AMERICA AT LARGE:DOES LIFE imitate art, or art imitate life? Five years earlier, Wayne Kelly had been the referee who took Shelby Pudwill into protective custody the night John Duddy knocked him down three times in the first two minutes of their fight at Madison Square Garden. Now here was Kelly, counting over Duddy's prostrate form in a ring on the stage at the Atlantic Theatre Company.

At almost any time you could name over the past half-dozen years, providing John Duddy with the look of a busted-up prizefighter would not have greatly challenged the creative powers of a resourceful theatrical make-up artist.

Even when he won, which he usually did, the Derry middleweight could be relied upon to spring a new leak or two, and there were at least a few fights over that stretch from which Duddy emerged with his face looking like freshly-chopped hamburger.

Which helps to explain Lou DiBella’s surprised reaction when he ran into Duddy and his wife, Gráinne, at the New York premiere of Lights Out in early January. Seven months had elapsed since the boxer had last been bloodied, in a loss to Julio Cesar Chavez Jr in San Antonio, and time seemed to have eradicated any vestigial residue of that night’s carnage.

“I was struck by how good he looked,” recalled the promoter. “I’m talking movie-star looks. It had been long since I’d seen him looking so fresh.

“ ‘John,’ I told him, ‘You look marvellous. Taking all that time off has obviously done you a world of good’,” recalled DiBella. “Looking back on it now, I can’t believe what I said next. I actually told him, ‘You look so good that you really ought to think about not doing this much longer. Who knows? Maybe you have a future in the movies yourself’.”

Just a few days earlier, DiBella had concluded negotiations with manager Craig Hamilton for a March 12th Duddy fight against Andy Lee at the Foxwoods casino in Connecticut. The St Patrick’s week bout on the Mashantucket Pequod tribal reservation would be the co-feature of a card headlined by Sergio Martinez’ middleweight title defence against Ukrainian Sergey Dzinzyrik.

Making the fight had been an arduous process, and in the end DiBella had to strong-arm HBO into televising the bout only by mortgaging future Martinez bouts as collateral, which in turn provided $100,000 guarantees for the two Irish middleweights.

DiBella was unaware at the time that Duddy had already taped a yet-to-be aired episode of Lights Out, the FX channel’s new boxing-themed series, but he was about to find out. The Lights Out premiere took place on January 5th. Ten days later Duddy stunned the boxing world by announcing his retirement.

“I wish I still had the hunger, but I don’t,” said Duddy in the January 15th statement released by Hamilton. “The fire has burned out.”

Ten days after that came the news Duddy would make his theatrical debut in an Off-Broadway revival of Bobby Cassidy Jnr’s 2007 play Kid Shamrock. The seemingly precipitate haste of the second announcement led many to suspect the two events must have been connected, but Duddy insists this was not the case.

“Just a couple of days after I announced my retirement I got a phone call from Séamus McDonagh asking if I’d be interested in the play,” said Duddy, who portrays the younger, fighting-era version of the eponymous lead character, plainly based on the playwright’s father, Bobby Cassidy, a useful middleweight and light-heavyweight of the 1960s and 70s. (McDonagh plays the older Shamrock, recounting the events depicted from the vantage point of a saloon bouncer years later.)

“My initial reaction was that I was pissed off,” said DiBella. “I’d had to fight tooth and nail to make the Lee fight, and I’d gotten both boxers exactly what they’d asked for. I felt betrayed.

“But when I thought about it, and it didn’t take very long, I realised that he was right. If he felt the way he did, Duddy should have retired. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to go through the motions and take $100,000 of my money for just showing up. Instead he did the honourable thing.”

After Duddy’s departure, DiBella secured the services of unbeaten, Edinburgh-born Craig McEwan as Lee’s opponent in the HBO fight. And Duddy went straight into rehearsals with Dublin-born director Jimmy Smallhorne for Kid Shamrock.

Like Duddy and McDonagh (who two decades ago fought Evander Holyfield for the US heavyweight title), every member of the seven-man cast had some boxing connection, guaranteeing the presence of the Fight Mob for the seven-night run at the Atlantic.

It’s a fair bet at least half of Tuesday’s opening-night audience was there to see Duddy, and that many of them showed up expecting to see him fall flat on his face in his theatrical debut. If so, they were disappointed.

You might not say Duddy stole the show (Patrick Joseph Connolly, the veteran character actor who plays an inebriated salesman whose barroom conversation serves as a foil for the older Kid Shamrock’s reminiscences, did that), but he was almost astonishingly competent, delivering his lines (in a New York accent) with a flawless ease.

The boxing scenes, most them based on Cassidy pere’s 1971 Madison Square Garden fight against future middleweight champion Rodrigo Valdez, may well be the best-choreographed fight action ever seen on a New York stage, on or off-Broadway.

And casting ex-pugs in every role might have seemed a gamble, but it paid dividends in verisimilitude: Gary Hope, the onetime English cruiserweight who plays the Kid’s cornerman, Paddy Flood, is believable because he acts like a boxing trainer.

And Wayne Kelly certainly knows how to act like a referee. In fact, Kelly’s understudy had to work the second night’s performance of Kid Shamrock. Unaware of the potential conflict with the Atlantic Theatre Company, the New York State Athletic Commission assigned Kelly to work DiBella’s real-life Broadway boxing card at BB King’s blues club last night.

While confessing to a case of opening-night jitters, Duddy seemed gratified by his reception and was looking forward to the rest of the run, as well as to what now looms as a second career.

Not that he’s turned his back entirely on his former pursuit.

“I’m going up to Connecticut to watch next month’s fight, and I’m actually looking forward to it,” he said. “I like Andy Lee’s chances against the Scotsman for a couple of reasons. Because they’re both southpaws, McEwan won’t be able to run the way he might against an orthodox boxer. He’ll have to stand and fight, and Andy has more of a punch than McEwan does; he hits harder.

“You know, I’ve enjoyed this even more than I thought I would,” added Duddy as he towelled off after his first turn before the footlights. “I don’t know what the future holds, but of course I’d like to do more of it.”

What comes next? “Have your people talk to my people?”