had family living there at that time (ssshhhh)